What is the other thing that will make 2008 a great year for the mobile? The tremendous growth of mobile services and the consequent commoditization of mobile IP. If you follow the mobile market pretty closely you are probably already familiar with these names: Twitter, Jaiku, WidSets, Fring (..and I could go on and on). All these startups are focused on building services specifically designed for the mobile platform. Some companies focus on social networking, others on VoIP, but what all of them have in common is building a service or a platform that is usable from a mobile handset. And the same is happening with the big names. Take Google, for example. This year, in addition to releasing the Android platform and acquiring a lot of companies in the mobile business arena, they released two great products: Google maps for mobile and Gmail for mobile. I love these applications because of their usability. So far very few big names have put their efforts in developing a mobile application service, and the fact that is happening right now made me think alot about what's next in 2008. The other big name is Nokia. They made some important acquisitions too and they launched OVI: a set of mobile services offering maps, social networking, music and probably much more. Another great sign. Nokia, to my knowledge, has never been involved in offering services with their handsets in the past.
Now, think about it. In the coming years we will start seeing mobile services offered by many different companies that are not our usual mobile carriers. And more than ever people will start using these services, like they use Facebook, Google or Blogger today from the web. Now, what do people need to use the services? Mobile IP. In order to have access to these services you need free access to the Internet and that is what mobile IP is about. Personally I believe the demand of Internet access from the mobile phone will increase so much to be commoditized pretty quicky. And if you take a look at the market this is already happeing right now: in US for 50 $/month AT&T Wireless offers unlimited data plans, while in Italy, for just 9 Euros/month you get 50 MB of data/day which is quite a lot. The great thing is that these offerings are not targeted to the business user, but instead, to the general public.
With this mobile services ecosystem growing over the next years I personally see a decline of the power of the mobile operators. One of the obvious application consumers want more from their mobile phone is Instant Messaging. Now, in a world where mobile IM is pervasive and we all have a flat data plan, does the old SMS make sense? Probably not. I'm not saying the SMS will be replaced by mobile IM, but there are services currently offered by operators, that, with the commoditization of the mobile IP, could be threatened.
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