An interesting trend I realized on New year’s eve with video chat

It’s 2012 and we are into a brand new year with probably super cool things coming up. Well mounting up to 2012 we know most people head out to city squares or clubs to go spend the new year eve. Well for me, it was a pretty chill one as I stayed at home because I had my mom and sister over. So with that I decided to use my laptop to check up what everyone else was up to. After a couple of minutes spent on twitter I decided I might as well check some video chat websites like tinychat and co to see if people were actually on it spending their New year’s eve. To my surprise there were so many people spending the eve on tinychat, creating more and more groups for anyone to spend the eve with them. The same went on for the other websites I checked out like omegle, chatroulette etc. That’s when I asked myself what if in 10 years 90% of us spent our major events online like this.

So when I got on Tinychat, they were over 100,000 streams going and the stream count kept on increasing. I decided to join a stream that was trending on the home page. Actually I have always been a lover of tinychat and I love watching and spying the fun streams. The stream I joined that night was full with all the 12 cam spots filled and people coming and going which everyone happy new year. It was kind of fun especially that people would argue that most people that will do such a thing are “losers”. Most people looked like the pretty normal kid in your history class. Most of the streamers told stories, flirted with each other and hanged out while waiting for the new year to come while staying on Tinychat which I thought was pretty awesome, hanging out with total strangers 5 minutes prior to spend a moment like this.

So I spent a few more minutes on tinychat and decided to later on hop on omegle and chatroulette to see if people where random chatting on new year’s eve as well. Well like I thought there where over 25000 people online on each service. I logged in and most of the people I bounced on where either screaming or wishing me a happy new year.  It was also cool to see that most people where in groups so it was more like connecting various groups of friends from around the world on omegle wishing each other happy new year.

So after visiting a couple of more video chat websites I really was impressed by the number of people that were actually online spending the 31^st and the 1^st online, on camera and mostly with strangers. So I thought to myself, what will it be in the next 10 years? Will more people spend events like this online with their friends and other strangers from around the world or physically? What do you think ?

Mobile carriers are not safe and here’s why

The smartphone age that helped to skyrocket the earnings of mobile carriers may soon be the tool to destroy it. With smartphones, carriers are now able to get their customers hooked up much more pricier voice and data plans that cost mostly over $60 per month. Also due to the price of smartphones, carriers can get us stuck to long term contracts to subsidize the price of smartphones.

 

Now I won’t dispute if $60 is worth the service or not. Being an owner of a smartphone, I do want data on my phone to use all the apps on it as well as calling and texting. So I won’t complain about that, however I would comment that there is one little feature that may disrupt the business of mobile carriers in the future. That little feature is an upcoming trend called video calling.

 

Today on our smartphones, a few apps allow us to video call our friends for free mostly in great quality video calls. They include skype, tango, fring, google talk, viber just to name a few. All you have to do is go on the app store and download these apps and add your friends so you can call them whenever they are online. An app like viber doesn’t even need you to be online, it runs in the background and with that whenever a viber contacts, you then receive the call that easily. No effort needed. That is really super cool and with more and more apps it won’t be too long before these apps should take a toll on mobile carriers’ dollars.

 

The reason why now they really don’t have weight against mobile carriers today, comes down to the number of people that have smartphones, the operating systems these phones use and also and mostly importantly the number of people that use these apps and have their friends using it.

 

It is said that now about 50% of the US population owns a smartphone. That is a great number however with differences in smartphones, they have different operating systems. If you have webOS or Symbian you will probably lack quality apps to allow you video call your friends however it is also true that most smartphones coming out these days is either in Android iOS or BBOS which do have quality video calling apps. As they number of smartphone owners increases it will give much more weight to video calling apps.

 

The main obstacle these apps are actually facing is the number of people using it and the number of friends they have using it. I personally have a few video chat apps on my phone and I really do lack contacts on them. For that reason I rarely use it. With more and more video calling apps coming out, it will fragment the members using it and thus you will never get enough contacts on one app to substitute your normal phone calls with calls using the app. If there could be 1 or 2 major players that could get enough following that most of your friends where using it, then that could become scarier to carriers. People won’t use their airtime minutes anymore and people reducing their plans drastically. Also if apps like viber allowed you to make cheap calls too, instead of only just allowing you to make free calls to your contacts, that would also be interesting. If google talk free calls could be on smartphones, that would be much more awesome (I have never understood why it’s not on the google talk app on phones)

 

The fact is that with time, in the next 2-3 years (even before) there will be a video calling app so awesome that most people will be using and most of your friends will be contacts on it so you could call them for free. When that time comes, what will mobile carriers do? Most of these apps also allow you to send free text messages as well to your contacts so people won’t need airtime minutes and texting anymore from carriers and we are talking about the short run. So plans that were $60 will turn to around $30 because phone users will only want data on their phones.

 

Then in  the long run when wifi becomes available almost everywhere or video calling apps build their own data networks and allow us to use it, what will mobile carriers become then? Most people will drop the contracts and get phones and just install a video calling app that will allow them call their friends for free. If I were a CEO of a major mobile carrier, then I will start preparing backup plans for the future. The bright side for mobile carriers today, is the fact that one, they are the only one now that allows internet to be reached by most areas since their pass their data across the phone wires. Their second advantage is that there hasn’t been the killer video calling app that got a huge sizable member base that will allow most people to have most of their friends on it. However, it won’t be too long till these catch up on mobile carriers.