When American jobs are threatened it’s time to level-up & get social

• American job losses will continue due to a convergence of big forces including offshoring and automation driven by accelerating change.  Service sector jobs will generally not return.
• Social web business models are flourishing and point the way to new jobs and efficiencies.
• A new class of Super Prosumer companies like Groupon are poised to explode and return more value to people, creating more jobs, but driving price points lower.
• We need to encourage the development of Super Prosumer companies on U.S. soil across various industries and become a Prosumer Nation.

Like Scott Pilgrim, America needs to Level-Up.

The erosion of traditional American jobs continues unabated and we can expect it to steadily worsen.  From a macro perspective, there is simply no silver-bullet counter to the converging forces of globalization, automation, overvalued real estate prices, national debt, mega quantitative easing (printing more U.S. dollars to buy back our bonds so they don’t tank - a new round of $600 billion has just been proposed), mounting international resistance to U.S. monetary policy, massive overseas spending (Iraq, Afghanistan) general inefficiencies in govt, defense, education, oversight, and social services.  Despite weak signs of life in the country’s massive services sector, which comprises an astounding 80% of U.S. jobs, last week’s dismal jobs report reinforces the steady downhill march.

Though the timing is obviously unfortunate, this should come as no surprise. Forecasters like Alvin Toffler have been pointing out the inevitable shift to the Knowledge Age and post-industrial society for some 30 years already, while others like Martin Ford argue this transition is likely to be very disruptive and and downright Schumpeterian due to the rapid labor displacement that’s being catalyzed by accelerating technological change.  Well-established generational dynamics like Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning further strengthen the argument that we’re in the very early stages of a nasty, punctuated socio-economic transition.

So, what can we do to preserve American jobs and our way of life?

First, we need to come to agreement on the root causes of the problem - a handful of which I have listed above.  Since our political system is clearly incapable of achieving this level of dialogue, due to a phenomenon that Jonathan Rauch aptly labels “Demosclerosis” (thanks to ASF President John Smart for the excellent reference), it’s now incumbent on us, as individuals and local community networks, to Level-Up our understanding of the big-picture socio-economic dynamics.  Now that the shit is hitting the fan, the time is ripe for productive dialogue, which must replace polarized political rhetoric if we are to successfully adapt to the accelerating change that is obviously transforming our world and digesting American jobs.  At the very least, establishing a better sense of accel-aware context can help tell us what NOT to do, and what NOT to waste resources on.

Once we get on more-or-less the same page, we can then either 1) move on to meaningful policy debates and attempt to bend politicians to our will or 2) work around them.  Because it’s so difficult to achieve mass consensus, it seems fairly obvious that we must start generating creative solutions locally, at the community level.  Fortunately, the same technological change that’s contributing to American job losses is also sparking the emergence of a host of powerful new tools and economic models that grass roots change agents can take advantage of.  If our goal is to save American jobs, then it’s our responsibility to identify, vet and selectively apply these emerging solutions.

First and most obviously, we can turn to well-established, leading-edge American tech and web companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Johnson Controls, Amazon, EBay for software, hardware and intelligent systems that can bring down personal and business costs and increase profit.  Google Apps, Maps and embedded Search can help save money and form new businesses.  IBM’s Smart Infrastructure can reduce municipal sewage and water costs.  Amazon and EBay can serve as powerful distribution channels for small businesses and entrepreneurs.  And so forth.  These are all solutions we need to become more familiar with so that we and our local communities can effectively implement them.

Then there’s also a new class of social web companies that are already playing a more direct role in generating income, savings and new behavior - especially at the local level.  These include the likes of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Groupon, and Foursquare, just to name a few.  These companies offer tremendous marketing and content value and can only exist now that we’ve built the layer of high-speed internet and rich web infrastructure necessary to support them.  And, believe it or not, some are growing even more quickly than the likes of Google.  For example, tech blogger Kara Swisher reports that “Groupon’s run rate for this year is clocking in at $2 billion in revenue [offering] insight into why Google has been willing to pay up to $6 billion to acquire Groupon.”  

This is a MIND-BOGGLING figure, especially for a company that many scoffed at not too long ago and that initially set out to “organize collective action around social or charitable causes”.  Never before has a company reached $2 billion in annual revenue in just 2 years time.  Never before has a company been offered $6 billion just 2 years into its existence (other than spin-off companies).  

