Appliance Smackdown

Mobile and PC Convergence

Hardware - Nokia person describes difficulty in distinguishing between mobile devices and PCs for purposes of software licensing

Network infrastructure - e.g. Wimax

Mobile and PC Divergence

Regulatory systems

Usage patterns

• information seeking
• information sharing (ability of people to make available the information they think their communities need)
• entertainment (movies, downloading ringtones) - gateway drug to generativity?

Markets and business models

• Remittance industry is going to collapse because of mobile phone wealth transfer

Generativity

Is the market proving JZ wrong?

• JZ doesn't make the assertion that people prefer generative devices. What he says is that the network and the overall cloud does better when the technology is generative. The issue is that when we study usage patterns, it's pretty easy to figure out what people are doing with sterile devices. With generative devices, the question is what could people do. This gets to what Beth was saying about entertainment possibly being a gateway

Content-level generativity

• if something allows you to connect, you can conceive of generativity as network effects (EZ)

Does hacker mentality play out in the market?

• Forced generativity in developing countries

What is generativity for phones? There's got to be a PC in the mix to write the code for the unlocked iPhone.

• M-commerce innovation is happening over phones in Africa
• There's a difference between content generativity and material generativity

Network generativity in Uganda

• Used a sterile system for money transfer by using network power