There are noshortageofpredictions about what this year will bring for mobile, so at the risk of piling on a bolted bandwagon here are a few more. Not exhaustive by any means, more of a selection of some of my favorites.
1. Celebrities figure out how to monetize social media, even if social media doesn't.
If Kim Kardashian can get $10k for a single Twit, how much could someone with a broader following and even greater respect coin? Lots of outrage and fuss predicted (can you trust anyone?), but the market will reward credible endorsements, and affiliate technology will enable both transparency and revenue.
Location-based posts and pics/ videos submitted via mobile will be a big part of this, as the mundanities of daily life are manna from heaven to the celebrity obsessed.
2. Developers expand focus from the device to the hardware ecosystem
A big challenge until now has been making it easy and reliable for phones to make calls, send texts, browse the web and download apps. Thankfully this is more or less a solved problem, so I suspect part of the battle will shift to the hardware ecosystem. People will start to integrate mobility into their physical environment - TVs, thermometers, speed cameras and sensors will become part of the extended operating system. Creative developers for Apple are already straining at the leash; first flashlights, spirit levels and compasses, and now blowers and handwarmers take us beyond the digital to the physical environment.
Look for big growth in the m2m market and intriguing modular hardware initiatives like Nokia's NOTA, Aduino and BugLabs and a fun new concept out of Portland, Green Goose (thanks Rob!).
In addition, companies like Nokia and RIM/Blackberry who are overdue for an operating system upgrade could take this opportunity to leapfrog even even Palm's fabulously slick WebOS and ensure their next OS is integrated more tightly into the physical environment.
3. Mobile augmented reality as a new search interface
Continuing the theme of moving beyond the phone, here we'll see the the overlay of digital intelligence with the real world. Google Goggles is an important validation - and gives them the advantage of having an alternative search trigger (their location algorithms deliver the search term, rather than the keyboard). This is a new enabler for many services that can overlay digital with physical, and there are some intriguing proof of concepts popping up like mushrooms, subway finders, interior design and ski slopes.
Bruce Sterling's speech at Layar's launch provides a good summary of the state of play and potential here.
Healthcare eats up massive amounts of consumers' attention,' powerpoint ink and investment dollars (the second quarter of 09 saw more VC investment in healthcare than in IT). Professional-grade startups such as AmericanWell are quickly dismantling barriers to online health such as onerous insurance liability, online doctor-patient relationships and restrictions on cross-border medicine. At the same time Congress is on the verge of throwing another 30m uninsured Americans into the system who will need cheap yet effective treatment, and the shortage of primary care physicians is set to increase. I predict mobile as platform of choice here - more secure and personal than a computer and able to take, send and store pictures, sounds and videos of questionable body parts, and deliver location-based services that will help patients find services easier.
Every year for the past few years has been billed as the year that mobile will break through. As AdMob and Quattro proved late last year - 2009 was actually the year for mobile, but it came and went. Mobile is no longer another place, it is all around us, like the Internet now is. I think 2010 will be the year that mobile starts to integrate with the physical world to deliver genuine user benefits (such as saving lives) as well as more trivial ones (such as Kim K painting her nails). Either way, a busy time for innovation ahead.
I don't know Omar, but I've known employee number 2 at Admob Russell Buckley (one half of the MobHappy gang) - for a number of years. Wonderful result for him and the team, and a lesson for me. I've spent a lot of time thinking up fancy-schmancy new mobile advertising paradigms, most of which are gathering dust in powerpoint archives, whereas these guys "just" went out and built something that is simple to describe (banner and text ads on mobile websites) and they crucially, executed well, with smart advisors. Seven hundred and fifty million proof points that execution matters sooo much more than ideas.
So if I ever find myself going down the startup route, and i) what I do can't be described in 7 words or less and ii) executing to those 7 words is not what every employee spends all their time doing, someone please shoot me.
Morgan Stanley Internet guru Mary Meeker presented her much-anticipated annual Internet trends talk at the Web2.0 Summit yesterday. This is the first time (she's been at this about a decade) that she's finally seen this to be the year of the mobile Internet, and spends most of the slides on that.
Couldn't agree more, in particular with these:
- Social networking on the mobile driving major changes in communication and providing new commerce opportunities.
- Mobile internet will create big material winners and losers in shareholder value.
Interesting, data-rich and worth a read, though I thought there could have been more about the explosion of mobile as the first Internet device for the next 1bn Internet users in developing countries.
The recently announced acquisition of German startup Cellity was completed today. Good news for Nokia as it takes us towards a goal we have had for a while - getting more out of the most important social network that you own (ie the contacts book on your phone) by connecting it with the new breed of social networks that are today better at leveraging the many faceted advantages of the web as a platform.
Welcome the @cellity team, and congrats to my colleague Ed (@simnett) and the team, who disproved that myth that nothing gets done in July.
What happens when Internet connected mobile devices, contextually-aware services and stubbornly organic and unpredictable people meet? I don't know but that's what this blog is about.
I'm working as a consultant on mobile, new media and healthcare projects and live with my wife in Upper West Side, New York.
