The future of the IPhone, Google Wave and Real Time Collaboration

Imagine you’re a business development manager for a kitchen products manufacturer and you’re attending a trade show. As you browse the trade show floor looking for interesting products to license or bundle into your existing product line, you notice a clever egg slicing tool. You have a sense that this would be an ideal addition to your line of breakfast products, but you want to explore it further with your breakfast products manager as well as your sales and marketing VP’s. The collaboration begins:

• You pull out your iPhone 4G and launch the GWave native app which is optimized for creating new Waves.
• With a single tap, you create a wave titled “EggZippy”.
• The inventor of EggZippy provides you with a comprehensive live demo of the product which you video with your iPhone.In a few taps, you attach the video to the EggZippy wave.
• With the video demo in the can, you invite your colleagues into the wave – they are each notified about the EggZippy wave and are able to watch the video demo within minutes of recording it.
• While your colleagues are enjoying the demo, you launch Google Voice and begin capturing a Q&A audio session with EggZippy’s inventor. At high velocity you are able to plow through 32 questions with great answers in rapid fire.
• The audio Q&A conversation is added to the wave with a few taps and auto transcription has already begun in the background by Google Voice. A voice-to-text transcription is automatically attached to the wave when complete.
• By now, your colleagues back at the office have digested the wave content, and they’ve begun to formulate a strategy regarding EggZippy by adding text comments into the wave.
• Your marketing VP is concerned about EggZippy competitors and potential patent issues, so she invites into the wave, the company’s patent researcher and its expert on competition in this space. Using Google Wave, each expert renders a tentative opinion which looks like emails but are presented as supporting memorandums in the wave. All of this activity is seen as it is happening in real-time on your iPhone.
• While your team is coming up to speed, you snap a few dozen photos of EggZippy from all angles as well as its product packaging, instructions, and even a portrait of the inventor. The images are automatically attached to the wave as you snap them.
• Your sales VP has hastily assembled a sales projection across all retailers and your product manager has plugged in base line costs of production and distribution. The spreadsheet unfolds live in the wave – the product looks like a winner.
• You ask the team to finalize the project with a templated pro-forma decision sheet with details about the sales and marketing strategy as well as licensing business terms.
• You shake hands with the inventor and schedule dinner for later that evening where you will provide him with a proposal. Before leaving the inventor’s booth, you capture his contact information and add it to the wave along with a photo of his business card. A quick wave IM to the legal department gets them started on a background check.
• At dinner, you open GWave on your iPhone, and the final proposal terms and product plan are waiting in the EggZippy wave to serve as your presentation and talking points as you negotiate the deal. There is also one snag reported in the wave by your legal department – they need an indemnification clause concerning recent financing activity by the inventor.
• When the deal is agreed upon in principle, you launch Google Voice once again and review the points with the inventor – the audio and text of the understanding is transcribed and added to the wave.


This scenario will likely be possible within 18 months, and Google is not the only company working on technologies that will make this a reality. I predict that Microsoft is likely to show something similar to Google Wave in the next year or so. Whether they also embrace iPhone is unknown, but one thing is certain, Microsoft’s massive adoption footprint in corporate and business email (Exchange and Outlook) is likely to provide a huge incentive to retain customers thinking about the benefits and agility of Google Wave.

Courtesy of Iphone CTO