I’ve seen the future of news, and it’s small enough to fit into the palm of your hand.
The future of news is the smartphone because the smartphone is the future of computing.
That fact became clear on Monday as I followed two conferences taking place on opposite sides of the country.
On the West Coast, Apple CEO Steve Jobs used the company’s annual developers’ conference to introduce the latest version of the iPhone.
A phone in name only, the iPhone 4 – which will be out on June 24 – is really a very powerful and very small netbook with a touchscreen in place of a keyboard. Among its new features, the iPhone 4 can record HR video and has a forward-facing camera you can use for video chat. Apple is introducing versions of its existing iBook and iMovie software that work on the iPhone 4, so you can use it to read books or make movies.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, online marketers gathered at Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing conference to talk about advances in social media technology, which so many companies are using for marketing that they’ve coined a new phrase, “social marketing.”
One of the day’s more interesting speakers – at least from my vantage point listening in via Twitter – was Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley’s long-time tech stock analyst. According to Meeker, we’re about to enter a golden age of mobile phones and online advertising.
To drive home the point, here are a few of Meeker’s slides to show you why this is such a big deal:
The first is Morgan Stanley’s projection for the growth of Internet-enabled smartphones through 2013. They see the mobile Internet adoption rate – the number of people using smartphones to go online – growing even faster than the rate at which people bought PCs to access the Internet via AOL or other service providers.
Next, Meeker predicts that by 2012, smartphones will outsell PCs and netbooks combined:
Finally, she says each generation of computing advances has led to more users, which is why mobile Internet – not just phones, but tablets, cars, home appliances, anything that can access the Internet – is closing in on 10+ billion units:
These are huge trends, trends that smart writers and other independent creatives simply cannot ignore.
Why? Because if smartphones and mobile Internet are the wave of the future, publications will migrate to those technology platforms if they want to reach readers. Of course that shift has already been happening for the past 15 years. But if the rate at which people are using smartphones accelerates, it’s reasonable to think that the shift from print to online to mobile news apps is going to speed up too. And if you don’t follow suit and learn what it takes to produce content – stories, pictures, videos and the like – you could get left behind.
So what should you do?
Tune in tomorrow for my 5-step plan for taking advantage of the mobile Internet.
Wow, isn’t this just amazing? Think of the difference between our lives and those of people who lived just 70 years ago. Thanks, Michelle.