Particularly interesting is the trendline of valuations.  Going back just one decade we can see acceleration at work.  Youtube was purchased by google for $1.65 billion after just 18 months of existence.  Farmville creator Zynga is said to be worth $5.5 billion just 3 years into its life.  Secondary market shares of Facebook are reported to be trading at a value of $50 billion after 6 years. And now Groupon has claimed the crown of fastest growing company in the history of planet Earth. The speed at which a company can be organized and scale is clearly accelerating.

Even more interesting is the symbiotic relationship these companies have with their customers.  Each and every one of them fundamentally depends on user generated content and participation to function.  Therefore, they inherently must make the cost of participation as low as possible, and the benefits to users as high as possible - a phenomenon I like to call The Mandate of Kevin.  This is their bread and butter.  YouTube returns value in the form of attention and ad revenue.  Zynga provides a web of social interaction and virtual gifts from co-players.  Facebook returns value in the form of a rich, easy to navigate social graph, marketing opportunities and great technology (they’d lose users the second they fell behind in technology, as Friendster and MySpace did).  And it’s no surprise that the fastest horse out of the gate, Groupon, returns the most value of them all to businesses and organizations in the form of direct revenue in exchange for participating in the group discount schemes.  

It’s logical to predict that their successors will be more dependent on large groups of value-adding participants, aka prosumers (producer + consumer = prosumer).  Which means that the power will continue to swing in our direction, resulting in larger pay-outs and more direct value, while the sites themselves become even more user-friendly and integrated with other systems (like Facebook, Google, and Twitter) that we already use on a regular basis.  Leading-edge companies like Google are acutely aware of this.

Such prosumer-centric models will steadily trickle down to all sorts of industries and purpose networks.  Some early examples include iphone apps that turn street mapping into a reward-driven game, online stock markets that predict box office scores more accurately than experts, and social health networks capable of determining the effectiveness of new drugs years before clinical trials can accomplish the same thing.

Stepping back again, we can see that at the very heart of this transformation of opportunities is acceleration in the networking of human beings and the ability to put more brains and bodies to use more effectively in more ways - the social side of accelerating change.  Key to this is the ongoing deployment of mobile computer devices, which currently manifest as the smartphones we carry around that allow us to connect to other people and data in real-time.  These will continue to augment the reality around us (if we want them to), bringing more of the web into the world and linking more of the world to the web, and enable more socio-economic opportunities that have been impossible up to this point in human history.  Thanks in large part to some accelerating price-performance curves like Moore’s Law, we are truly living through a momentous shift that’s going to proceed far more quickly than most of us presently imagine.

One result of this possibility expansion will be the ongoing emergence of a new class of Super-Prosumer companies that will fill much of the void left by dwindling American jobs.  As the traditional economy flounders, these social web companies will clean-up (they already are) and expand the phase space for massive, rapid value creation like never before.  It brings to mind the Cambrain Explosion 600 million years ago and the dinosaur-to-mammalian transition 50-60 million years ago, both prime examples of a spurt of species destruction quickly followed by rapid new growth that can occur in systems when the conditions and timing are right.  We are now living through a similar period in history.

To take advantage of the disruption and minimize the downside of accelerating change we must act like mammals at the end of the dinosaur era.  We must learn to actively seek out and generate new opportunities, especially locally.  As the barriers to participation and creation fall we can use new technologies to easily create our own apps, build complex simulations, create custom animations and cartoons, better map and monitor the planet, earn money for our photos and vids, create powerful mobile on-the-fly action networks, earn money by turning people on to deals, reduce emissions and earn money by renting out our cars, and so forth.  The list goes on and on.

My near-term hope is that the explosion of opportunities will create more jobs than it destroys while reducing resource consumption along the way.  But now that the game is cracking open and more people all over the world can participate it seems far more likely that we will not be able to replace the American jobs that we are losing quickly enough to minimize the negative short-term economic effects.  That’s just reality.  We as a nation have over-extended, over-borrowed and over-diluted our currency, and at the same time fallen behind in education and technical acumen.  All while the rest of the world has learned to do what we do better and cheaper.  So, even as we do make the transition, it will be at a lower wage price point than we are accustomed to.

