Life is horizontal. Technology should be too! Part 1

The Matrix shows an interesting insight into how mobile devices perceive the world.

When Neo was in the Matrix, Tank could read the streams of ones and zeroes scrolling up his screen and perceive them as buildings and people. He turned data into information. If you think about it, that’s what our minds do all the time. In the real world you can think of buildings as a data source, people as data sources, traffic light as data sources, etc. Our minds process that data from what we see and hear and taste and smell, into information.  In fact, everything around us can be looked as a data source, and we are always perceiving information from multiple data sources and fusing it together.

This is an important fact. We don’t live in a vertical world where our minds focus on processing one thing at a time. We live in a very horizontal world and our minds are trained from birth to perceive, analyze, prioritize, and horizontally integrate data from multiple sources. Imagine driving down the road with two kids talking to you while just ahead of you a pedestrian prepares to cross the street. You are trained to down-play your kids’ conversation to prioritize the behavior this pedestrian and maneuver your car accordingly.

So what? Well, imagine if your mobile device could process those data sources like your mind does. Your device could know what and who is in the building you are about to pass, or understand that the guy two seats down from you is looking to fill a job that is perfect for you. Suddenly your mobile becomes a part of your life, an extension of your senses. It presents you with information from the electronic world, that your physical senses can’t access, and integrates into your physical world.

The challenge is simple: how do we connect the disparate data sources to give mobile devices the power to do this horizontal integration, and how do we get it to the user when and where and how he needs it? That is the true power of mobile devices. Companies like us, who have a technology that allows any mobile device to  interact with any data source; those are the companies who not only know that mobiles are different that PCs, we actually understand the difference, and can use it. At GoLife we have developed a way of implementing this horizontal integration, allowing any developer to help build the future. I can’t wait to see the result. In my next post, I’ll show an example of what we’re thinking.