Welcome to the party Tim O'Reilly!

We jest with the flippant title. Ibiograph is thrilled that Tim O’Reilly, a major influencer and visionary thinker in the tech world, reached an epiphany about the significance of the mobile phone as a unique and PRIMARY development platform, or channel for consuming services (depending on your whether you are on the “sell” or “buy” side of the specific transaction).

Ibiograph has applied this thinking for the last 2 years as we’ve developed the Ibiograph, our service for chronicling life using the mobile phone. Tim makes the point that the mobile phone is a completely different environment and channel than the PC. To fully realize the value of the channel, the mobile phone’s multipurpose functionalities and function must be integrated from the design stage of service development, not added on as an extension of an existing service. Much like the “search” paradigm constrains the thinking about mobile apps, the entire PC centric conception of the web proves limiting.

Tim argues the combination of the uniqueness (i.e., personal, ubiquitous, sensor filled, communication device) of mobile phones with the power of the cloud holds tremendous value; we agree. We also believe that the discipline of designing and developing for the mobile phone and the information efficiency required offer the opportunity to provide value creating new services for people.

This information efficiency requirement is very different than coding for the Web 2.0 PC environment and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Everyone acknowledges the bandwidth, processing power, and form factor constraints of the mobile platform. Over time Moore's law will alleviate these - in fact this is starting to happen now. But a good portion of the value people receive from an information efficient service will continue in perpetuity because of the human and environmental constraints; namely when using a mobile people are often on the go, so time and effort are at a premium. If a task taking 1 minute and 150 kilobytes using a Web 2.0 PC-first oriented service extended to the mobile can be accomplished in 8 bytes and 10 seconds, most of the time in mobile the latter wins.

An example of this thinking and development framework put into practical application is the Ibiograph's (www.ibiograph.com) service for automatically publishing networked, personal memory books (PDF), completely "authored" using simple text and picture messaging from the mobile.