The Next iPhone Will Be a Tricorder

Seriously.

This past summer, I took a cab from SFO to downtown SF. I pulled out my credit card to pay the tab, and the cabbie hands me his iPhone — with a little thing stuck in the earphone jack. It was a tiny little credit card swiper. Moments later I read the email receipt of this transaction on my iPhone. This was significant because a taxi driver in D.C. a few weeks earlier had told me how expensive it is to have a traditional card reader in his cab, so I'd better have US$ 50 cash if I want to get to the suburbs. Then, on the airplane, flipping through that catalog that no one ever buys from, I saw a blood pressure cuff for iPhone. It's also available at Walgreens, which qualifies it as mainstream for me. The FDA recently approved a Blood Glucose monitor for the i-devices. A little Google time shows me that there are also body-weight scales, projectors, and high-end microphones available. Not to mention pedometers. Actually, let's do mention pedometers. Nike mapped data from runners in London over a 15 day period. Early starts, late starts, distance runners, sprinters, neighborhoods. It's inspiring, cool, social, big data and beautiful. It is action as art. I love Nike.

But my swooning over data-aggregation-and-visualization-to push-sneakers is not the point I'm trying to make here. I joked on Twitter a few months ago that the iPhone 6 would be a tricorder. Since I've only watched the William Shatner Star Trek (in syndication), and I don't know the Whoopie Goldberg-and-beyond lingo, I don't really know if you "millennials" will get what I mean by that, so I'll explain. McCoy — he was the tech-enabled country doctor and Captain Kirk's wing-man. He had this thingamabobber that looked like (and probably was) a tape recorder (remember those?) turned on its side. When he encountered a sick or injured person or Styrofoam rock-creature, he waved this thingy, and was able to learn everything about it. What it was made of, body temperature, heart rate, how it felt about its parents, etc. Great theater.

Extra Sensory Perception

We are all (and by "all," I mean me, and probably you, and the people who are like us) now walking around with these devices that bring the power of the interwebz to our current context. It started (for me) by being able to walk through a dark parking lot with a cell phone in hand so that I wasn't afraid, because my friends, family, and police were literally in my hand. A decade or so later, sightseeing in London, I was able to find out the history behind the statue and this "Cromwell" figure I was staring at. Now I can not only view my banking history, but make transactions with my phone (not the browser, the phone). And join a community of runners who run when and how I do. Now my phone is not just a source of information and communication, it is a sensor. I can sense my environment — where I am and how fast I'm moving. I can sense information through QR codes (yeah, I know they're still bombing, but that's a different topic). I can sense financial info through a little do-hicky. I can sense my blood pressure and glucose. I'm guessing the next great thing will be a thermometer to check your child's fever and send it to the pediatrician. Perhaps I can sense how many people are in line at Starbucks before I detour there. In Paris, I could "sense" how far I was from a metro station or Notre Dame (though not without some glitches). And, critically, I could record and share it all with my family in real time. I may never need to send another postcard again. My phone is becoming a tricorder. I bet the military or MIT is working on a spectrophotometer — something that you can wave around and detect the presence of airborne chemicals or agents. Our generation's coal-mine canary. Or perhaps cheap, portable night vision for every smart-phone owner?

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Tags: cms2012, customer experience, cxm, deb lavoy, iphone

Seriously.