February 2004

VIPs: Virally Interactive Pixels

Continued from page 1

By Michael Schrage

But wait! I already have a $79 key-chain memory device that plugs into the USB ports on my computers and lets me carry up to half a gigabyte of data between home and work. This accessory could double as the connection device between my camera phone and my PC. It would be terrifically cool if I could take pictures and plug my key chain into my camera phone to download them, then transfer them to my home computer. It would be equally cool if I could copy an entire photo album to my key chain, then use the phone to sort through it and send whichever picture-or document-I wished. In other words, I want my phone to have at least one USB port.

Yes, I know about the Handspring Treo and its knockoffs, which attempt to blend phone, camera, datebook, e-mail, and Web-surfing capabilities into a single form-factored box. But while these technologies foster certain forms of "instant interconnectivity," they're not yet tailored to supply the kind of immediate gratification that's making simple camera phones so popular.

In the same way a camera phone makes it easy to "snap & send," the next generation of visualization innovation could come from making it ever easier to "snap & back up" or "snap & scan" or "scan & edit." Think of mobile phones as a channel for viral marketing, where consumers convert their friends to new products simply by using them. Camera phones therefore become digital platforms for "VIPs"-Virally Interactive Pixels. Both mobile manufacturers and service providers have a powerful incentive to promote VIPs as the messaging medium of the future. In the same way people trade games wirelessly and respond to voice and wireless text messages, they should be able to respond to VIPs.

Increasingly ubiquitous VIP interconnectivity should inspire different kinds of communications behaviors. My bet on a "metric of the future" is "instant forwarding": that is, in the same way people forward jokes and URLs on mailing lists, they will immediately forward some VIPs they receive on their mobiles. Will they send these goodies to their own PCs? Or will they forward them to the mobiles and/or e-mail addresses of friends and colleagues? If I'm running a cellular service, I have to believe that the growth of "IF" for VIPs will become one of my critical indicators of customer use.

Then again, I'd feel more confident about betting on IF-VIPs if I knew that mobile scan & edit-and not just snap & send photography-was capturing the attention of Japanese schoolgirls.