LUKE WROBLEWSKI: Sorry.

It's not that often you find a gong behind you somewhere.

Like how often does that happen?

So you sort of have to take advantage of it.

Usually the sound I make when I start a presentation is a

little bit more like this.

[WHOOSHING SOUND]

LUKE WROBLEWSKI: That's a sound of the future, in case

you guys aren't familiar.

You may think the synthesizer is the sound of the future,

but that was the sound of the future in the '60s.

So today, that's what the future sounds like.

And what the future looks like these days is it

looks pretty small.

Oooh, foreshadowing.

But when you start talking about small things like

mobile, I actually think these things have a really, really

big impact, which is what I want to dive into today and

kind of talk about some of the ways we can manage what's

going on with mobile.

Look towards making great

experiences for mobile devices.

But at the same time, instead of using these things as they

exist today, really look towards what's possible going

forward through some of these experiences.

So I mentioned mobile is sort of a small thing.

But to kick off, I want to talk about a very big thing,

which is this idea of mass media.

So what's mass media?

It's any technology you can use to communicate with lots

and lots of people.

And you guys should be familiar with

these sorts of things.

The first form of mass media to hit our planet was print.

There's a bunch of different pieces around you.

There's some on the walls.

There's posters in here.

There's books, magazines.

This was the first way that our planet was able to take a

message and get it to many, many people across the world.

And print was around for a long, long time.

That was like around 1500.

It wasn't around until 1890 that the next form of mass

media came out, which is recordings.

So LaserDiscs, you guys probably have

a LaserDisc, right?

MiniDisc?

One MiniDisc player?

DAT tapes?

Wow, I'm dating myself.

After recording, cinema.

So we went to being able to share audio to now we can

actually share moving pictures.

Ten years after that, radio.

Now we can actually broadcast those audio signals.

So after this couple hundred year period of all we had was

print, all we had was print, every 10 years or so,

something new is coming out and really changing things.

And we think we live in exciting times now with the

internet and with self-driving cars and laser planes that

create 3D models of buildings.

Imagine if you were alive here and all of a sudden

recordings came out.

And all of a sudden, cinema came out.

And then radio, like audio moving through the air.

I don't know what the equivalent of the 1800s--

your brain popped or whatever.

What is it?

Blew my mind.

I don't know what they said back then, but they probably

thought it a lot.

Radio stuck around a long time.

That was around 1910.

It was about 40, maybe 45, years until the next form of

mass media came out, which is television.

And television also had a decent run, because it was

around 1990 or so that the internet really came out and

became the sixth form of mass media.

And nobody will really argue that the internet is a form of

mass media, a means to communicate with

lots and lots of people.

But there's a theory that came out from an ex-Nokia executive

called Tomi Ahonen, and he said mobile is the seventh

form of mass media to hit our planet.

And to me, this has really profound implications.

Because when we start to think about doing things like

designing for mobile or designing for the small

screen, this is sort of the association we have.

How do we take our internet-y things, our software-y things

and fit them onto these smaller devices, if you will,

these portable devices?

Now that's one way we could look at the issue.

But if we look at it at the scale of a transition from

something like radio to TV or transition like something from

TV to the internet, I think it's fundamentally a much,

much bigger deal and has a lot more implications.

As a result, it's worth looking at, is mobile really

the seventh form of mass media?

Or is Tomi smoking Nokia crack, which there's very

precious little of left these days, if you guys follow the

stock price?

So to understand if something is really the next form of

mass media-- is it really that big and important--

let's look at something small like babies.

This is how many babies come out every day on the planet.

So we figured out that algorithm.

I think it was a Google Project that

figured out that algorithm.

Aagh.

[LAUGHTER]

LUKE WROBLEWSKI: Unfortunately, this is how

many iPhones come out per day.

And I blame you guys for this one, but this is how many

Android devices are activated per day.

Add in the total number of iPod Touches and iPads, add in

the dwindling number of Nokias and the uber-dwindling number

of BlackBerry devices--

I feel so bad.

I feel like I still have to include them.

But every time you look at one of these charts, they're just

getting squeezed by iOS and Android.

So let's do the math.

How many is that?

It's like three million plus mobile devices entering the

planet per day.

When I started doing this sort of bit

around kids versus devices--

a year ago, I sort of put together a blog post comparing

how many kids are born per day to the amount of mobile

devices entering the planet-- it was about a million.

Over the course of the year, that number has gone up by

another two million.

So now it's an order of magnitude difference.

300,000 children entering the planet per day compared to

three million devices entering the planet per day.

And because there's so many of these things coming out, the

rate at which they're spreading is tremendous.

The way that they hit mass market

penetration, if you will--

how long it takes for 40% of the US audience to have one.

Telephone took about 40 years.

Electricity and the computer, which you would think

everybody would want to electricity as soon as

possible, took about 15 years.

Radio, mobile phone, internet, again, some of these really

transformative things, took about five years.

But the fastest growing technology ever to hit mass

market penetration in the United States has been the

smartphone.

Took roughly three and a half years.

Right now, it's at 58% of the addressable audience in the

United States has a smartphone.

And it continues to grow.

It'll probably continue to grow until you hit saturation,

where every feature phone turns into a smartphone.

And that's not a lot of time to figure out

what to do with mobile.

Three and a half years is not the kind of opportunity the

telegraph companies had to figure out the telephone.

They had 40 years.

And the impact of this is if you look at what used to

happen in the personal computing market, this is what

personal computing market share looked like in

the first 15 years.

Anybody remember the TRS-80?

It had a tape deck.

So you guys remember TRS-80, but you

don't remember MiniDiscs?

Come on.

Talking to geeks here.

Eight-track?

Anybody remember an eight-track?

OK.

Thank you.

Geez.

Commodore Amiga, Atari.