Sharing as a key driver

I am glad Wendy brought up the sharing theme. Sharing - the fact that people are social and communicate with each other - is behind the success of mobile phones.

Often when applications are developed the benevolent idea is to increase efficiency and make people more productive. While those benefits are of course significant, especially in the work context, many killer apps are based on sociability. People want to belong, they want to share their feelings.

Text messages were not supposed to become a huge success in the mass market; but they did. Because they offered a silent, non-intrusive way to submit thoughts, greetings, wishes, etc. There was a latent need for being in touch (and it was much more efficient, too).

The ability to “read” users’ lives and identify latent needs is the cornerstone of application development.