In 2009, mobile devices began outselling PCs.  On January 27th, 2010, the iPad was announced at an Apple press conference by Steve Jobs.  The iPad has now become the fastest-selling consumer product of all times.

These mobile devices have an enormous penetration in the world’s population.  In fact, 90% of all people on the planet now have potential access to mobile networks.  According to estimates, 4.6 billion mobile phones owners live in emerging nations.

The infrastructure upon which these devices thrive have a set-up cost that is a small fraction of what it would take to lay down physical cables.  They are oblivious to power cuts in developing nations, and the total cost of ownership is cheap by comparison.  Beyond all of that, these devices are intelligent.  GPS tells them where they are.  They can see via their cameras, and they can interpret what they see – from written language to QR and bar codes

So what is in store for us going forward?  Here is a list of what I think will be major opportunities and areas of potential use for these devices – many of which have already arrived:

1. Performance support and point of need assistance for mobile workers;
2. Information via QR codes that range from providing your personal health history to a doctor during disasters, to trailers for movies on DVD packaging (see: http://blogs.2elearning.com/2011/07/what-can-we-use-qr-codes-for-in-learning/);
3. Acquiring books to read and reference in digital formats, and the birth of digital lending libraries;
4. Entertainment – from radio, TV, and music to downloadable movies;
5. Education to the most remote learners in an organization or to populations around the globe (see: http://blogs.2elearning.com/2012/02/top-20-uses-for-mobil-learning/);
6. Photography and photo sharing;
7. Social networking, from chat and Skype to informal learning;
8. Identity validation using the touch screen to read your fingerprint, the camera to verify retina and iris identifiers, and layering on top of both of those, password protection;
9. Using the above security measures, you can then use these phones to unlock everything from hotel rooms to your family car and home;
10. Credit, debit card, driver license, SSN, and passport repositories that replace your need for a wallet;
11. These devices will replace the ATMs we use for banking, and eliminate the gatekeeper charges in developing nations who extract exorbitant fees for making these transactions;
12. Navigation support – from walking to driving a car;
13. Language and grammar support via dictionary look-up;
14. Shopping support of all kinds, from comparison shopping via barcode look-up to producing readable barcodes for coupons and discounts;
15. Voice activated searches and commands;
16. Augmented Reality that overlays a city street for identifying restaurants and even the people approaching you along the way (see: http://blogs.2elearning.com/2012/02/googles-new-ar-terminator-sunglasses/);
17. Micro-targeted publications that can be distributed cheaply;
18. The locations of traffic congestion areas, speed traps, and traffic cameras;
19. Recording interviews and speeches;
20. Augmenting visual, speech or hearing impaired people by providing a range of capabilities from sign-language communications to text-to-voice communications;
21. Monitoring your home and devices inside your home remotely;
22. Monitoring your baby, children, or grandparent remotely;
23. Replacing the textbook (see: http://blogs.2elearning.com/2011/05/is-this-the-new-textbook-of-the-future/);
24. Remote voting and polling for political action; and
25. Voice-to-text applications from searching to communicating in another language.

Simply look on your phone’s app store to see the variety of offerings already here.  If you want to learn more about how these phones will be used for learning, you can read the publications of ADLNet referenced in the education bullet above.  Lastly, I highly recommend The Mobile Wave by Michael Saylor which helped me formulate many of the ideas shown above.  There is a summary of this book also available through The Business Source at: http://members.thebusinesssource.com/elm1.htm. Would love to hear your ideas…

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Tags: Augmented Reality > Elearning > Joe DiDonato > mobile > mobile learning > photos > QR Codes > social learning > social networking > social networks
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