Matthew Hodgson, CEO of New Vector and co-founder of Matrix.org

According to Business Insider, US adults spend around 24 minutes per day on mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This is up over four minutes compared to 2019. Which begs the question – are all these different apps contributing to a disconnected future of communications?

This is what Matthew Hodgson, CEO of New Vector and co-founder of Matrix.org, thinks. In our latest podcast, he talked to Avishai Sharlin, division president of Amdocs Technology, about how the way we communicate – on both a business and personal level – is broken. Furthermore, he discusses how in his view, we rely too much on siloed approaches rather than one single source of communication.

Taking a global perspective, Hodgen asks, “How can we bust out of building yet more little silos and try to take on the bigger picture? Because clearly, the only way to compete with something like WhatsApp would be to create an open global network, and create an equivalent to Bitcoin relative to PayPal. Nobody has done that.”

He then continues to explain why we shouldn’t suffice with what’s available, saying that it all comes down to engagement.

“We've seen the pendulum swing more and more toward [the web] being controlled by a handful of very big players to the detriment of everybody else. If you have a single company controlling a huge chunk of how people communicate, then that company might start to optimize for engagement over quality and be more interested in fixing it.”

For more, listen to the Future of Tech podcast series.