Increasing numbers of people accessing the internet on their mobile phone
There are many more mobile phones than there are PCs today. Over 50% of the world's population now has a mobile phone, this amounts to 3 billion mobile phones. At last estimate, there were 1.1 billion PCs. As the majority of new phones come with internet access as standard, we envisage that by Q3 2009, more people will access the internet on their mobile than through a PC.
Mobile advertising surges ahead
Mobile advertising is a huge opportunity with the potential to generate in excess of $10 billion in annual revenues by 2010. There are a number of factors holding it back, mainly the lack of analytics so advertisers can verify the results of their campaigns. Once this is solved and there's an independent auditing process then mainstream brands will dip more than a toe into mobile advertising.
Shift from messaging to internet for data usage on mobile phones
We are 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 by putting search box prominently on the portal home page. Search will become more like the internet experience but the quality of mobile search index needs to improve dramatically to achieve mass market adoption. During 2008, more brands and content providers will use internet instead of messaging for service delivery.
Mobile commerce of physical goods will come of age
Buying travel tickets and basic consumables via the mobile web has been popular in Japan and Korea and soon this will move to Europe and the US. It's possible in the Far East because the operator payout rates to content providers approach that of credit cards so people are paying for physical goods on their phone bill. At the moment, payout rates in Europe and the US are too low but as they increase so will the purchase of physical goods.
The PC and mobile will become closely linked
The two separate worlds of the PC and mobile will come together. People will be able to connect their PC life with their mobile life much more easily so anyone on Myspace, Facebook or Twitter for example will be able to share content and information with the mobile phone users. The two worlds will no longer be seen as hostile with mobile providing an always connected, personal characteristic that makes it unique.