There is however a silver lining to the tale. The United States is a creative nation that can benefit greatly from the entrepreneurial spirit woven into our national storyline and from the presence of the abundant prosumer-oriented companies that have already sprung to life here.  If we can learn to more quickly learn from these examples and the potent new models that are emerging every single day, then we can and will recover our edge and relative income.  If not, then we will see much value flow outward, off-shore and be left to hope that accelerating change will raise all boats even as others seize the opportunities that we could have seized.

By understanding the nature of accelerating change, globalization, automation, creative destruction at the national level, and emerging prosumer models we can figure out how to individually and collectively adapt to the times.  As the world shifts, the individuals, communities, cultures and nations that upgrade their maps most quickly will have a big edge.  People who understand the shift and the new tools will be able to do more with less and pull value toward them. They will be the ones to create and take advantage of the new Groupons and Facebooks.  That said, the competition will be fierce, the price points will be lower, and the performance metrics more accurate.  As a result we’ll need to become increasingly multi-modal, willing to work on-the-fly, become accustomed to low job security, and be willing to engage in an increaingly web-mediated economy.  We'll need to become a nation of Super Prosumers.

If we can sufficiently level-up our map of the system and social web then we will surely learn to leverage our voices, feet, dollars and networks to increase personal and local opportunities in unexpected and astounding new ways, thus repositioning America for new jobs and growth.


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Alvis Brigis is a media strategist, writer, and entrepreneur focused on the social side of accelerating change.  He is currently CEO of a stealth mobile content start-up, Board Member of the Acceleration Studies Foundation and a weekend bartender.

Here Come the Blobs!

Now that iPhones and Androids have catalyzed a vibrant ecosystem of services that allow you to check in to places like Starbucks, doesn’t it seem likely that a next logical step will be the ability to check in to people?  Such a feature would be the social equivalent of gravity, incentivizing people to form and maintain proximity clusters or blobs.  

I’ve already seen a version of this feature in the wild - in RL!  Way back when I was a kid spending summers at Latvian Camp we’d often play a game called Blob, essentially group tag.  Each iteration would start with one person designated as “it”.  Their goal then was to capture additional people, each time adding them to the ever growing blob.  The game would end with a large swarm of kids spreading out the blob in a line to trap the final speedy kid in a corner of the playing field.  

Now imagine an app called Blob, loosley based on the same principles.  The app would reward people for 1) checking in to other friends’ cell phones, 2) remaining in proximity, and 3) growing the blob.  Thus clusters of people would earn points, just like Foursquare or Gowalla, for forming groups (much like atoms form molecules), maintaining density, and increasing the size of the blob.  For many early adopters this behavior would be fun in and of itself.  For normals it’d become more enjoyable as 1) the incentives increased, 2) other apps/games were developed for blob (the Party Version, the Gym Class version, the Flash Mob version), and 3) the functionality was mixed with other potent services like Groupon (imagine that you and your blob could get 10% off coffee for checking your group in at Starbucks).  

Like location check-ins, the concept is such a no-brainer next step that I’ve gotta believe companies like Facebook, Foursquare and Yelp are developing it or something similar right now.  Facebook Places already allows people to check in their friends to locations (a logical first step for grouping) and mapping crowd-sourcer Waze recently announced a groups feature that allows people to caravan together on trips.  The next obvious move is to establish game incentives for group formation, which will then enable a whole mess of emergent behavior, services, games and next-level complexity.

My bet is that over the next 6 months we’ll see more than a few established geosocial players releasing grouping features or discrete apps.  They may call it Social Gravity, or Molecule, or Grouply, or ClusterFu*k, or maybe even Social Node.  But let it be known, the Latvian Camp kids would prefer they call it Blob.

Image by Zach Armstrong. 

The Acceleration of Gaming

Life must be lived as play. ~ Plato

Fueled by provocative presentations/posts by gaming-oriented thinkers like Jesse Schell, SCVNGR’s Patrick Seth Priebatsch and VC Bing Gordon, the idea that games are spreading into serious areas like work, transportation, shopping and health is finally beginning to spread to the masses.  Of course, like most ideas, this concept has been around for a very long time, taking on various forms.  We can trace it back to iterations like Justin Hall’s Passive Gaming, Zyda’s spin on Serious Games, Wolfram’s work on Cellular Automata, John Nash’s Game Theory, MIlton Bradley’s The Game of Life (1860 - later associated with cellular automata) and even statements made by Plato like the one above.  

