Fun Facts in Support of Mobile Internet

The author William Gibson said something like "The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed." I believe that is true for the mobile internet; the innovators are already living the mobile internet life, in some cases because they are early adopters and in others because the mobile culture is strong in their country.

Here are a few fun facts that support the move to mobile internet, and in some cases surprised even me:

• One half the world's populations has mobile phones. I knew the penetration was high (80% +/-) in developed nations, but would have guessed the developing world would pull this average further down. Note that for many of these people, the mobile phone is their only access to the internet.


• One eighth of Americans uses a mobile phone in place of a landline phone. Twenty five percent who have moved recently have opted to use their wireless instead of a landline phone. This increases the time period where the mobile phone is close at hand, and thus available for other mobile services.


• Despite all the discussion about the U.S. technophobes, 32 percent of U.S. mobile phone users accessed the internet in a recent month, and 41 percent sent pictures on a mobile phone. In Japan, almost as many used a mobile device to access the internet in a recent month, as used a work or home computer. These stats make for a great number of impressions available for advertisers.


• Speaking of advertising, a recent IBM study forecasts that global mobile advertising will grow at 41% p.a. from 2006-2010, versus a growth of 5.9% p.a. for all advertising. It is about time to get out ahead of this bandwagon.


• We will see roughly $22B in mobile payments by 2011, across 204 M mobile users.  Which companies will get grab a share of that market?  Today's financial leaders or today's innovators?

Who says the mobile internet is a myth?  At this point the gap is a failure of imagination.

Unleash Mobile Advertising

At the AlwaysOn media conference, Cyriac Roeding, a CBS VP made excellent points about what is needed to grow mobile advertising.  I have believed that growth in mobile advertising is going to be critical for the success of the mobile internet because it will help subsidize content and services to attract the early-majority users.

He laments that mobile advertising accounts for only 0.2% of all advertising spend, when the majority of adults in the developed world have these devices and advertisers have learned that users are 10X as likely to click through on mobile as online.   He cries out for greater simplicity for users and for advertisers.  "Don't try to duplicate the online experience, mobile is different."  It took the iPhone to convince handset makers that the phones need to be simpler to use.  Advertisers are perplexed by the different standards for mobile content and advertising, and cannot create effectively for this medium.

The industry is getting in its own way and must consider the needs of the users and the advertisers for us to realize the full potential of this technology.

Secure Web Services?

One key dependency for the growth of the mobile internet is that we have reliable web services. This is parallel to Google's vision on cloud computing.

While web services and cloud computing are compelling new trends for the desktop and enterprise environments, they are essential for a mobile internet world. We need the storage space and processing power of server computers, rather than be limited by the capabilities of a mobile device; we will often want to do broader manipulation of our data on the desktop and then mini manipulation on the mobile device, much like people use Outlook today; and we will want the security of having our data on a server in case we break or lose our mobile device.

It will be important for all these services to exist on the web and that users trust in their reliability and security. CIOs (subject of another blog) have their own concerns and needs about web services; individual users will need to have a high confidence level because they have limited negotiating power with the web service providers.

Some recent developments show that we have a long way to go to earn this consumer trust. Blackberry's have had several widespread outages and Amazon's S3 Web Services had a recent significant outage. Charter Communications deleted the emails for 14,000 users, and evidently did not keep backups. And a "computer glitch" gave the FBI access to all the email accounts on an unnamed network.

Granted these incidents may be isolated and rare, and generate lots of attention for the media. And it is likely that most all web services provide greater reliability and security than most home networks and maybe most enterprises. Nevertheless, perception is reality for the consumer, so service providers must try doubly hard to earn the trust of users before they will feel comfortable leaving all their data, communications, family photos, music, school notes, or whatever in "the cloud". And they must feel comfortable for us to realize the growth potential of the mobile internet.