Henry Ford posing next to Ford Model - T
“I will produce cars in any color of your choice as long as it is black” – Henry Ford to a customer who asked him to sell a car with a color apart from black in 1914.
I wonder what would have happened if Steve Jobs had given users of the iPhone pre-installed Angry Birds as the only app accessible to them. Some of the crazy Angry Birds fans might settle with that but most of the users would want a wider choice of apps. More options are always good.
Henry Ford could afford to not have a customer centric approach because he knew that there were no other car manufacturers at that time who made affordable cars.
Today, insatiable human needs and a perfectly competitive scenario is driving innovation to levels unimaginable to most of us. The cool and crazy gadgets shown in the James Bond movies are becoming a reality. The old saying that ‘if there is a will, there is a way’ leads us to a new saying, ‘if there is an idea, we will find a way of doing it’.
Picture this: It is one of those chilly days when you just want to reach home and get into your bath-tub with nice warm water. But for this, you will need to first reach home, turn-on your water heater and wait for the tub to be full. How you’d wish you had some magical control through which you could have the bath-tub ready and you could just jump into it and relax. ‘Your wish is my command’, said Larry Page when he unveiled the ‘Android@Home’ framework this year at the Google IO 2011. Google plans to take mobile convergence to the next level by offering Android@Home, a framework that allows an Android phone to control all your appliances at home from wherever you are. So start your washing machine when you want or schedule your vacuum cleaner to turn on by simply adding a reminder to your Google Calendar. One amazing demo that Larry Page gave at the Google IO was a concept, Android-powered device hub called Tungsten. Using RFID embedded into CD cases the device was able to detect the CD and add it to your library. Another touch and it started automatically.Now, doesn’t that sound exciting?
Watching 3D movies is always fun. We have seen a few television manufacturers who have recently launched 3D TV sets. So with this feature available on these two screens, how can the mobile screen remain out of the picture! Both LG and HTC recently launched handsets with 3D screens which allow its users to view 3D content without 3D glasses! The user can also capture 3D images using a pair of cameras provided on the phone. I wonder how the experience of watching a movie like Harry Potter would be on a 4inch 3D display! With so much happening on the 3D front, how can Google stay out of action! Recently Google introduced 3D Google Maps which gave a 3D view of buildings and streets. I don’t really know if this would help us in finding our way when we are absolutely lost, but it definitely looks good!
Another very exciting development is gesture recognition on mobile phones. The recent launch of the Nokia N9 created waves amongst the technology enthusiasts. The very fact that the phone had no physical buttons (except for a couple on the side for volume control and camera) but relied completely on swipes excited me a lot. But what if I didn’t even have to swipe? What if all that I had to do is wave at my phone to send a message? Or nod my head affirmatively to receive a call? On July 26th, Qualcomm announced that they will be launching a new version of the Snapdragon Processor with gesture recognition capabilities. Hmmm…. I wonder if using these capabilities, my phone would automatically make a call to my best friend when it saw me frown!
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