But games have been around even far longer than humans have been aware of them.  Thinkers like Wolfram and Nash argue, convincingly, that games are baked into nature itself and originated perhaps billions of years ago, certainly when organisms appeared and began competing with one another for resources, and that people rely on games from moment-to-moment to process thoughts (neural nets), emotions and to inform their behavior.  This big picture view is key as we now contemplate the ongoing spread of games.  It helps us get at the deeper why, rather than just the fascinating how.

Schell does a great job of pointing out how games will interact with pervasive sensors and computers (aka The Internet of Things), which lines up nicely with Gordon’s “video-game-ification of everything” principle and Priebatsch’s argument that 2010-2020 will be the decade of “the gaming layer”.  Each of these frames is a very useful guides to the near-future.  That said, to get the whole story it’s also critical to place these ideas into the context of life-as-game and and accelerating change.

When I refer to accelerating change, I’m not simply talking about Moore’s Law (the regular doubling rate of computer processors) and other hard-tech advances.  I am referencing Kurweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns which he links to information technologies and thinkers like Korotayev argue is the product of the increased rate of networking of human brains (which totally jives with observations like Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law).  We as a people-populated planet are steadily, inexorably getting better at mapping systems and simulating our environment thanks to the information networking enabled by rapidly emerging communication technologies.  It appears to be a natural  planetary development driven by convergence of human created technologies and data pools, and even more fundamentally, the nature of life itself.

Through competition (which also ends up expanding to cooperation - Evo Devo), life produces increasingly more complex structures capable of controlling more resources.  This game has brought us to to 2010 and a world in which games appear poised to saturate everything, just as as technology is poised to do the same.  This parallel timing is not accidental.  Better technology leads to better games.  Better games (aka behavior templates and/or guides) lead to better technology.  The two are intertwined and it can and should be argued that game patterns themselves are a form of technology.  So I am now arguing that games are absolutely critical to the planetary phenomenon that futurists have come to call convergent accelerating change.

If this is the case, then we can venture the prediction that games will proliferate in direct relationship to other accelerating vectors like computer processing, information, communication and perhaps even human intelligence.  There are already countless examples of games being used to generate better products (this can be applied to computer processors), assemble knowledge (crowd-sourcing), facilitate communication & interaction, assist with learning.  It makes a whole world of sense to me that games will be absolutely essential if general acceleration is to continue.

In particular, I find it interesting to contemplate the interaction between games and virtual models of the world and other systems of interest.  Back in 2006 I contributed to a prescient cross-industry foresight project called the Metaverse Roadmap that identified convergence across Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality and Life-Logging (life logging has since been reconceptualized as Rich Video).  The project slug read: What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? ... What happens is the Metaverse.  This concept applies now, in a big way, and offers great insight into the near and long-term future of gaming.  As we construct virtual infrastructure like Google Earth, Facebook, YouTube and Augmented Reality, we’re ultimately building what IBM researcher Jim Spohrer has dubbed the World Board (what Baudrillard would equate with Hyper-Reality), a cohesive system that allows people to access data about anything and everything in the world around us.  Like the World Wide Web, the World Board seems to be a developmental inevitability.  And it sure looks like gaming is essential if we’re to build this quickly, as the macro trends I listed above suggest must occur.

So then, if games are in fact part and parcel of accelerating change, as I believe must be the case, then we can use that knowledge to formulate new predictions and hypotheses about the future of games and the future in general.  For example, we can argue that the gaming industry will grow massively through 2020. Or that serious games like Waze will explode in popularity. Or that web-based gaming will become essential to managing typically conservative domains like government, business and education.  Or that game theory and studies will be required learning circa 2015.  Or that games will be essential to the increase of human capability and intelligence.  Or that games are likely to plummet in price while increasing in performance and experience rapid commodification.  

Summarized, the general point I am making is that games have always been critical to the evolution and development of living systems, that they are key to our economy and behavior, and that we can expect them to evolve and spread rapidly as we proceed through the knee of some powerful curves that affect everything we know and have come to hold dear.  If acceleration is to continue, games too must accelerate - and we can use that realization to help inform our models and predictions of the world.

Fortunately we have a great deal of experience in this area. As Plato reminds us, we are and have always been compulsive gamers.

