Norman — Information everywhere as technology pushes forward

Seemingly from one day to the next, more and more information than a person could imagine wanting to know is right there at the touch of a button, almost by just thinking about it.

And that’s becoming closer to reality everyday, with the use of mobile devices as much a part of everyday life as breathing the morning air or having that first cup of coffee.

It’s the job of men like Dr. Kishore Swaminathan to see what the next big things are going to be.

Swaminathan, chief scientist for Accenture, was the featured speaker at a recent session of Practice and Policy Lecture Series, put on by the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma Department of Human Services.

The native of Madurai, India, has spent about 20 years with Accenture, setting the company’s technology and research agenda and heading its systems integration research. In short, he’s on the cutting edge of its technological advances.

Even as the last year was a rough one for the global economy, Swaminathan said it “was a watershed year with respect to technology.”

He outlined several areas of improvement and what is likely to come the next few years in those areas, with much focus placed on the increase in number and functionality of mobile devices.

We used to call it “BYOC” — bring your own computer,” he said. “But that since has been revised to ‘bring your own device.’”

Accenture’s statistics on mobile devices projected that by the end of 2009, about 60 percent of the world’s population were mobile subscribers.

“That is more than the number that has running water and refrigeration put together,” Swaminathan said.

If those numbers aren’t staggering, Swaminathan projects that number will be 80 percent by 2013. “That is more people with a cell phone than have shoes,” he said.

He presented statistics showing the greatest percentage of Americans buying the multi-use, state of the art phones of today actually are lower middle class, bringing in less than $50,000 a year.

“The reason is they’re not buying an expensive phone, but they’re buying a cheap computer,” he said. “Mobile devices are putting a tremendous amount of power in the hands of the consumer.”

In addition to having more power, chances are users also are spending a decent amount of time with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The use of social networking continues to grow at a rapid pace. In March of 2009, one of every 11 minutes online was spent on social networking, Swaminathan said.

By last September, that number nearly had doubled to one in six minutes. And around the world, it’s an even more steep percentage.

“In Korea it’s one in three minutes and in Australia it’s about one in four,” he said.

There is a lot for people to do with that time. For example, Apple’s iPhone has more than three billion applications available with the number growing almost every minute.

Swaminathan pulled out his own phone, pushed a couple of buttons and shared a few seconds of the police radio for the Los Angeles Police Department. The same app also can tap into the control tower frequency of any airport in the world.

He discussed Foursquare, an application that works much like Twitter but is location-sensitive, telling a traveler all about the new city where they just have arrived.

“If this place could talk what stories it would tell ... now that’s becoming a reality,” he said.

Another big trend he sees is the success of companies that are doing more to help individuals get what they need out of their computers and mobile devices.

“My 17-year-old has a much better laptop than this crap Accenture gives me,” he joked.

“Five years ago, the big company could do way more than an individual. Now so much is geared to giving people the ability to build exactly what they want. There is not as much of a gap in the purchasing power for companies as there was.”

Those individuals also are spending more time watching and using video for their benefit. YouTube, for example, has 10 billion videos loaded per month and more than 20 hours of video loaded every minute.

And he said businesses are paying attention, as some of those videos can be an outlet for customers who are not satisfied.

“When I go complain to a company about something, I’m just one upset customer,” he said. “But when I go make a video about my bad experience and complain to the community, it can make for thousands of upset customers.”

Christian Potts 366-3544 cpotts@normantranscript.com