Life will be like this in the future, but what about mobile technologies? What could be the use of mobile phones -or more accurately- mobile devices?

In today’s world, not only for voice communication or text messaging, mobile phones are also used for internet access and many other useful applications. They are small tools for us to reach out to the internet and make use of it as best as they can. Most importantly, they even started to replace our laptops, which are also a common replacement for desktop PCs for most of us.

There are a lot of reasons why mobile devices are becoming a replacement for their predecessors. Here are my reasons for that:

• They are small, easy to carry around, and better than ultra-portable, they are mobile!
• They are very personal. You don’t usually give away your mobile phone to anyone even for a couple of minutes. It is yours!
• There is a billing platform embedded into it. So you will not need a credit card in the future to buy a cup of coffee in Starbucks.
• It knows you! There is also an identification system in it which can authenticate you.
• It knows where you are! If you need a pharmacy, it can narrow down the search to 5 km radius for you.
• It has broadband internet, you can even have Mbits/s! So you are not stuck with good old GPRS.
• It knows you better than you do! Since you live your life with it, anytime & anywhere, whom you talk, connect or share with, what you like, what you don’t like, what do you pay for etc… There is a huge amount of accumulation of information for a better mobile and social experience.

Let me follow some of the headings from Ian Sands’ post and make my comments.

How will individuals use IT in 2012?
Ian mentions about an easy use of a workflow in 2012. Well, in Turkcell, people are already using such services. Many of the workflow decisions can also be made through our mobile phones. People do not need to open their mailboxes, click the link in it and pass through login screens… Just click it and it is done!

What will business look like in 2020?
I cannot agree more with Ian, since there will be a blend of personal and business lives, people will make use of it for their own productivity. I believe Googleplex is one of the best examples for that. Business and personal lives of people working at Google are not really separated, but they are happy because they have all of their needs met. They usually don’t need to go back to their homes for relaxing or resting, they do it at Googleplex! And once they are ready to get back to work, they can instantly get productive again in a couple of minutes. So Googleplex is neither a workplace nor a home, it is both…

What about the public sector in 2020?
There will be less and less time but more and more information. Hence, education will be mobile. Not only students, but also lots of people will use m-learning, to be more productive, more efficient. Obviously there will be classrooms to some extent but the low cost and time efficiency of m-learning will drive the industry.

How will IT be used in healthcare?
Ian says: “At present, the best healthcare tends to be in cities. But imagine a scenario where a patient could ask questions of an expert hundreds of miles away via a large display in their living room.” As demoed in CeBIT Eurasia 2008, Turkcell has that kind of system to spread better healthcare services to the rural areas of Turkey, where the healthcare services are not good, or not present. But there is a crucial point: not only a large screen just for communication, via Turkcell’s solution with its valuable partners, people are also able to send their electrocardiogram or blood pressure to the doctors even thousands of kilometers away in a couple of seconds.

How will IT be used in banking?
Did you know you can withdraw money from an ATM with your mobile phone? Did you know you don’t need any coins to buy a coke from a vending machine? Did you know you can pay your credit card bill with your mobile phone? These are all real and live applications on Turkcell network. You can withdraw money from an ATM via Turkcell MobilImza (Mobile Signature), buy a coke from a vending machine via Turkcell MobilOdeme (Mobile Payment) and pay your credit card bill or transfer money to your mom using only your mobile phone!

How will IT be used in manufacturing or agriculture?
I mentioned about how workflow can be used to increase productivity in business life above. There are also a couple of great examples of such systems in manufacturing and agriculture. As a telemetry solution, Seramatik, think of monitoring a greenhouse from your mobile phone. If the temperature of the greenhouse increases, you can start ventilation or greenhouse fogging remotely with a single click. If there is a critical condition, wouldn’t it be nice to be notified with an SMS message or an emergency call from your greenhouse?

How will IT be used in nature?
Another great example is about the forests. Unfortunately, Turkey continues lose its green cover every year due to forest fires. Once a fire starts in a forest, it takes a lot of time to detect and take a preemptive action against it while it is still a small fire. However, with Kodalfa’s telemetry solution, monitoring several parameters such as temperature and moisture, forest fires can be detected earlier and save forests as well as reducing costs to extinguish a huge fire.

To wrap it up, there are a lot of mobile solutions in every aspect of our lives and most of them can be realized with today’s technology. And this is only the beginning of the mobile evolution. As the mobile devices get smarter and powerful, the solutions will be a lot more, helpful and life-enriching for us. Having said that; I believe Turkcell, as a technology company, is on the right track with its vision: “To ease and enrich the lives of our customers with communication and technology solutions.”

