The rise of mobile and the death of rest

Read a couple of articles this week about the rise of mobile computing.  About a decade ago I was at a conference where one of the keynotes was on the inevitability of ubiquitous computing or everywhere computing.  I believe now that smart phones have arrived, we have realized that dream.

How big companies die

One article I read was from Forbes on Here’s why Google and Facebook might disappear in the next 5 years.  The central tenet of their discussion was that the rise of mobile is a new paradigm shift just like Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 emerged over time and reinvented most of the industries that went before them.

Most companies around before the internet were unable to see and understand what would constitute a viable business model in the new Web 1.0 environment. Similarly, the major players in Web 1.0 never really saw the transition that occurred to a more interactive, information sharing that became Web 2.0.

The problem is that all these companies grew up in the reigning paradigm of the day and became successful by seeing the transition as a new way of doing business. They just couldn’t conceive that another way of doing business was coming along that was strategically different and thus, highly damaging to their now outdated, business models.

Full speed ahead

But it even get’s worse. Another article I read from Tecnology Review was titled Questions for Mobile Computing.

One interesting tidbit is that time it’s taking to reach a certain adoption level in the market is shrinking. The chart (from Apple) showed that both the iPhone and iPad has drastically shrunk the time it took to attain high market adoption.

Mobile business models

The main question in the article was how web 2.0 advertising revenue business models were going to translate into a mobile environment where they no longer controlled advertising.  Many Web2.0 companies seem to be ignoring mobile at the moment but it won’t take long for companies focused on this new computing tsunami to roll over them.

Apple and Google have taken two distinctly divergent approaches to this market but at least they are (massively) engaged.  That’s more than can be said for some of the web 2.0 properties out there ignoring mobile to their long term detriment.

The fact is that mobile is a new computing platform.  It’s possibilities are truly extraordinary from mHealth (see my post on mHealth taking off in Kenya) and  mCurrency today to Google glasses of tomorrow.

I strongly believe that those companies that see this shift now and go after it with new business models to profit from mobile computing will succeed faster and mightier than we have ever seen.   The rest will be left in the dust.

The funny bit is that it’s not the developed world that’s taking the new model to new directions but the developing world.  They seem better able to see mobile computing for what it is, an relatively easy way to leapfrog from the 19th century to the 21st in one jump.

So what are profitable business models that leverage mobile computing?

Mobile health (mHealth) takes off in Kenya

iHanging out with Kenya Techies by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)
Hanging out with Kenya Techies by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)

Read an article today about startups and others in Kenya  providing electronic medical care via mHealth and improving the country’s health care system (see Kenya’s Startup Boom).

It seems that four interns were able to create a smartphone and web App in a little over 6 months, to help track Kenya’s infectious disease activity.   They didn’t call it healthcare-as-a-service nor was there any mention of the cloud in the story, but they were doing it all, just the same.

Old story, new ending

The Kenyan government was in the process of contracting out the design and deployment of a new service that would track the cases of infectious disease throughout the country to enable better strategies to counteract them.  They were just about ready to sign a $1.9M contract with one mobile phone company when they decided it was inappropriate for them to lock-in a single service provider.

So they decided to try a different approach, they contacted the head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) who contacted an instructor at Strathmore University who identified four recent graduates and set them to work as interns for $150/month. They spent the spring and summer gathering requirements and pounding out the App(s).  At the end of the summer it was up and running on smart phones and the web throughout their country.

They are now working on an SMS version of the system to allow others who do not own smart phones to be able to use the system to record infectious disease activity. They are also taking on a completely new task to try and track government drug shipments to hospitals and clinics to eliminate shortages and waste.

mHealth, the future of healthcare

The story cited above says that there are at least 45 mHealth programs actively being developed or already completed in Kenya. Many of them created by a startup incubator called iHub.  We have written about Kenya’s use of mobile phones to support novel services before (see Is cloud a leapfrog technology).

Some of these mHealth projects include:

  • AMPATH which uses OpenMRS (open sourced medical records platform) and SMS messaging to remind HIV patients to take their medicines and provides call-in for questions about the medication or treatments,
  • Daktari, a mobile service provider’s call-a-doc service that provides a phone-in hot-line for medical questions, in a country with only one doctor per every 6000 citizens, such phone-in health care can more effectively leverage the meagre healthcare resources available,
  • MedAfrica App which provides doctors or dentists phone numbers and menus to find basic healthcare and diagnostic information in Kenya.

There are many others mHealth projects on the drawing board including a national electronic medical records (EMR) service, medical health payment cards loaded up using mobile payments, and others.

Electronic medical care through mHealth

It seems that Kenya is becoming a leading edge provider of mHealth solutions based in the cloud mainly because it’s inexpensive, fits well with technology that pervades the country, and can be scaled up rapidly to cover its citizens.

If Kenya can move to deploy healthcare-as-a-service using mobile phones, so can the rest of the third world.

Speaking of mHealth, I got a new free app on my iPhone the other day called iTriage, check it out.

Comments?