Summary of my New Book with Robert Scoble

Below is an executive summary of Beyond Mobile: Life after Smartphones, the book Robert Scoble and I are working on. This piece is part of the Sponsorship package we are assembling and is not actually in the book. It is

not designed to dazzle or draw readers in as the Table of Contents andIntroduction will hopefully accomplish. We just want this Summary to tell sponsors what the book is about, so that they can decide if they want their brands to be associated with a book about how new technologies such as AR/VR, robots, autonomous cars and digital genies will be changing business in the near-term future.

Please give this a tough read and tell us how we can make it do a better job. You can reply here, or at shelisrael in Messenger or ShelIsrael1@gmail.com, if you like old-fashioned email.

Beyond Mobile: Life after Smartphones

Overview

This is our third book together. The previous two, Naked Conversations and Age of Context, became tech business best sellers. Like our two earlier efforts, Beyond looks at technology’s impact on work and life in the short-term future.

Beyond is self-published. We are attempting to raise $150,000 from corporate sponsors to cover costs of writing, publishing and marketing this book. Target publication date is Dec. 1, 2016.

Audience & Perspective

Our book is filled to a large degree with information derived from the tech community, where Scoble conducts hundreds of on-going interviews. He watches for patterns and trends that indicate what will happen over the next few years. Israel adds the analytical perspective of a veteran, hard-nosed journalist.

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We both consider ourselves user champions, but we write primarily for the business decision maker. Based on books sales and public feedback, our books have a strong appeal to general readership as well.

Beyond follows the theme of our two previous books: technology is about to foment change in the near term future and smart business people will adjust to that change sooner, rather than later.

Key Points

Beyond examines technology that will get closer to people than mobile phones can possibly do. It makes four key points:

1. AR/VR, Digital Genies, Robots and Autonomous Cars will start moving digital activities beyond the mobile phone in 2016. Driven by Millennials, adoption will come quicker in both consumer and enterprise areas than has previously happened.
2. In periods of rapid changes, startups often rise from oblivion to overtake incumbents. In this case, incumbents are driving the changes. The likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are taking the lead. Still they are facing feisty competition from the most promising generation of early phase companies we have ever seen. This clash of Davids and Goliaths will cause a period of rapid change and mind-blowing innovation. Competition will drive costs down to the point that the Digital Divide will be based less on economics than today, but rather on those who use it and those who choose to abstain. The Divide will grow into a full chasm.
3. Concerns about lost jobs and privacy is an ongoing issue. A lessened ability for people to tell the difference between what is real and what is not; resistance of older people to change current habits will increase the current gaps between those who depend on technology for work, communications and play and those who do not. This will extend the digital divide into a chasm. Many people will opt out of using these new technologies: Far more will opt in. Those who chose not to take advantage of post-mobile technologies will become the new Amish of the 21st century: they may be perfectly happy, but will become isolated from mainstream people and businesses. Businesses, merchants and enterprises who are laggards, will inevitably become the next generation of Sears, JC Penney and Kmart. They may continue, but will be less important.
4. Over the next decade–perhaps sooner, massive adoption of AR/VR, robots, genies and self-driving vehicles, will change entertainment, the home, health-care, education and religion. Nearly every aspect of business, including the global enterprise and the corner merchant will change; And as close as people are today with mobile devices, will become far more so as the separation of people on one side of a screen, and the tech on the other dissolves and we become immersed in tech rather than just witnesses to it.

Takeaway

Readers will walk away with the understanding that technology is about to completely change experiences and expectations of all members of the enterprise ecosystem as well as brand markets. It will also define a new form of the digital divide. Millennial cultures will continue to represent diverse social, economic and educational levels as well as communicate with each other through the universal language of code. They will lead and older people will follow for the most part, but they will be laggards.

Businesses can continue doing what they are doing and like Cadillac, Sears and Penny’s follow an aging customer base that gets smaller every year–or they can understand that the new shift is to Millennials and to use the tools that they use.