Yes, your decisions are quite literally in your hands in these times when the smartphone and smart apps are poised to drown the past dominance of gadgets like the laptops and desktops. I personally feel rather joyous to find someone stand right there in the middle of a thousand people, swipe out his smartphone, and connect to his innermost desires through what we euphemistically call apps.
‘This is the future I had been waiting for,’ I murmur as I see more and more of us get on the app-bandwagon. Yes, the apps are getting smarter but then it is because we want the power to decide even as we move. This is truer for travel and fashion… and well, probably applicable for other things as well. But just imagine you’re walking down the street after coming out of your office and some giggling girls pass and you cannot but overhear what they are talking about.
One says, ‘Desktops are so boring now! And imagine how funny it is to sit on a chair browsing for the latest in fashion.’
They giggle and then the other friend speaks, ‘I need the right mood and it is only when I’m standing in an ice-cream parlour with my favourite cone in one hand.’
The girls were out of earshot but I knew what they said was correct. Imagine standing in an ice-cream parlour with your favourite flavour in one hand… and your smartphone in the other taking you on a dream ride into the fashion world. You decide. You buy. Right there as you take your next bite of butterscotch!
Yes, I want to move away from the drab and heavy browsing moments on a desktop… even laptops are as dreary, dear. I want apps on my smartphone. I want to decide when I am ready to decide. And to try this intuitive revolution I just installed a few apps and… something magical happened.
I had a client meeting in IHC and once it was over I just went around to where some photographer was displaying pictures of his trips in the past year. As I slowly walked from one wondrous moment to another I was overwhelmed by this desire to travel to Jordan. Yes, a desire to go to Jordan!
Now when you have an irrepressible desire to travel to Jordan (or any other place, now that we’re on the subject of travel) you need to be able to decide immediately if this impulse rests on shards of possibilities or not. I stepped aside, took out my smartphone and in a matter of minutes had the itinerary and the costing of a trip to Jordan worked out. I know that had I waited until I got back home near my desktop or laptop, the urgency of the moment would have been replaced by something else and life would have probably forgotten that Jordon too exists.
I guess that there is a great future for Travel and Fashion in the app-only world and it means a lot for consumers who love following their dream. I believe that to grab your dream is being human and to do it before you forget most of your dreams is simply being tech-smart. If sequential logic is what you need to convince yourself that being tech-smart is the need of the times, let me just add that decisions need a healthy concoction of information and impulse with a clear picture of the steps to be taken to transform a decision into action. Apps do it with a lot of immediacy.
Immediacy is the keyword. Delays are what dilute intent and end up stifling intuition and the heady charm of impulse. I would, therefore, go for app-spotting when travel and fashion are on my mind.
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#itspersonal
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Arvind Passey
05 May 2015
