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I’ve known Florent Stroppa since his time at Voxmobili. I was running a project working with mobile app developers to better serve them in the emerging mobile app dev communities. That’s nearly 2 decades ago!

We first met in person at eComm (emerging Communications) in 2009, that’s also where I met Karel Bourgois. Karel came up in our conversation as we discussed Florent’s current project, Nodle, decentralized computing using blockchain, aka swarm computing.

We do run long on this video, but it’s important history, that has a bearing on where the industry is going. We covered the beginning of mobile app development, with SMS, native, and WAP gaming. How telcos controlled the WAP portal and carrier billing, so would charge a 70% fee, and higher depending on the app’s placement on their WAP portal lists.

Florent moved to OnMobile, where saving people’s contact list was important. Change phones and you lost your contacts. We covered the value in contact list synchronization, the challenges with SyncML, and other solutions for non-SIM markets like the US. And how the emergence of Android and iPhone changed the industry within a few few years, so Google and Apple now control your contact lists as the mobile OS duopoly.

Because we were overtime, too much time spent reminiscing, we skipped over the time when Florent was part of the team at Vodafone that kicked off RCS. We come back to RCS at the end where Florent shared his view that RCS role is principally A2P, not P2P, here’s the YouTube Short on that.

The mobile OS duopoly is then questioned on whether the trend in ambient / swarm computing will open the door to a new ‘OS’ battle. We have many devices that are opening up a new phase in computing. For example ipods, watches, VisionPro, Samsung rings, and many other wearables. And this leads to Florent’s current project, Nodle, decentralized computing using blockchain, aka swarm computing.

How all these devices and the vast computing power contained in such ‘peripheral’ devices can be harnessed. Peripheral is the wrong term. The Apple vision pro uses an M2 system on a chip, 15.8 trillion operations per second. Nodle is a connectivity provider for the Internet of Things. The company has built a Bluetooth Low Energy – powered network to help companies and cities connect and collect data from their devices, sensors, and tags.

Whether its an OS, or an AI agent, or something in-between as the default for ambient computing. This linked back to Karel’s vision of using voicemail to create a communications assistant. Which broadens into a general assistant because of its pervasiveness across your devices / peripherals and your data.

Florent is on an exciting journey. We’re going to hear much more about ambient computing. Beyond high end devices, rather harnessing the vast compute power from all our devices. Perhaps Nodle will become the ambient OS, or Voxist will become the default assistant, or perhaps its a hybrid across OS and application? Its funny how we all met at eComm 15 years ago. The future is not written, but the journey is going to be fun and frustrating 🙂