Page 20 - Mobile World Daily - Day 2

CONNECTED FUTURE | GEMALTO
Rémi de Fouchier, VP Marketing Communication, Gemalto
Back… to the present
a few key ways in which the vision of Hill
Valley 2015 differs from today’s reality
As we hit the 30th anniversary of
Back to the Future – and the year
into which Marty McFly and Doc
Emmett Brown travelled in Back to
the Future 2 – we take a look at
some of the predictions the film
made and compare them to
today’s reality.
It’s 2015. For Marty it is a pivotal year: the
date of his first glimpse of the future after already being used by insurance firms to
he and Doc got together on that fateful
day in 1985, travelling through time in an
amazing flux-capacitor powered Delorean
time-machine.
For us in the mobile industry, it’s
interesting to reflect on how a 26-year-old
Hollywood-tinted vision differs from today’s
reality, and to cast our gaze to what things
might look like if we were to travel back… to
the future, to 2025 or beyond.
Here are a few key ways in which Hill
Valley’s future is different to what was
imagined, and how it may yet change.
NO (MAINSTREAM) FLYING CARS…
YET
The power systems required for flying cars
(and indeed, the “1.21 gigawatts” needed for
time travel) aren’t quite at the point where we
have mainstream models. However, a key
differentiator of cars of the future will be how
connected they are. As Dieter Zetsche, Chair
of Daimler AG and head of Mercedes-Benz
worldwide said earlier this year: “The car of
the future [is] a smartphone on wheels.”
This highlights the importance of in-car
connectivity. The market is anticipated to
grow from 45 million connected cars on the
road just a couple of years ago to 420 million
connected cars in the next three years. Unlike
smartphones, these cars need to last a decade
or more, transcend multiple generations of
network technology, and be rugged enough to
ensure a cyber-security breach doesn’t cause
a risk to real-world security. After all, as cool
as NFC or Bluetooth locks might be, if
someone can just stroll right up and steal
your Delorean, and travel back to 1955 to
give their younger self an Almanac of all the
sporting events from 1955 to the present
day… well, the results could be catastrophic.
PAGE 20 Tuesday 3rd March
This connectivity will deliver a wide range
of applications, of which NFC car keys are
just the tip of the iceberg: cars have
incredibly sophisticated in-car entertainment
systems already, and the sensing and
mapping systems are so advanced that we’ve
seen some impressive early autonomous
vehicle demonstrations and proof of
concepts developed, from Audi, Google and
others. Realtime vehicle location data is
improve tariffs, and by emergency and rescue
services to improve response times to drivers.
HILL VALLEY 2025: A SMARTER CITY
Some of the things imagined in Back to the
Future 2 were remarkably prescient.
Contextual advertising for one: who doesn’t
remember the shark from Jaws 19 leaping out
from a billboard and targeting Marty as he
walked past. Of course: the Jaws 19 billboard
was relatively ‘dumb’ – proximity driven.
Today’s reality is already significantly more
personalized, with advertisers and mobile
operators sharing data to ensure that – when
opted in to promotions – consumers get a
relevant, personalized and engaging
experience.
Voice recognition and the cashless society
too – Marty doesn’t offer any form of
payment when he asks the cafeteria’s virtual
waiter for a Pepsi. Perhaps he had a secure
payment NFC tag woven into his self-drying
coat? We didn’t see anyone on public
transport in the film, but imagine that the
problem of a lack of loose change would
have persisted. In one scene, Biff does pay for
his taxi using a thumbprint, correctly
anticipating the surge in biometric
authentication we’ve seen. In our reality,
we’ve seen a rise in contactless payments on
public transport, an increasingly common site
today in many cities around the world.
The film was fairly accurate in anticipating
how we communicate and consume
entertainment, anticipating the rise of 3D
Films, video telephony and Google-Glass like
devices for video calling. It didn’t quite
predict the rise of the internet-enabled
smartphone, however, and thought the fax
machine would be more important in 2015
than it has been. We can all be grateful for the DELIVERING OUR CONNECTED
fact that Siri and Cortana are less irritating
than the stuttering virtual waiter in Back to
the Future 2’s 2015.
Most exciting, though slightly misjudged,
was the vision of the connected home we
glimpsed: our home knowing its owner,
unlocking on ‘recognition’ – presumably
facial or DNA ID of some kind, to let ‘young’
Jennifer through – and then responding to
voiceprinted commands to turn the lights on.
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS DAILY 2015 | www.mobileworldcongress.com
In reality, a lot of this sort of technology uses
the smartphone as the hub of the
experience, with apps and potentially even
Mobile ID providing a route to secure
authentication and control over the
connected home: after all, the security
implications of unauthorized access here are
significant. But given that Back to the Future
assumed fax would remain dominant for
data communications, it’s understandable
that it didn’t imagine a future in which these
sorts of commands could be transmitted
securely, wirelessly, from a pocket device to
a connected home.
In our reality, the very fact of this possibility
emphasizes the need for strong security
mechanisms, from the core of a system to the
edge, to protect users from unintended
consequences or malicious attack.
FUTURE
As became clear in the last example, the
defining factor in delivering all of these
services and applications has been, and
continues to be, trust. If you don’t trust an
NFC chip in your phone to protect your
personal data, you won’t use it. If you don’t
trust advertisers, mobile phone providers or
operators to respect your interests and
personal details, you won’t provide them with
access to your data. And if you don’t trust
urban infrastructure to keep your data secure,
you will avoid using it as much as possible.
When you do trust these services, as the
youth of Hill Valley did, using these systems
becomes so natural and ubiquitous as to be
virtually invisible; an automated reflex, much
as EMV payments are for European
consumers today.
Back to the Future may not have scored
100% in its predictions for the future, but it
has had enduring value as a piece of science
fiction and consumer entertainment. My
prediction: building the reality of our future
will happen in step with the development of a
bedrock of trusted services and
infrastructure. And by 2025, perhaps the
flying car will seem as anachronistic as the
fax machines of Back to the Future 2’s 2015,
as we all zoom around on our jetboots or fire
our consciousness off into virtual avatars
around the globe.