I’m convinced I’d be more productive, but so far I’ve struggled to find a boss that agrees with me. Oddly, I find it better to get up “stupid early” than “normal early” – I have more of a spring in my step if it still feels more like the night before than the next morning. As a result, I spend a lot of time tuned in to early-morning radio.

So it was, that I found myself listening to Chris Moyles the other morning. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but the first half hour of his show – the bit where he rambles on about anything he chooses – always keeps me happily entertained during my crack-of-dawn road trips.

Anyway, on this occasion he was talking about the Steve Jobs movie and mentioned that after watching it he’d started digging around on YouTube, where he’d found the video of Jobs launching the original Apple iPhone in 2007. You should look it up, it’s an incredible thing in the context of where the technology has progressed to now, only a decade later.

Jobs announces that the iPhone will combine three things: the phone, the iPod and, wait for it… the internet! It’s easy to forget that smartphones up to this point had almost no workable internet, came equipped with tiny buttons instead of touchscreens and had no built-in camera.

Facebook had launched three years earlier in February 2004 and Twitter in March 2006, but it was the launch of the iPhone in January 2007 that brought social media into the fabric of our lives and literally into the palms of our hands.

Fast forward to the present day and in the first quarter of this year mobile accounted for more than half of all Kuoni’s web traffic, with that number growing.

Customers increasingly turn to their smartphones for travel inspiration. Often that spark, that idea of where to go next, comes from closer to home than you’d think. Last week, during the first week of the Easter break, seven of the first 10 posts in my Facebook feed were from people on holiday, from the Whitsundays to Whitby. If I hadn’t been thinking about holidays before I logged in to Facebook, I was afterwards.

A decade can seem like no time at all, until you revisit the world as it was back then. The challenge, as always, is to look into the future a similar number of years to try to understand how the travel market will continue to evolve and the clues are already here.

Amazon Echo has taken us into a world of smart homes where the internet of things and artificial intelligence are beginning to evolve into something useful, and chat bots are slowly making inroads into the service sector.

Innovation often arises from the amalgamation of existing technologies. Jobs changed the world by bringing together phones, music and the internet.

Imagine what might happen when the next generation of technology is combined.

Derek Jones is chief executive (UK) of DER Touristik