Are You Keeping Up?

Originally published August 2012
Sweeping, The Journal of Chimney Venting and Technology

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology

has exceeded our humanity"

-Albert Einstein

In 1983 the first commercial cell phone hit the market. The Motorola DynaTac measured roughly a sleek 9" tall (plus a 4" antenna), 3.5" deep and 1.75" wide. It weighed more than 2 lbs, had a 30 minute talk time, took 10 hours to re-charge, could store a whopping 30 phone numbers, and cost the Gordon Gekko's of the world a modest $3,995.

By comparison, today's current model iPhone is 4.5" tall, .37" deep and 2.31" wide. It weighs a paltry 4.9oz, has 8 hours of talk time, re-charges in about an hour, and the "low end" 16GB model stores roughly 5,000 songs (who knows how many phone numbers?); all for less than $400 at the high end.

And that's just a comparison of the phone itself. I recently saw data that indicated as of 2011 there were 5.6 billion mobile phones in use. In the United States alone, there were more mobile phones in use than the US population itself (103%). Of those billions of cell phone users, how many of us actually use our phones merely as phones? It has been estimated that by 2014, mobile internet access is expected to take over desktop internet access, representing almost a 400% increase in mobile internet usage since 2007 alone. Almost 1/2 of all local searches for products, service and general information are performed on mobile devices.

Depending on your perspective, the statistics about all of this technology and the way the world communicates today range from staggering to bizarre. Well in excess of 1 billion of the mobile phones in use are smartphones, and with relative few exceptions almost all of the remaining phones are SMS enabled.

And here's something to consider...I've seen it estimated that on average, Americans spend almost 3 hours per day socializing on their mobile devices. That's over twice the amount of time most spend eating, and more than 1/3 of the time we spend sleeping every day.

So what's the point? As author Scott Friedman put it,

"If you don't make a commitment to technology today, you've made a commitment to retire."

The constantly evolving face of technology and its impact on the way we live and subsequently do business is at the core of everything the world is becoming.

An article last month in The New York Times indicated that Facebook is now up to more than 900 million users. That's more than 3 times the U.S. population, and we've all likely heard the quip that if Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world. That same article noted that nearly half of all Facebook users log in on their tablets or mobile phones.

One year ago, Time Magazine reported that Twitter had 360 million accounts with 460,000 new sign-ups per day. Similarly I have seen reports that LinkedIn surpassed the 120 million user mark last fall.

How often do we hear someone talking about how the world is changing? How often do we hear about "kids these days" or how today's generation just doesn't "get it"? Well if you haven't figured it out by now, today's generation has it, and they're not about to slow down and wait for the rest of us to catch up to it. By the time this article moves from my computer to the magazine and into your mailbox, I can only imagine what new technologies and media will have either surfaced or begun a short curve research and development phase that further impact our daily lives over just the next 12 months.

Think back merely 15 years. That's not all that long ago all things considered, but it's multiple lifetimes in technology terms. How has the world changed just in that amount of time? 15 years ago, how many of you used email and the internet with any degree of regularity? If you wrote a letter to someone, what was a reasonable response time? By contrast, if you send an email today, how quickly do you expect a response from someone? And forget email; 15 years ago how many of you knew what text messaging was, let alone were actually using it? 15 years ago, video conferencing was an expensive and cumbersome proposition. Today, Skype and FaceTime are not only free international communication tools, but one or the other is pre-loaded on just about every new computer or smartphone out there.

The world is changing! The world has always been changing, but it is certainly doing so at a more rapid pace today.

You may not personally be on Facebook. You may not get a kick out of being among the more that 230 million tweets sent per day or care to follow others on Twitter. You may still think You Tube is some awkward video invasion of someone's personal space. None-the-less, the fact is that these are merely three strategic marketing platforms that successful businesses of all trades are increasingly realizing are a necessity for their survival. 

So, is this a generational thing? Sure it is. But we're wasting our energies if we try to place blame on generational labels. The fact is that for the first time in our economic history, we have 4 generations working, living and competing side by side. The youngest generations may be pushing the technology, and they do represent the future longevity of all of our businesses, but it's a mistake to assume that the more seasoned generations are not embracing much of the technology as well.

According to Nielson, the research company, during the second quarter of 2011 the second largest growth sector of tablet owners was the 55+ year old demographic, while the largest growth sector for smartphone owners was the 45+ year old demographic.

Go-Globe.com reports that in 60 seconds there are:

• Over 370,000 calls on Skype
• Over 98,000 tweets
• Over 100 new LinkedIn accounts established
• Over 6,600 new pictures uploaded on flickr
• Over 695,000 status updates, over 79,000 wall posts, and over 510,000 comments on Facebook
• Over 600 new videos uploaded to You Tube
• Over 13,000 iPhone apps downloaded

And that's just a small sampling of the online media activity the world is using every minute of every day. If you are not taking advantage of that traffic somewhere, it's amazing the potential opportunities that are being missed.

In an article I wrote a few years ago about the changes we are seeing, I wrote:

My old typewriter and my new laptop may both we wireless, but that's about where any similarly ends. Personally, I don't miss the manual ping and mess Whiteout. I'm in awe at the global resources my children have available to them and can only imaging the next level of technology that they will consider to be common-place before I know it.

This is becoming a stronger truth every day.

I hope you're keeping up.

Until next time, I continue to wish you every success!

Mark