What's Next for the Mobile Internet?

Hamburg.
From Andrew Keen's rant we move on to a next09 panel on mobile telephony. What will the mobile environment look like in 2020? We begin with a brief video from the open think tank MoCom2020.com, showing where we've come from, and where we may be going (a 'sensorconomy' based on digital device sensors, new mobile services and mobile broadband offerings, major takeup in India, Africa, and other developing regions, miniaturisation and embedding of mobile devices, a shift of newspapers from print to mobile delivery, instant translation tools, location tracking, and substantial privacy and security concerns).

Raimund Schmolze from t-mobile follows on from this. His first suggestion is that the mobile Internet will soon capture a mass market. This is simply a continuation of current growth trends; there's already been a tripling of data traffic from 2007 to 2008 (in the t-mobile network, I assume). Second, virtualisation changes everyday life, as more and more conventional services and media forms are becoming available in virtual form through mobiel devices (print media, TV, banking, ...): this makes the digitalisation of all media inevitable. Digital delivery of music has now outpaced physical delivery, for example.

Also, the mobile Internet is now more than just mobile surfing, through the emergence of new gadgets from mini notebooks (or netbooks), smartpads, and further developments in ePaper (and through major speed increases for mobile Internet access coming soon). And this mobile Internet is now an open Internet - there are already tens of thousands of applets for iPhones, for example, and the walled garden mentality in mobile content services is, finally, very much dead.

Innovative devices also help bring mobile Internet access to the mass market - netbooks and other devices are no longer sold like notebooks, but made available on subscription plans like mobile phones. And there's a move towards open standards, with apps running across iPhones, Android, and other platforms.

Chsistian Magel from Simyo is next, and presents the longer-term picture, based on the MoCom2020 experiment. We will soon have more SIM cards than people in the world; communication will mean Internet-based communication, and the Internet will be mobile.

This will have profound effects - on politics (think flashmobs and other spontaneous networked movements), on the economy (think the demise of newspapers, and networked business models based on global micro-partnerships), for society (think the emergence of a knowledge culture, greater information sharing and transparency, and the explosive growth of shared desires as documented by emerging markets), and for technology (think omnipotent and intuitive hardware, convergent devices, transparent and seamless user experiences, and context-relevant personal services).

Technorati : change, future, mobile, mobile Internet, next09
Del.icio.us : change, future, mobile, mobile Internet, next09