Alvis Brigis is CEO of in3d.com and a Board Member of the Acceleration Studies Foundation.

An app for every tree in Central Park by 2015?

A not-so-silly thought experiment about the Internet of Things, or more accurately, World as Web.

Sometimes I like to think of humans carrying smartphones as Imperial Probe Droids capable of quantifying the world around us.  After all, millions of prosumers use these devices to snap photos, record audio, shoot video, map the position of things and even record our paths.  Smartphones can and do double as truly capable reconnaissance tools.

Much of the information collected through smartphones is then made available on the internet where it can be pulled into a variety of very useful graphs, web pages and applications.  There is tremendous business, consumer, and social demand in place to incentivize these flows.  This pull force is getting stronger as we collectively discover new ways to unlock the value of this data.

A powerful example of this effect is Google Earth.  Since its birth as Keyhole (2001), Google acquisition (2004) and ongoing evolution, Google Earth has steadily added content and increased its resolution.  One can now view weather, traffic and demographic data and even 3d representations of landmarks, trees and buildings (the company I manage, in3d.com, specializes in constructing these) using this contextual 3d map

It is also possible to add information to the objects embedded on Google Earth in the form of custom layers, Google Places pages, or links to websites or custom location/thing apps.  Fueled by Google, a growing number of geosocial startups, businesses looking to differentiate their locations and a growing population of Google Earth enthusiasts, the number of 3d objects paired with rich data is exploding, resulting something that closely resembles Jim Spohrer's augmented reality World Board, the internet of things (a scenario that originally envisioned cheap networked sensors scattered all over the place), or even a virtual version of Bruce Sterling’s spime concept.  (If you're not familiar with these concepts then they're definitely worth a read.)

So the year is 2010, all of the above is possible, the number of smartphones is rapidly rising, and there’s tremendous demand in place to map and link the world.  The next step to proper evaluation of the Central Park scenario now requires consensus on what constitutes an app.

Although most folks probably define apps as programs that run on smartphones, the definition is in fact a bit broader:

Wikipedia: A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment (e.g. a Java applet)[citation needed] or coded in a browser-supported language (such as JavaScript, combined with a browser-rendered markup language like HTML) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.

The cost of generating an app generally ranges from free (simple widgets, Yahoo pipes) to tens of thousands of dollars fro full-fledged iPhone or Android apps.  But, in general, these figures are dropping as more developers come online, HTML5 enables the insertion of basic apps into web pages, and big companies make it easier for non-technical people to create useful apps.

With over 100,000 Android apps, 225,000 iPhone apps and countless other smartphone-viewable pages that also function as apps, it’s obvious that by 2015 there will be many millions of apps, some useful, many not useful.  

The question at hand is whether or not each and every tree in NYC’s Central Park (there are upwards of 25,000) will have its own app, or website that contains apps, that can be easily accessed in the year 2015.  Here are some of the trends that critically support this scenario:

• Rise of the Prosumer: With increasingly more and less expensive means to produce content (higher resolution picture and video quality on smartphones by 2015 + new devices such as panoramic lenses or auto-object tagging AI) and a web marketplace for this content, it’s a safe bet to believe there will be many millions more people playing the prosumer game circa 2015. Especially significant will be the growing number of Super Quantifiers (the 3d equivalent of hardcore Wikipedia contributors, few but powerful!) looking to map everything around them for reputation, $ or other social currency. 
• Crowd-Sourced Photosynthing: Google, Microsoft and a handful of other companies are in an escalating war to most quickly map the world (no surprise as this is absolutely critical to the future of search).  This battle has spread from basic maps, to Street View, and finally to 3d.  3d components are generated by stitching together satellite, aerial, and ground-level photographs.  This process is now taking a big leap forward as new rapid photosynthing processes are developed.  Photosynthing is currently less effective than building 3d models of buildings and trees from carefully taken photographs, but in the next few years we expect it to overtake standard 3d model generation in efficiency.  When that happens, circa 2013/2014, it will be possible to grab public geo-tagged photographs of a given space and to automagically create fine 3d models of everything in that space.  With millions of people taking photographs of central park from various angles, it’s reasonable to believe that there will be sufficient data available to crowd-source a high resolution 3d map of all the trees in Central Park in the year 2015.  Throw into the mix better location positioning, higher-rez aerial photography and perhaps cash incentives for photo-snapping consumers (Google, Microsoft or 3d Party Quantification Company) and it becomes even more likely that a 3d Central Park model is likely to exist by 2015. 
• Google Things? To grow its advertising base, Google will continue to steadily add value to its Google Places and drive adoption.  It’s reasonable to believe that by 2015 every single Google Places page will either 1) be made available as an app in and of itself, or 2) contain one or many custom apps (thanks to HTML5 or a succeeding web language).  I find it likely that Places will be expanded to include Things or Objects.  Google is, after all, in the business of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful.  ... If Google doesn’t do this, Microsoft, Facebook or some new start-up likely will.  But doesn't Google Things make sense as the next iteration of Google Goggles?