It is always very inspirational to share ideas with likeminded people. As we were discussing with my friends Selim, Refik and Elif; we came to a really interesting point: What will life be like in the future?

Obviously we were looking at it from an IT perspective, but especially from a mobile perspective. Here is a projection by Ian Sands, director of envisioning at Microsoft Office Labs. This projection is a lot similar to what we thought, but we have our differences.

To begin with, there will not be a separate business life or personal life in the future. Business life will penetrate into our personal lives even more, or vice versa, as we experience the birth of it today with our mobile phones (Blackberry, PDA, iPhone etc…). As a result of this the borders of these two worlds will fade out. So the life will be a nice blend of the business life and personal life.

How this will affect the working conditions? Consider 50 years ago, people had been working for a company nearly for their whole life. However in today’s world people need a change, seek for a better job or start their companies (it is much easier to launch a startup today!) So it came to the point which people work for at least 5-6 different companies throughout their lives. So what about the future? Why would I work for only one company? Why would only one company benefit from my experience?

Having said that, in the future a person can work for company A for Monday to Wednesday, be a consultant for company B on Thursdays and so on… Moreover, there will be no weekdays or weekends, since there is no workdays or holidays. There will only be hours you live and, you will decide when and how to work or not to work. At home or office? Wait, will there be an office in the future, or home? Depending on what you would like to do, anywhere in the world can be your office or home because you will have all the basic means necessary for anything you want to do. It will be like all people working as freelancers.

Hypothetically, all of the people will have a brand of their own. What this means is that I as a person will not be a telecommunications engineer anymore, I will be “Goktug Gedik“, as my company name, working for myself and/or serving other companies.

Sounds like a chaos, right? This is the point where technology fills the gap. Today’s technology, communication tools are not sophisticated enough to handle this kind of life. A visual phone will never replace a real face-to-face meeting. However, there will be new tools, new technology to replace that. The change has already begun with the social services like Facebook or Twitter. Not only in personal lives, but also for enterprises social communication services have also been quite popular, just like the Yammer, which is like an enterprise version of Twitter.

There will be new tools and services for people to communicate, share and interact in such world without being in a chaos. It is hard to predict those tools, but there is one thing for sure about them: People will choose which tools are good and helpful, and which are not. They will be shaped with the change in our lifestyles, just like natural selection.

This is the question I have been asking to myself for the last couple of months. One may argue that if Facebook is as big as Google. My answer to that is “not yet” but I strongly believe there is a huge opportunity for Facebook.

Anyways, what I am really interested in is a rather small company, which has a huge potential to grow like Google did. Obviously in these days it may not be logical to think that you search about a trend, find a company, see the opportunity, join the team and be one of the first people in that company. Once you find “the company”, it would be filled with lots of people like you and you would be looking for another “one”.

Here is the answer of that question from TrendWatching: “Believe us, if we knew, we’d be working on it right now.” Absolutely! Why won’t they!? I’d too…

Their sugestion is simple: “create the Next Big Thing yourself.” I totally agree with this. However, simply agreeing with an idea does not make it easy to happen, right? You have to think smart, work hard and do it ASAP! The “next big thing” will not stay there until you find it!

I don’t know what will be the next Google yet, but I have a few thoughts on what could be “the next Google’s area of interest”. I’ll post about this soon… :)

By the way, don’t forget the check the Top 15 Trend Questions (and Answers) on TrendWatching.

I thought it may be a good idea to wrap up a few things. Here is a collection of recent blog posts I like about startups.

If you are thinking about starting a company, you should take a look at these posts. I hope it’s gonna be useful for you…

• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy?
  
• Guess What? Now’s A Great Time To Launch A Startup (this is a summary of the post above)
  
• 5 Ways to Fund Your Web Startup
• Plan B for Funding: Do It Yourself
• Startup School 08
• 5 Ways Recessions Help Startups
• 3 Ways to Market a Start-Up Business
• Should you work for a startup? Here’s 9 reasons why I do.
• work.com – How-To Guides for Your Business
• How To Demo Your Startup
• How To Demo Your Startup (Part Two)
• Startup Hacks: 7 Questions VCs Will Ask You, What They Really Mean, and How You Can Answer Them
• Too Small To Fail
• 10 Micro Trends to Bet on For Your Audacious Startup
• Smart Startup Advice: Don’t Panic – Profit
• Mobile Startups & VC’s: Opportunities in Times of Crisis
• Mobil Startup Case Studies