Rob Glaser Defines the Superphone and Predicts the Mobile Future

The future of media will be information consumed on superphones while on the go, said Rob Glaser, chairman of RealNetworks, today in his first public speech since stepping down from his CEO position. In the speech, given in Seattle at a Mobile Broadband Breakfast event, he forecast that by 2013 the installed base of smart and superphones (see chart for Glaser’s definition of each) will exceed the installed base of PCs, and those web-surfing devices will be mobile. In this world he sees five big opportunities:

1. People want digital persistence: They have an expectation that their content will be available everywhere at any point in time.
2. People want universal access to content across all devices.
3. The industry needs to make discovery easy, which means once people have access to digital content, they need to be able to find their stuff and new stuff they will like using semantic data.
4. There will be new ways to empower social expression and engagement, much in the same way Twitter created a new category of expression and a way to communicate.
5.The digital revolution will be a global phenomenon.
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Baytown Bert's take on the above story:  Just in case this morphing from Desktop PC's to Laptops to Smart Phones has never entered your mind, let me help with your education. The desktop PC is rapidly going the way of the 8-Track tape.

Evidence of this technology shift is most apparent in the under 30-year-old and younger users. Many of them do not have a home computer or even a wrist watch, as they access the time of day, music, videos, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, and the Internet using their phone only.

The handheld unit is the future and the future is now. What? You are still struggling with your Desktop PC and I'm telling you it is a thing of the past? Yes and I am sorry, as I too prefer it to looking at a 2 inch screen with ear-buds crammed in my ear holes.

What Rob Glaser is saying in the top 2 sections of this Blog is simply that the future is in the handheld models and he is advising everyone in the audience to get on board.

The future handheld units will be capable of projecting a screen, keyboard and even a mouse type device, which will emulate the real thing, so why should you own the real thing and that is their logic.

In case you missed it, he says this will be in three short years.

The next logical step for universal access is an implanted neural chip. I'm game.