Future of Mobile Services, Advertisement, and Social Networks

I attended “Master of Innovation V” on June 30^th, 2008, organized by Docomo USA Labs. Three speakers from different consulting and research companies presented their predictions of future of mobile services, advertisement world and mobile social networking. Docomo had a radio professional, Ken Rutkowski, CEO of KenRadio, for moderating this panel. I summarize some interesting statistics and some take away points here.

 Some future mobile killer apps mentioned by the speakers:
        * Remittance: Sending money using your mobile phone
        * Location based advertisement
        * Automated calls to user for reminding appointments, taking medicine
        * Combining and interacting between different social networks

 Tim Bajarin’s, President of Creative Stratagies, prediction is that iPhone will be driver in change in how consumers use their phones. Currently, phone hardware is more important than what it can do with its software. But Tim foresees that this will change and software and services on the phone as ‘a device differentiator’ will gain much more importance. Tim also predicts that in 2009 17-19% of the phones in the USA will be smartphones, and by 2012 this number will go to 45-50%. IPhone users much more heavily use Internet compared to other smartphone users: 98% of the iPhone users browse Internet on their phones compared to 58% of other smartphone users and 13% of all the USA phone subscribers.

PC penetration vs. Phone penetration
            In the USA: 80.3% vs 77.4%
            In the world: 12.9% vs. 41.6%

 
Everybody agrees that the way we use our mobile phones depend very much on our age. It is common knowledge that Generation Y use SMS much more than Generation X. Julie Ask, VP & Research Director of Jupiter Research, mentioned that she knows a  teenager who texts about 200 a day, even when she is sleeping, wakes up every 15-20 minutes and text little bit. This is almost unbelievable to many of us older generation. I also heard that teenagers texting to each other even when they are in the same room watching TV.

Chetan Sharma, President of Technology and Strategy Consulting, talked about mobile advertising. He made a good point that when thinking about mobile advertising one should not only think about cell phones but also other mobile devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, iPod Touch, etc.

Chetan emphasized that from advertisers point of view, the following points are most important:

1. Reach: How many people you can touch with your advertisement
2. Targeting/Purity: Reaching the right target audience
3. Effectiveness: Measuring the effectiveness of the advertisement, does user take any action?
4. Efficiency: Getting the benefit and revenue increase for the money spent on advertising.

Clearly mobile advertising has advantages especially in advertising targeting and measuring the effectiveness of the advertisement.

            Chertan predicts that mobile advertisement will be
            bigger than online advertisement and the mobile ad business
            has potential to be $20B industry by 2013.

When I was listening Chetan I was thinking how annoying it would be to receive mobile advertisements. Then, unknowingly Chetan made a comment and made me a believer: He thinks that idle screen of mobile phones are the holly grail of mobile advertisement, everything will start from there. He thinks, and I agree, people would be willing to receive advertisement and coupon on their idle screen, especially in exchange for reduced monthly mobile provider fees. Another good point was that the location based advertisements (e.g., a restaurant coupon can be delivered when you are close by) would be very important in the near future.

Julie Ask, VP & Research Director of Jupiter Research, talked about mobile social networks. When she asked the audience about their social network usage, there were about 5 facebook users out of ~60 people, no myspace users and only 2 mobile social network users, including Julie herself. Because niche social networking sites are becoming popular, she thinks one of the potential killer mobile apps is social networking aggregator, where user’s personal information (obtained from mobile phone) is utilized to identify user and do mesh ups of user’s different social networks.

Julie's blog is at: http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/ask/

 

Comments

[Tao Mei]

A very interesting article about mobile applications. One concern from the perspective of research is that, is the new trend of mobile advertising just a piece of application senario or a business model without any profound research or technology? How far away is it between the business model and technoloqy?