Disruption knocking at the door….

Which industries are next in line for total disruption?
We’re not done disrupting mobile – the industry previously owned by the carriers and old school phone manufacturers is still wide open for further upside-down, inside out disruption.
The PC is dead. Microsoft is now an also-ran, struggling for grip, and is no longer mentioned on TechCrunch etc.
Where will the disruption wave go from here? And which industries are still holding us back, preventing innovation with their grim adherence to yesterday’s assumptions? Not that I know secret info – this is just my silly ass guess:

1. Mobile payments. we’re lagging a wave of change that makes your cellphone a fully robust and reliable payments mechanism – both on the move at point of sale locations but also on social sites and at airports etc. Get ready for the disappearance of Fastrak transponders and other purpose-specific payment tools – your phone will handle this stuff.

2. Automobile-and-mobile advances. Expect your car and your phone to get to know each other much more intimately. Right now you can Bluetooth your music and your phone through the car, and higher end models allow you to control the music and calls from the steering wheel. Next, get ready for car alarms to talk to your phone, possibly texting pictures 360 degrees to you instead of disturning the neighborhood. Possibly allowing you to read telemetry and diagnostics that were reserved for your car dealer’s systems. Possibly locating your car anytime, anywhere, allowing you to disable it remotely, and definitely turning on a solar powered AC or starting the heater before you go out to your car.

3. Television. Let’s face it – it’s over. People will always watch TV, but the delivery vehicle and the advertising mechanisms will be web-to-mobile, and web-to-big-screen instead of cable. More importantly, identity management on the new channels will allow much more targeted advertising. Your teenager watching the same show in the other room will get different ads. The show may look totally different – shows may look more like Facebook pages with live video in the content area.

4. Healthcare. Probably should have put this first. How can this dinosaur not change – it may first collapse, then be reborn as a lean mean doctor machine. Or not. It could change in bad ways – further cheapening the doctor’s value in the equation, maybe allowing remote outsourced medical professionals via video conference to diagnose your stomach pain or lower back pain from Bangladesh. As a smarter direction it could centralize medical records in the cloud and consolidate 75% of health insurance bureaucracy with a giant health cloud in the sky. Doctors would spend more time on patients and less time slaving on insurance paperwork. Providers everywhere would link in and out of a patient’s treatment in real time. You could be diagnosed and treated sometimes from home via web conference with several experts there together, instead of all those separate trips and appointments and long waits. You would never have to be the secretary who fill out claims and asks for reimbursement. This all depends on factors beyond technology alone – patience grasshopper.

5. Automotive technologies. The car industry wants us to think of it as high tech, sleek and innovative. In fact there’s a five year cycle from idea to street availability. Auto executives are dinosaurs and they know it. We don’t need rear view mirrors: cameras could replace them today. We don’t need annoying car alarms: video and image transmissions could deter a thief better than loud noise. We don’t need to get into a steaming hot – or freezing cold car: solar panels could power the thing that keeps your car comfortable and keeps the pet safe inside your car outside a Texas shopping mall in August, or a Helsinki driveway in February. We don’t need to plug phones into cars or connect them via Bluetooth: the car can have its own network and be its own mobile hotspot, today. Your account is what glues it all together – whoever steps into the car and hits the [Connect] button, activates the hotspot and merrily talks, maps, texts and emails all the way to their destination. Oh, you’ll need heads-up display and voice controls that work – that too, can be done today.

6. Advertising. Hell yeah. Ads may seem innovative as they find new places from which to jump out at you, but honestly their ideas move slower than you and I adopt new stuff in our lives. My T-shirt has been viewed more times than this blog – and that’s true. So how about LCD ads on your car’s rear window, or your home’s front door? Sounds awful, but if it helps people pay for car insurance or mortgage, it may take off. The challenge until now has been verifying impressions – not anymore.

7. Security, surveillance and civil liberties. Ouch, touchy subject. But inevitably we’ll be ever more easily identified as we move around, by our car ID and our phone ID or our online identity. Why would we think the surveillance industry won’t be able to catch a burglar linking his mobile UDID when he broke into your home, with his credit ATM transaction where he deposited the $500 he got by selling your jewelry to the pawn shop. What does this mean for the industry? Big money in analytics, data collection and investigative services.

Other observations – “Facebook is eating the internet” is a  commentary I’ve heard more and more. While it’s bad for one company to control an industry, it may yield some great advances for a couple of years if Facebook becomes the skin through with we do almost everything. It could become our identity management for online banking and shopping and buying and selling on Ebay/Amazon/Craigslist, and it could become our phone number, email address and credit card account number. I wonder if broadband carriers will mutate into tech companies, and how long they can oppose device makers and our endless thirst for mobile bandwidth.

I’m off to watch Minority Report again.