It stands to reason that my iPhone 4s will in a period of 10 years have more memory, more computing power, faster download speeds and an array of I/O capabilities than today. It is also most likely I will find myself connected more easily and reliably such that the days of wondering whether how many “bars” I have will seem pre-historic. We will laugh about how we used to have to ‘scan’ for a Wi-fi zone to log on to.

The mobile industry is missing, or seemingly unaware, of a great movement that has been occurring in the PC world. Namely, none of us want to install new applications on our desktop/laptop computer. We now expect all applications for the most part to run within the browser. What’s setup.exe? We also don’t seem to want to store anything locally, preferring network storage. It’s the whole movement to cloud computing (duh). Somehow the mobile industry isn’t adopting this change.

The average smartphone user has 24 applications installed on their phone. Ironically, they seem to be using only about 12 on any regular basis (according to stats). Do you or I really want more applications littering our phone?  To get an application for most phones, you have to go to a central repository operated by Google or Apple.  Apple is busy telling us they want to protect my little iPhone from ‘bad’ applications and ensure quality and make things easy.

Doesn’t this sound a lot like the rhetoric that we heard from America Online & CompuServe? A closed community is best, right?

With the advent of LTE to your mobile handset, applications won’t need to be stored locally on your handset, they can simply be blasted in via the network on a demand basis and in a matter of a few seconds.  How you use applications will change dramatically as well.  Imagine your typing in the URL for United Airlines and magically the application runs on iPhone and disappears as soon as you leave. Why should United Airlines try and convince Apple to put their app on their store (it’s free) and why is it Apple’s job to feed us this app?

It’s no wonder that Apple is in no big hurry to put LTE on the iPhone 5, it’s the end of the App Store for them and with it a huge potential source of revenue.

It’s at this point that America’s demonstrates that despite spending billions on technology, key and likely important infrastructure issues remain deeply under invested and lacking of modern day touches. Los Angeles County has the same population as the entire country of Switzerland and it’s no surprise that they have a busy emergency calling center. In fact, the E911 systems in LA answer roughly 5.1 million phones calls a year. It can sure can hectic as well, a single car accident on a motorway can result in 400-500 calls to the E911 center in the space of a few minutes. All of this giving a new meaning to “please hold your call is important to us.”

Note, I said “systems”. Los Angeles has 58 incorporated cities within the county (though one would be hard to tell where one ends and another begins). Los Angeles doesn’t just have 1 main emergency dispatch, they infact have 21 different emergency centers taking E911 calls.

Let’s return to Demi Moore. Lovely as she is (or was, but hopefully will be again). This recording of the E911 calls begins easy enough. Frantic caller, calm E911 dispatcher. I have an emergency, this is our address. Easy enough or so it seems. What transpires is a comedy worthy of late night television.

The dispatcher isn’t sure Demi’s home is within his dispatch area and unsure why he got the call. I know where Demi lives! A less than 10 second search of Google maps found she lives here (for all your celebrity voyeurs) in the heart of LA County and ritzy Beverly Hills. So the dispatcher decides to connect Demi’s assistant with the Beverly Hills Emergency Center (of course they have their own darling). The dispatcher isn’t sure the address is within her region, puts everyone on hold (the LA dispatcher is still on the line) to “consult” with her supervisor. She returns a minute later and declares the address isn’t really in their area.

At this point, the 2nd Demi Moore assistant picks up another phone in the house and wonders why the hell they’re now on the phone for over a minute trying to get a rescue unit dispatched. The LA Dispatcher, obviously not well versed in customer service, reprimands the lady explaining he is trying to help.

Don’t believe me, here’s the YouTube link for the audio recording. Clearly, there remains a tad more room for improvement here.

The reality is, if I have a good idea, why would I possibly give it to you?

Unfortunately, they didn’t start life this way. In fact, the telephone companies were quite innovative early in their life. In the beginning days, there was no Ericsson, Huawei or ALU sales guy sitting in their lobby ready to ‘pitch’ their latest deck on what they thought the market wanted.  There was no handy vendor with pages full of SKU’s that could be ordered like a pizza. There was nothing.

So with a need to provide a service and no ready manufacturer, telephone companies became manufacturers. In 1856, George Shawk started Western Electric Manufacturing Company which subsequently went on to become the prime equipment providers to what grew to be the AT&T Bell System and for many, many years afterwards, Western Electric, affectionately named WECo.

Nearly 140 years, WECo was the factory of innovation for AT&T. If the company needed a new service offering, WECo was charged with  figuring out how to do it.  WECo was soon owner to numerous patents, considered a leader in business processes and spun off numerous other technologies companies involved in everything from movie projection equipment to satellite tracking systems for NASA. If you were a geek in the early 1900′s, there was no better company to be at than WECo.

