Mobile Internet World took place in Boston this week. Here are some highlights.
The presentations and audience represented all the activities from around the mobile ecosystem.The three-day event brought together the industry’s leading thinkers on the convergence of the internet with highly mobile devices. Tim Berners-Lee hit the stage along with senior executives from companies like Nokia, Sprint, Google, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Motorola and Ericsson. (The constellation of presenters was similar to the composition of the recently announced Open Handset Alliance.)
On the exhibitor floor, Access (one of the event’s sponsors), demonstrated their NetFront browser running in phones, MID computers, and gaming systems. Opera also was there (its browser runs on 52 new phones and millions of desktop computers.) The W3C Mobile Initiative held a Developer’s Summit as part of the pre-conference program.
The watchword of the event was convergence - a term describing where the internet and mobility meet, at the cross-section of communications and computing platforms, with applications roaming freely across wired and wireless networks. Advances at the chip and network level got us this far; software is needed to keep things moving forward. One slide by Texas Instruments captured the oft-used Web 2.0 theme: “Mobility Liberates Web 2.0 Experience.” Another theme echoed throughout the conference was openness.
It seems the bandwidth for uni-cast videos ( e.g. YouTube) anytime, anywhere is still beyond everyone’s reach. With new chips coming from Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, it looks like silicon won’t hold us back. However, spectrum could. Will WiMax take off? What will happen with the upcoming FCC auction of the 700 MHz band? Will carriers play along? Spectrum allocation and availability will have a long-term impact on how much convergence takes place. (The November 16th Wall Street Journal reports Google “is gearing up to make a serious run at buying wireless spectrum, a chunk of the airwaves that can be used to provide mobile phone and Internet services.”)
Social networks took center stage in discussions on user experience, marketing and advertising. Larry Weber, a long-time public relations visionary, discussed many of these ideas (every attendee was given a copy of his new book “Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business.”) His view of current marketing trends highlighted the transition from demographic to behavior based campaign planning, emerging technology focused on software rather than hardware, and a shifting emphasis from content distribution to user experience. He offered this automotive analogy: today people are less interested in “what’s under the hood” and more interested in “the speakers and leather seats.” Everyone seemed to agree that improved usability was key to the success of the mobile internet.
Some of the numbers were attention grabbing: $1.1 billion will be spent on mobile media advertising/marketing in 2007; that number is projected to grow to over $14 billion by 2011. Analysts predict 4 billion cell phone subscribers in 2010 and 1 billion new (high powered) phones produced each year until then. The ratio of mobile phones to PCs is now 3:1 and expected to quickly grow to 4:1.
We moved from 1G (analog phones) to 2G (digital phones with texting and early applications) rather quickly. Now we are on the doorstep of 3G (an ITU standard which offers advanced application capabilities and already has 522 million subscribers) and a whole new range of possible applications.
By 1996, phones could finally be used “all day” and then recharged at night. That led to an always-available culture with phones as constant companions. Expect to see the same leap forward, according to Qualcomm, for new, highly functioning phones. Qualcomm’s upcoming introduction of Snapdragon offers a dual-core, low-power chip to push beyond voice into traditional computer processing. Get ready for the “Power of a Laptop in Your Pocket”.
India recently reported a drop in broadband connections to computers at the same time mobile phone access to the internet increased by more than 20%. Similar dynamics, where the initial internet connection is typically a mobile phone, exist in China. Behavioral changes like this in billion-person populations are bound to have an impact.
The event was organized by Yankee Group and their division called Trendsmedia. It was the first-time they’ve held this but they plan to make it an annual event. They did a great job organizing everything from venue to speakers.
What will we see at next year’s Mobile Internet World conference? I think we’ll see a much bigger event - it was a great group this year and I’m betting attendees will bring their friends (and industry competitors) next year. I expect we’ll see more software developers, both bigger and smaller in size. I also expect to see a more global perspective - particularly from developing countries and “digital children” who together represent explosive demand potential. We can also expect fewer slides and more working devices to do the talking.The mobile ecosystem looks healthy: a new world order for the mobile internet is taking shape.
