If it is not a phone, what is it?

Your iPhone or Droid or Blackberry or whatever smart phone device you have in your pocket is now a direct communication link to you from whom ever has your phone number. Think of it as the communicator that Capt James T. Kirk had in his pocket and Spock would contact him with some vital piece of data that saved the human race from disaster.

Whether it is a text message, e-mail, push notification from an app, photo, or phone call (one of my least used apps), my smart phone is a way for people and business to communicate directly to me.

There are pros and cons from the consumer perspective. For example, as I stood in the check out line last night at Safeway waiting to buy a loaf of french bread to bring home for spaghetti dinner, I was able to open a plethora of coupons made available to me by the Safeway App on my iPhone. I save 70-cents which does not seem like much, but that was a $30% savings off my purchase! If you told me that by instlling an App onto my iPhone from a retailer would save me 30% off all my purchases, we would agree that would be great. Unbelievable is probably more accurate. Obviously, not everything that I buy will be on sale, and most times I save closer to 5-10% on my grocery purchase.

From the business side, Safeway now has a purchase history of what I buy from their store. They know that one of the more common purchases for our family is a loaf of french bread to go with dinner. When you have two young children, pasta is always one of the favorite meals. Armed with that knowledge of my last five years of my shopping history, Safeway can offer me a 30% off coupon on a single item so that I return to their store and purchase more items. And still, they could offer a 30% off coupon for a different item to my neighbor based on their shopping history. The Safeway App is a tool the busness can use to customize coupons for each of their customers to increase the overall traffic in each of their stores. No longer is there the weekly ad delivered in the paper and customers only had those options. Safeway saves printing costs, advertising costs, and gets greater returns for their coupons targeted at specific customers.

My iPhone is a direct communication link to me.  Whether it is my son who forgot his homework or a retailer that wants to me come to their store and spend my money, or a company gleaning bits of data to be analyzed and sold later, it is still the same device. The computer in my pocket.