It was a excellent long run, but it came to an end with the carpet bombing impact of divestiture. But this good as well, WECo had grown old and stale and the new companies like Northern Telecom and other nimble innovators were willing to change the game. A new era of  innovation had begun.

But where are we today? Well it appears, we’ve gone full circle. The telephone companies find themselves competing against companies built predominately with their own customer software. I remind those around me often that Google “did not” put out an RFP for a search engine. If it’s your core business, you kinda of have to own the technology.

This isn’t good news for today’s vendors, who want every operator to have the same equipment and economics of scale. They’ll fight each other to the last breath, drop prices, fire employees and pray they are the last man standing (wait — isn’t that what’s happening now?).

But there is good news, similar to divestiture, the melt down of the big supplier will spark renewal. The big service providers will have to invest to build their own services, it will require an entire new group of skill set employees. These employees will need tools, base components and systems to make these services come to life.

So as fast as the junk dealer can haul off NSN, ALU and Ericsson — the sooner the renewal will begin.

Now the great RIM sits in shambles, the two founders sent packing to ice fish their remaining days out and a very youthful German, Thorsten Heins, whose main contribution to the technology world was working at Siemens is moved upstairs. Siemens? When was the last time Siemens did anything innovative? Ooops .. never.

So what will become of RIM? But with nearly $2 billion in cash on hand and declining revenues of $20 billion, whatever it is, it’s gonna take a very long time to happen.

I don’t predict a happy ending here. RIM owned the market for what we know today as a “smart phone”. But they saw themselves as a email phone and obviously missed the memo that phones would become tiny computer. They continued to pander to IT departments, who I would predict will be dinosaurs in the next wave of technology, and missed or rather refused to see the shift to consumer devices. The massive Playbook was laughable from the first story.

But mainly RIM was full of themselves, middle of nowhere Canada, a holier than thou attitude, every discussion involved an attorney, a simple NDA gave way to a 23 page document. Ugh.

Yes, we all know that the odds of turning this around, making RIM a significant company, a valued and esteemed member in the world of technology seems quite far fetched. They’ll continue to fire people, fire off some flare products in the hopes of saving themselves, invest in new wacko business ideas which evolved from a committee decision with plenty of PowerPoints. Thorsten will bring in new management, Steve Job’s wannabes, complete with turtle neck sweaters, flowery words and loud speeches. Yes, we all know this but we can’t help but watch this seen unfold.

I still have all of my Blackberries, somewhere in a drawer, a testament to an earlier time, a time of innovation and clarity. It’s exciting now though, for in the ashes of RIM, new growth will emerge, perhaps a cubicle engineer, fired in the waved of shut downs, is busy now in his Waterloo basement conceiving, concocting, connecting with his idea which RIM had passed over long ago. I’m watching for that.

The discussion about M2M (Machine-to-Machine) interfaces has been a hot topic of late. Many of us already use these interfaces, we just don’t realize it. Mint.com, for example, consolidates all my financial information for easy viewing on their web portal. Vanguard.com, another financial  company, allows you to add outside accounts to their web portal which is automatically updated. I’ve used these services for months if not years with no issue.

Recently, a wrath of new travel services that provided consolidated information about your frequent flyer miles, activity and status. Helpful if you fly a bunch of different airlines and often forget where you have accumulated miles. I happily signed up with Awardwallet.com and provided it with the appropriate logon information for my various frequent flyer accounts. It quickly assembled a consolidated view of my activity.

However, just today, Awardwallet.com sent me the above email, informing me that American Airlines has asked them to “cease and desist” from accessing my data. Sadly, Awardwallet.com is now having to do some stupid browser extension (just what I don’t need).

The question is what right does American Airlines have to say who accesses my data. I gave Awardwallet.com my information and I’m not sure how different this is than me giving the same information to say an assistant or friend to look up my information. Now clearly there is a potential security risk, perhaps I have my credit card information on file with American Airlines. Likely, American will cite this as the primary reason they’ve taken this action.

But more likely, American Airlines wants me to come to their website to see my account information, providing them data on how often I access the data and opportunity for them to promote whatever they want. Now of course, if they said that, I’d be rightly upset. Well, I’m upset anyways because despite what they’ve said, I’m not stupid.

The whole issue of data privacy in a M2M interface is clearly going to arise. Who owns my data and who can access it? What’s ironic, the financial institutes seems to have found a solution, for what, I would argue, is much more valuable and information in need of security.