I am actually on my flight again, reading the in-flight magazine, when I saw an article with blog links and Twitter accounts.
It was at that moment that I wished that I could bring up my iPhone and 'download' these links to my phone. Alas, instead I had to type them in my notes for furthur reading.
And more random thoughts came to mind. Would it not be cool if we could download content from the magazine to read later? I'm not speaking of the usual web content download. I'm already consuming too many of those. But they are never a strong form of content nor product discovery. I am restricted to what I am already consuming, never venturing beyond those. Probably I should invest in such a content delivery tool like lazyfeed.
But that's not the point of my ramble here. Here I'm wishing that this magazine I have here has some mechanism for me to download content to my phone. It could be a tablet, or it could embed a bunch of RFID chips that I could later lookup and connect to a central server to download the actual content on.
I could see how dramatic and different such a style of consuming content could be. Imagine a future where you walk into a shop and there are simply a bunch of tablets with content on them. You browse them, and consume the content you desire into your phone. Perhaps before you leave you would connect to the server in the wifi zone of the shop to perform a checkout, which involves payment and then downloading the actual content you had marked for purchase with your phone.
But the more powerful scenario comes when you had no intention to be making purchases (that is, conciously visiting the shop). You could be on the move, in a plane like I am or some other tools for commuting. And they provided such tablets which had replaced magazines. They likely contain short articles or even product advertisements. And you see something of interest. You could either make the purchase there direct with the service provider, download the content, or have it delivered to your place if it is a physical product.
Or maybe it need not be a tablet you hold, but a tv a few people are sharing to see. You might like the movie but had to go. So you mark it for purchase. Video on demand!
It almost seemed natural for Apple to be the one doing this, thanks to their itunes store.
I can imagine how much poorer I could be in such a future, being such an impulse buyer. Maybe it's time to be on the attack, by buying Apple stocks.
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