Mobile Cloud Computing

**This post is courtesy of Raj Singh. Check out his blog @ http://www.rajansingh.com

Earlier this week, Google made a disruptive but expected announcement showcasing their new version of Google Maps – now supporting turn-by-turn, voice output, re-routing, etc. What’s more interesting was found in the details of the announcement; Google basically said that they are at an advantage since they can leverage the cloud to do so many cool things with their mapping application that TomTom, TeleNav, or Garmin would never be able to do.

As an example, Google said you could do limited natural language voice searches into the mapping app (ie asking for “take me to the king tut exhibit in San Francisco”). Google would send this query to the cloud, and determine that you were referring to the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park and then route it. Interestingly, the computation required to execute such a query is too heavy for a mobile device and thus, leveraging the cloud makes a ton of sense.

Take this concept and extend it further and you are beginning to see an emerging trend in the mobile industry – cloud-enabled services attached to every application on your phone. The recently announced Moto Cliq has cloud-enabled the address book. Contacts are meshed with their Facebook and Twitter profiles – soon they may be meshed with other interests (ie a meta profile against a variety of popular services). These sorts of mashups are much too difficult to do on the phone and thus are perfect for cloud-enablement.

Going forward, it’ll be interesting to see how other applications on the phone leverage the cloud. What does a cloud-based SMSapplication look like – is it similar to Yahoo OneConnect where an SMS could end-up as a Facebook message for the recipient. What does a cloud-enabled photo application look like? Does it show you related images to the image you just took? Maybe, it does simple facial recognition and detection – again, services that are much too heavy to do on the phone. Now that we finally have always-on mobile networks, the cloud can finally assist – the “going through the tunnel” problem may no longer exist.

-Raj Singh
Raj has been living, breathing and working in mobile for the past 10 years. You can read more about him and mobile at his personal blog.