Check out the evolution of cell phone design.
And now for something completely different: Text/Messages: Books by Artists. Incidentally, I’d love to see card catalogs replaced or enhanced with text messages.
Take a look at this idea, Hansel and Gretel Marketing, as implemented at Barney’s. This would be an awesome use case for text messaging. From the linked article, here’s how it works:
1) A computer system at Barneys tracks the weekly spend of their regular clients by looking at data from the client’s Barneys credit card (this is another reason besides high interest rates why department stores push so hard for their credit cards: They can track individual customers).
2) When weekly spend for a customer drops below a certain threshold, an automated alert is triggered: They assign one of their employees the task of handwriting a letter to that customer, enticing them to come into the store for a free facial.
3) Customer comes into the store for a free facial (who can resist?), but it’s too late. The allure of the store is too hard to resist. Weekly spend on the department credit card is back up to normal.
And:
We have this question today, this question of where mobile devices will go in the future. So the question at hand is, ‘What is mobility, really?’ And in my view, mobility is not the device. It’s not the network. It is the mobile experience.
Mobility as a term has existed for quite some time, and for most of the time it has been synonymous with ‘cellular network’ and ‘device’. This is because cellular networks were the first time we were truly free of wires. I think this has changed though, mostly because of the massive, enormous scale of adoption. More than three billion people on earth use a cellular device to communicate. Every second, four babies are born. In that same second, thirty mobile devices are sold. And we’re just now starting to see the innovation beyond mere two-way communication in mobility.
- Padmasree Warrior, CTO Cisco