Thursday 2 September 2010

Mobile Trends 2020

Check out this SlideShare Presentation I think it’s awesome. It pulls together a few bullets from 40+ mobile luminaries with cooler job titles than my own. Obviously Rudy De Waele forgot to get in touch with me but that can be forgiven, given my exceptional talent for spotting trends once they've been spotted elsewhere I thought I'd summarise a few of the key themes from the deck and what the world of mobile may deliver over the coming years… most important is battery power!

Mobile Trends 2020
Handsets – Cheaper than they are now, more powerful than they are now. There will be more OEMs, tiger markets coming into bloom and HTC taking a bigger piece of the pie. Oh... and Apple still doing what they do! Basically major democratisation of the handset world with the smart v feature phone splits being 80/20 in favour of smart phones

Connectivity – More of it and a lot more objects connected. Think of fridges, bathroom scales, irons and of course your dog. All talking to you, your phone and of course each other. On a couple of occasions it mentions objects creating more data than the individuals that use them!

Paying for Content - the consistent theme here is inconsistency! Discussed throughout mainly people alluding to more content being paid for but others saying nobody will pay for mobile content. Possibly content being paid for once but delivered/consumed across multiple devices as part of the transaction (tv, laptop, mobiles and tablets). This is something I see happening and expect it to be on the Rupert Radar very soon!

Data Ownership/Storage – With such an increase in connectivity there will be more data than anyone can handle so much so we’ll want and need to be the masters of our own data which will mean a whole new need for data storage solutions and perhaps us selling the storage

Universal wi-fi – Whether it’s propped up by the tax payer, an advertiser funded model or simply a nice altruistic offering from the corporate world the prospect of having wi-fi literally everywhere, or at least in major conurbations is great… but will it work? Or will I continue to get bumped from one BT openZone to the next?
Internet browsing – Will surpass that off desktop internet browsing within the next few years, according to Mary Meeker it will be 2014 and some a little sooner but either way we’re looking at a significant shift in how people consume content and on what devices in the mid term future.

Advertising – A thread running throughout is mobile starting to take a significant chunk of advertising budget and even challenging digital budgets in the near future. This could happen but I guess that’s more likely when the distinction between the two is less. I expect the near future to be about

Augmented Reality – Will it become the norm? Some say it will… the more LBS opportunities there are for consumers I’d expect the more opportunities for augmented reality applications so makes sense to me (and the rest people that know what they’re talking about too).

Payments – It’s been growing for a while, largely driven by apps and ring tones but there is now ‘proper’ purchasing going on, next week we’ll be buying toasters and then next year it will be cars. 2020 – houses?

Battery Power – The most useful of these developments, batteries that match the power needs of the phone. I’m charging my Desire once maybe twice a day to power all the damn browsing I’ve lived the past 10 years without and to replace the Ipod’s & MP3’s etc..

Disconnect – I love this theme, again it comes up at least 4 times. So much connectivity that people just wants to, well, disconnect. Think foursquare and "@ off the grid" but you have to travel to it, potentially pay for it and it becomes a pass time of those that can afford to disconnect… maybe not that drastic but there will be value in not being connected... and with that I'm out.