Mobile Internet: 5 Predictions for 2008

In case you haven't seen someone talking, texting, or otherwise traipsing about with a cell phone while (a) driving a car, (b) sitting in a coffee shop, (c) riding on a train, (d) walking down the street, (e) participating in a meeting, and (f) you fill in the blank....well, take my word, there's a lot happening in the mobile web arena. And, as it turns out, Bango is a company that tracks this kind of stuff a lot more than I do. Which is one reason why their "five predictions for the new year" are interesting:

• More and more people will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones. There are lots more mobile phones than there are PCs today. Over 50% of the world's population now have mobile phones, amounting to 3 billion mobile phones, while estimates peg 1.1 billion PCs. As the majority of new phones come with Internet access as standard, Bango expects that by Q3 2009, more people will access the Internet on mobiles than through a PC. (Coincidentally, ESPN announced its mobile site is seeing more visitors than its PC-Internet site.)
• Mobile advertising will surge. Get ready for ads on your phone. Mobile advertising has the potential to generate more than $10 billion in annual revenues by 2010.
• We'll see a shift from messaging to Internet for data usage on mobile phones. Bango is already seeing more web browsing as operators introduced flat-rate charging in 2007 and moved from a portal model to a more open search-based model. The new model encourages search by including the search box prominently on the portal home page. Mobile search will become more like the PC-Internet experience but the quality of the mobile search index needs to improve dramatically to achieve mass market adoption. During 2008, more brands and content providers will use the Internet instead of messaging for service delivery.
• Mobile commerce of physical goods will come of age.Buying consumables via the mobile web has been common in Japan and Korea; this will soon move to the U.S. and Europe. This is possible in the Far East because the operator payout rates to content providers approach that of a credit card so people are paying for physical goods on their phone bill. For now, payout rates in Europe and the U.S. are too low, but as they begin to increase, so will the purchase of physical goods.
• The PC and mobile will become closely linked. The two separate worlds of the PC and the mobile phone will come together. People will connect their PC life with their mobile life more easily. Anyone on Myspace, Facebook or Twitter, for example, will be able to share content and information with mobile phone users.

There you go. Anything you'd like to add?

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:31 AM  Permalink