Mobile Fix – “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”
Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, talks iPhone 5; Facebook credits; Google’s ‘offers’ business; The Cloud; and dumb smartphone users…
Apple
We probably overuse the William Gibson quote “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” – usually to talk about how advanced Japan and Korea are as mobile markets.
So it’s a little surprising to see just how popular the iPhone is over there. We’ve talked before about the success in Japan – where they now have a 12% share of the market. New data shows Korea likes the iPhone too – they have sold over 2 million, in a market of just 7 million smartphone users
Without too much real news around, people are starting to speculate about iPhone 5 – with NFC and mobile wallet functionality leading the thinking. As we pointed out back in the summer Apple have been investing in the best talent in this space.
And the other big theory is we’ll see some of the amazing cleverness of Siri baked in.
Bret Taylor, the CTO of Facebook, has been talking about mobile being the focus for Facebook in 2011 and talks of how they see HTML5 as the best way to deal with mobile fragmentation.
Facebook have acquired a mobile focused start up called Rel8tion, started by ex-Googlers. Apparently this stealth company were looking at ways of using location and demographics to target the most appropriate ads – isn’t everyone?
The other big news is the confirmation that Facebook will mandate their own credits as the currency for any games on Facebook. You can already buy Facebook Credits in Tesco and we’ll now see very quick growth – how long until you’ll be able to use them in F-commerce sites like the one ASOS just announced?
In line with the mobile focus that Eric Schmidt talks of at every opportunity, Google have move quickly to make their Boost service available on mobile.
Having been spurned by Groupon, Google are close to launching their own offers business.
They have also bought FFlick – a start up that uses twitter analysis to create movie recommendations and are looking to use it to make YouTube more social.
And Eric was in Europe this week for the DLD conference; as well as talking about Mobile First, he mentioned that Google see mobile to be growing 8x faster than desktop did at the same stage of its development.
He also mentioned that he is looking forward to his next 10 years at Google, quashing those stories that he is out.
It is easy to write Google off, but as their top commercial guys tweeted today;
@nikesharora of google to my colleague @shwetarkndtv: not worried about Apple and Facebook but about the next big start up idea #davos
Everyone is looking for WiFi
With confirmation that Sky is to buy UK WiFi provider The Cloud and news that O2 plan to launch a countrywide WiFi service, we can expect to see more and more empahasis on WiFi as the support to network traffic.
Forrester; watch out for the dumb smartphone user
Forrester have released their view on mobile trends for 2011 and they make lots of sense – we particularly like their views on dumb smartphone users. We hear that some UK networks are finding that the data usage on some of the smartphones is too low to justify the subsidy on the handset – leaving them in the odd position of trying to get heavy users to use less and light users to use more.
We think the rapid adoption of mobile websites would make a big difference – if people can get a good experience surfing their favourite sites on mobile they’ll change their behaviours – but if their favourites suck on mobile they’ll be slower to migrate away from the PC.
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