“Always-on” gives way to new, novel behavior.

When a new consumer platform gets adopted, we always see a surge in developers building apps as a result of the growth of that new platform. Sometimes these apps are simply another channel for existing user behavior. But sometimes they allow for genuinely new behavior. These are the “brave new world” startups that can go on to create the most value.

I believe that when a new platform is “always-on” it is more likely to support completely novel uses and create more “brave new world” startups. We’ve seen examples of wholly new behavior when internet became always-on (Broadband enabled Yelp), when cameras became always-on (the iPhone enabled Instagram) and when location became always-on (GPS smartphones enabled Uber). In each of these shifts, we saw a wave of new development and new use cases.

The top three candidates for new consumer platforms are Voice, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Using this criteria, when will each of these platforms spawn an explosion of Brave New World companies?

Voice is already always-on by definition and will likely be the first of the rank to get massive proliferation of both usage and developer interest.

For Voice to become attractive to developers, it needs to support discovery, monetization, and notifications. Until those three capabilities are added, we will continue to see “ports” of other mediums (weather, music, and simple games like Jeopardy) rather than innovative products. But these are policy decisions not technology constraints, so they are likely to be solved soon.

VR today can be always-on if you’re willing to accept some discomfort and limited mobility (by being tethered to a high powered computer). It is still a couple of generations away from solving all of the usability issues (headsets are heavy and uncomfortable, some nausea etc), but there is line of sight to solutions. Once prices come down, it is possible to imagine a “Ready Player One” future with always-on VR that could spawn many Brave New World companies.

AR is further from being always-on. AR needs to be mobile to be useful, and that requires several more revs of technology to solve for battery life, display technology and compute power. And then price will need to come down to support volume for a mass consumer technology. There is justifiable excitement about the potential of AR, and many people can already imagine what it can be used for. But I think that the truly innovative use cases for AR are the furthest out of all these three platforms because always on AR is the further out.

Developers follower the users. The act of having to think about switching something on is a huge barrier to users. All three of these platforms will eventually generate huge user bases and novel applications, but I think we’ll see it happening first in voice, then VR and finally AR.