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Mobile Computing: The iPhone and Beyond

January 5, 2010 by Matt Mireles

It's not by accident that everyone in the SpeakerText team has either an iPhone or a Droid. Even the hotshot college kids we hired. How did we pay them? iPhones. 

As Marc Andreesen told Charlie Rose: "the iPhone is the first true cellphone that is actually a full computer."

And that really matters. Having a computer in your pocket changes what you think a computer should be able to do. Form defines function. And when you're building a software company, you gotta understand huge trends like this at a very deep level. 

Thus, for SpeakerText and for me, mobile computing is not just a cool fad that we follow because it makes us look hip. Again, Marc Andreesen:

 It has a full operating system, it has the ability of support, a large number of applications, it has a software development kit that you can use to build applications, it has a way to distribute applications over the network onto the phone.

No, having our engineers and managers own iPhones is a strategic move. 

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  • http://profile.typepad.com/caprio Mike Caprio

    The iPhone is even more than just a computer – it’s also the first in a line of environment recorders, a rudimentary “life recorder”. In addition to tracking all your wireless calls (as ordinary cell phones do), it also geotags all the photos and videos you take, and it takes the history of all the music you’ve played while mobile and imports it back to your iTunes library – and those are just the Apple applications, that’s not including using the accelerometer as a pedometer or any of the other productivity applications, bar code scanners, augmented reality interfaces… As newer models are developed, by Apple and by others, they’ll start recording more and more data of various kinds until we get to a point where everyone is recording full HD audio and video all the time. The future is more data, more data, and more data.
    This is also why SpeakerText is a cool app; it adds more data to the stream.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/caprio Mike Caprio

    The iPhone is even more than just a computer – it’s also the first in a line of environment recorders, a rudimentary “life recorder”. In addition to tracking all your wireless calls (as ordinary cell phones do), it also geotags all the photos and videos you take, and it takes the history of all the music you’ve played while mobile and imports it back to your iTunes library – and those are just the Apple applications, that’s not including using the accelerometer as a pedometer or any of the other productivity applications, bar code scanners, augmented reality interfaces… As newer models are developed, by Apple and by others, they’ll start recording more and more data of various kinds until we get to a point where everyone is recording full HD audio and video all the time. The future is more data, more data, and more data.
    This is also why SpeakerText is a cool app; it adds more data to the stream.