• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, October 3, 2008

Mobile technology just wants to get close to you.

If the first digital decade was about personalization and individual control, then prepare for a decade of mobile innovations that bring technology to new levels of involvement. Geo-location through GPS, near field communication (NFC) and the next generation of embedded sensors on handheld devices will add a new layer of passive user feedback to the media and marketing loop. This time it's not just personal: It's getting intimate. Prepare to cuddle your media.

Location-aware services like mapping and social networking are just the beginning, but many expect them to be the game-changers over the next few years. "We are working extremely intensely on that," says Tom Henriksson, director of Nokia's emerging business unit. The long tail of the Web gets even longer as GPS-enabled devices become ubiquitous and local merchants finally see benefits in knowing where a person is and what they need now. "After all the hype, there's real hope that location-aware advertising will be widely available near-term," he says.

More than ad pitches, location-based service (LBS) offers new insight from tracking our proximity to one another. MIT Professor Nathan Eagle's "Reality Mining" project leverages the technology in worldwide test groups to study "computational epidemiology," modeling the spread of disease or even how civil unrest in Kenya affects movement and personal communication. Combining databases about people with their physical proximity opens up a new world of service. For instance, MIT's "Serendipity" experiment connected location-aware mobile technology with deep user profiles involving everything from a person's sleeping schedule to inferred friendships and hangouts. The result was a real-time, real-world matchmaking system that connects like-minded people in close proximity. "We will have the computational power of today's desktop PC in our phones in just a few years," says Eagle. "Coupled with new, faster wireless protocols like WiMax, we're going to see all sorts of cool stuff."

The real leap forward comes when devices themselves become more active agents in locations. For the near term, we text in keywords off of physical objects or scan 2D bar codes to interact with the world via phones. But "proximity will replace QR codes and SMS," says Michael Ball, mobile practice lead for Interpublic's Emerging Media Lab. Embedded sensors will transform the functionality of phones in the next decade. Radio frequency identification (RFID)-like NFC chips constitute an integral first wave.

Nokia already has a pilot project in the London Underground that lets O2 customers use their NFC-enabled phone as a contactless pass. But the phone will also be a trigger for the physical world. Touching a movie poster with a handset could deliver previews, directions to the nearest theater and a ticket sale. And the phone could just as well carry and broadcast information about you that makes the physical environment respond. At Carnegie Mellon, researchers are exploring "smart rooms" that may detect your identity from your phone when you enter a room, then adjust the environment, lighting and technology, perhaps for a scheduled meeting. In the first decade of mobile we struggled to bring the Web to the phone, but this next stage reverses the polarity: The phone becomes a mouse, objects become clickable and the physical world feels more like the Web.

And phones will feel more of what you feel. In Microsoft's Beijing labs, manager of wireless and networking Yongguang Zhang is working on embedded sensors like accelerometers and other measurement systems that make the iPhone seem prehistoric. He told a recent conference at Carnegie Mellon, "In the future, phones will become sensory phones, not just showing information but collecting information from you to become part of the applications." Make a magic-wand-like wave of the phone in front of an enabled object and it might respond. Physical sensors will open up new areas for medical services that respond to your body temperature and heart rate.

The marketing possibilities are staggering, if unclear. "Biofeedback is going to be very important," says Ball, and marketers will have to figure out how to leverage that new layer of information coming back from the user. "Maybe it knows you are hungry and it can serve you up offers when you haven't eaten."

But all this really "cool stuff" (to use Prof. Eagle's academic jargon) on mobile also requires new interfaces that are not just user-friendly but user-aware, says Eric Chan, consultant for MobileSlate and program manager of Carnegie Mellon's Mobility Research Center. Voice command products like the in-car Ford Sync may seem cutting-edge now, but "eventually you want to get to the point where you don't have to program or command things," he says. Like a personal valet, mobile technology will discern where you are and what you have done there in the past to push content, services, and nearby activities and opportunities right to you. We won't personalize the phone any longer; the phone will personalize our context. "Similar to what you expect from a nice hotel and a concierge who tries to fulfill your every whim," says Chan.

All of these new technologies, and the intimate applications they promise, only antagonize the two elephants that are not about to leave the room: fragmentation and privacy. Mobile technology promises the most intimate communications exchange with consumers imaginable, but don't expect the fragmentation across thousands of handsets, scores of operating systems and carriers, and multiple network and mobile TV protocols to end any time soon. The emergence of more open standards, such as Google's Android or Nokia's Symbian, only add to the confusion. "There will continue to be fragmentation," says Nokia's Henriksson. "It is just a fact of life."

One thing that will have to change in order for mobile to move forward is the discussion of privacy, however. For over a decade, concerns about stockpiling and mining digital personal data have remained unresolved. But the unprecedented contextual depth of mobile data collection surely will bring the issue to a head. "The privacy concerns are massive," says MIT's Eagle.

In order for sensor-driven advanced mobile services to work, someone has to know who you are, where you are, what you have been doing and what you need. Mobile media leads us into territory no GPS system can map. Experts all agree the consumer needs to be in control and always have an off-switch. But at the same time, the biggest hurdle may be education, helping customers understand data use so they can opt into the various tiers of tracking that may be necessary to render different benefits.

In fact, the privacy problem could force everyone in media and marketing to up their game in making the products as indispensible as they are intimate. "We need to provide such valuable services that consumers are willing to try it out," says Henriksson.

If they want to get that close, then they'd better come ready to act as a true friend.