Simeon Oriko is a student at University of Eastern Africa – Baraton, and today he is talking about the Mobile Cloud Computing paradigm. He starts by saying that web experience cannot be superimposed on mobile phones. It can be terribly frustrating to find information using mobiles. For rural areas where he often does IT outreach to students at schools… if the information they need to fulfill their dreams is available online, and the students do not have computer access; they should still be able to find that information through mobiles. There is a long way to go.
He goes through the 4 problems of mobile web.
- Storage in mobiles is paltry
- Flaky connections particularly in rural areas
- Small display screens (I should also add differing display screens. @cellstories had to deal with this when the Droid came out)
- Flaky browsers. So many to choose from, optimized for different devices.
Solutions
- Put the processing in the cloud. Think Amazon EC2. Put the storage there too so the mobile acts as a dumb terminal of sorts. Storage space on mobiles is still quite expensive, but storage online can be very cheap, and processing information online is much easier that on mobile phones.
- Create a common platform that all mobile phones can share. Its tedious to make apps for the myriad OSs like Android, Iphone, Symbian, J2ME
- Integrating solutions like PesaPal
Think of the potential of processing information on the cloud and delivering it through mobiles. With the increase in mobile subscribers forecast to reach billions in future. Think of the young people who have dreams of being a pilot, a doctor…whatever. Can we meet the challenge of providing this information through mobiles? Can we develop applications that meet our local needs of educations on basic phones?
Attached is his presentation… I was greatly inspired by his talk… off to lunch to chat about this some more.Mobile Cloud Computing.pptx
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