With a 3d model of every tree available on Google Earth and the ability to easily add a Places or Things  page associated with any geospatially located object, the next logical question then is whether or not it makes sense for Google to generate a custom Places page for each tree in Central Park. 

Why would a company like Google or Microsoft do such a thing?  Would people demand it?  

Here are a few reason why I think this is likely:

• The Benefits of Simulation: Simulations help people to monitor and manage places. Many groups including the City of New York, park managment, citizen groups looking to preserve Central Park, tourism agencies and educational institutions will see the benefits of a simulated, true-to-scale, true-to-object Central Park - local World Board.
• Search Wars: The demand for increasingly better Search will drive Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc, into every niche that is not defended. Wherever there is information, they'll be there.
• Key Gaming Catalyst: 3d simulations can serve as the robust scaffolding for new applications and games.  It’s developer heaven.  If these simulations enable lots of new fun games then there will be a large class of people that demand to play them and thus demand the mapping of each and every tree in Central Park.  Imagine Grand Theft Auto with a closer-to-exact map of NYC? 
• Super Quantifiers: With technology dropping in price, Super Quantifiers will probably quantify the areas around them regardless of wht the rest of society thinks, unless their behavior can be restricted by legislation first.  There are compulsive mappers out there.
   

But then again, all things future are uncertain, and it’s possible that the 3d Quantification of Central Park will not progress as quickly as I imagine.  Some reasons for this may include:

• Social Quantification Backlash: At some point the world will realize that rapid, rampant quantification may not be in its interests.  Privacy, security, or plain lifestyle concerns could stop the other trends in their tracks. Events leading up to 2015 could turn people against graph stewards like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. 
• Revenue Control: The whole process could be slowed if NYC determines that it wants to control the revenue derived from simulations of Central Park.  This could lead to slow negotiations with Google or Microsoft, or strict regulations that slow the process. 
• Technology: If the world enters a harsh depression, then it’s conceivable that technological progress will slow by 2015.  That said, the necessary building blocks for tree mapping and apping are already in place.  They don’t have to progress all that much for this to remain a viable scenario.

Conclusion: So long as there's no social will to regulate against deep quantification of our surroundings, it's highly likely that by 2015 we'll have created 3d versions of all the trees in Central Park via Crowd-Sourced Photosynthing.  It then becomes an almost trivial matter to pair each object of interest contained in these simulations with its own web app or equivalent.

The implications of such a scenario are profound.  It's a confirmation of the idea that the rate and resolution of our world-modeling behavior is increasing in direct proportion to advancing computing, sensing and social media technologies.  As we capture more data and get better at patching it together into cohesive simulations tools like Google Earth will grow more valuable (and dangerous).  They will then serve as platforms for social commenting, interaction, commerce and gaming.  But along the way the value chain will probably transform and new social behaviors will emerge.  

Over the next 5 years the web will rapidly spread into the world.  This will not necessarily require the abundant, cheap sensors typically referenced in conversations about The Internet of Things (which is more about direct object-to-object communication).  Instead, it's more likely that prosumers will enrich rich virtual mirror worlds and then access them via geo-coordinates at home or on the go.  

Here comes Sphorer's World Board, sprouting first in densely populated public areas, like Central Park.

P.S. I'm not arguing that all of the tree apps in Central Park circa 2015 will necessarily be used very often, just that the means will be there to establish such systems at uber-low cost.  It'll be fascinating to watch use cases emerge.  There will be many we cannot anticipate.

Thanks to Venessa Miemis for the conversation that inspired me to write this post and to TakuyaMurata for the iPhone user photo - Creative Commons Share Alike 2.0.