Enabling the future of living!

Half of the world’s population now has a mobile subscription up from just one in five 10 years ago. An additional one billion subscribers are predicted by 2020, taking the global penetration rate to approximately 60%. A Smartphone device, no bigger than the size of our palm, has more technology in it than the Apollo 11 space module that landed on moon.

Size, shape, and capabilities of these ubiquitous communication devices continue evolving, and so are prices which, driven by cost and performance improvements in digital technologies, are falling rapidly. Beyond smartphones, tablets, connected sensors and body-worn wearables will also make headlines. Connected sensors will find their way into vehicles (smart cards), into urban areas (smart cites) and into our infrastructure (smart grid) – redefining the way government services are delivered.

The Ericsson Mobility Report 2016 validates that consumers in India believe that mobility is improving the quality and efficiency of every aspect of their day-to-day lives. Take work-station, for instance. Since the PC era of the 1990s, our offices have gone through an unprecedented transformation. Work today is something you do… not somewhere you go to. And mobile technology is at the heart of that change.

The way forward then is to enable employees to work on every screen they use be it fixed screens, desktops, IP phones, tablets, smartphones, video walls, and wearable devices… all of these become content destinations and engagement portals where employees can access and interact with content.

Driving this new way to work is the only way to engage and enthuse the new age workforce demographic. If a company can drive greater business success while nurturing a stronger sense of employee engagement, achieve higher levels of collaboration, and ultimately enable faster and better decision making…. That, surely, has to be the future of work!

Think about how mobile technology has improved the quality of care and empathy. Healthcare is an area that has embraced mobile technology wholeheartedly. The joint report by PwC and Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) on the Indian m-Health market in 2014 placed India second among developing countries on maturity for m-Health adoption.

More than 60 percent of Indian doctors and healthcare players have adopted mobile technology in Healthcare. As importantly - 60 percent of the consumers in India predicted that within the next three years, mobile technology would improve the convenience, cost and quality of healthcare. In times of crises, mobility has proven to be a boon. It has come to the aid of anxious family and friends in the event of calamities.

The Nepal earthquake and the Chennai floods in 2015 caused mindboggling devastation. It was in times like these that mobility gave wings to human aid. When it comes to the way we learn, the process was more about concepts being conveyed in an abstract manner using textbooks. This in contrast to mobile technology, which makes the learning process more personalized, interactive and engaging.

Innovations like tablet-based tutoring can enable two-way conversations and increase collaboration, giving students the best of both worlds in a changing education environment. Today, forward-thinking learning centers avoid video lectures in favor of two-way interactions in which tutors walk students through problem solving and demonstrate new concept using tablets. Imagine, it is a virtual central platform, all over!

As the next step in the continuous innovation and evolution of the mobile industry, newer technologies will not only be about a new air interface with faster speeds, but it will also address network congestion, energy efficiency, cost, reliability, and connection to billions of people and devices. Your device is already the first screen.

It will become the preferred source for entertainment and information, your global bank account number and your virtual debit/credit card number and your wallets. It would be fair to say that mobile technology has – and will continue to play - a significant role in evolving the social fabric of nations and people around the world in the years ahead. (The writer is CBU Head of Andhra Pradesh & Telangana Circle, Tata Teleservices Limited)

By Prasanna Das