Mobile Tsunami

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I'm here to tell you a story. The story starts over 8 years ago when I got my first Handspring and my first mobile phone.

Looking at the two devices in my pockets, I realized that there was a lot of potential if my phone, which was connected to the Internet, had access to the capabilities of the Handspring. Or vice versa.

I became consumed with the idea that if people had ready access to information wherever and whenever they needed it that it could be the sort of thing that could change the world for the better.

And when I say consumed. I mean CONSUMED.

My apartment was covered with large post-it notes describing what might be possible and a business plan built on this idea.

I had forgotten about this until recently when we decided to start Cloud Four to focus on mobile development. My wife Dana reminded me that when she met me that my apartment was covered in post-it notes like some sort of mad scientist's lab.

Probably not the best way to make a first impression. I'm tremendously lucky that despite the obsession, she still married me. :-)

I really believe we were onto something when it came to the convergence of mobile phones and PDAs. Unfortunately, we hit a wall called WAP.

The reality was the technology wasn’t good enough to do what we wanted to do. The world changing would have to wait.

Instead I got a great job at a wonderful company building web sites and applications for standards-setting organizations.

After seven years at that same company, I found myself yearning for something new. I found myself asking what was next: both for technology and for me.

When I looked around, there were three things that couldn't be ignored:

The first was the release of the iPhone. It made the dreams of 8 years ago seem not only possible, but inevitable. The dream was close to becoming a reality.

The second was meeting Kinan Sweidan at Web Visions. Kinan and I discussed mobile development. I told him that I was surprised he chose to work on mobile given the frustrating lack of standards and the control that carriers have.

Kinan said that yes, it was frustrating and difficult, but that it was in this space that the true opportunity lies because when it is easy and standardized that it is commoditized.

I had spent the last seven years working at a company that built web sites and applications for standards-setting organizations so I lived and breathed standards. Kinan's words were heresy. And when I thought about the early days of the web, I realized that they were true.

The final thing that couldn't be ignored was a number. It was originally 2.7 and later 3.3 billion. That is the number of mobile devices in the world.

That's an astonishing number. It is difficult to comprehend how large that is.

3.3 billion mobile devices means that there is a subscription for every two people on the planet. None of the other popular technologies can come close to this widespread adoption.

Tomi T Ahonen recently helped put 3.3 billion in perspective. There are more mobile phones than Cars, PCs, Telephones, Credit Cards and Televisions. We think of television as being the global mass market, but it is dwarfed by the mobile phone market.

It is astonishing that mobile phones can be such a large market and at the same time be under the radar for most businesses.

Source: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putt...
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/01/when...

The mobile market is so large that one portion of the market, SMS, accounted for 100 billion in revenue in 2007. Again, Tomi puts this in perspective by noting:

'That is as big as total Hollywood box office, total Hollywood DVD sales and rentals, total music industry revenues and total videogaming software revenues in 2007 - combined. By contrast the total messaging revenues of email and IM are less than 5 billion dollars globally.'

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/01/when...

Flickr photo by Vlastula: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vlastula/450642954/

And the mobile market is still growing at a tremendous pace. China has more subscribers than that U.S. population. China and India continue to grow at tremendous rates.

One important fact to remember is that many people have more than one mobile phone. Often people have their work and their personal mobile phones. This means that many countries have over 100% subscriber rates.

Because of the fact that people often have two phones, the total market for mobile phones still has a long ways to go before the market becomes saturated.

This is also the first of many indicators of how America is behind the rest of the world when it comes to mobile adoption and leadership. America has 80% subscriber rate whereas most of industrialized nations are at or above 100%.

Finally, the USA Today recently stated that the world population grows by 3 people per second. In that same second, 38 mobile devices will be sold.

Sources:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2008-01-...
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/01/when...
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/02/who-...
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/22/HNchinamobilesu...

What is more significant than the size of the market is how our use of phones is changing and how rapidly it is changing.

Deloitte & Touch conducted two surveys of American mobile phone users in 2007. They asked consumers if they used their phone for entertainment. In March, only 24% said they did. By October, that number had jumped to 36% an increase of 50% in only 6 months.

62% of those 13 to 24 years old use their phone for entertainment and almost half of those 25 to 41 years old do. 20% of those surveyed said they watch video content daily or almost daily.

As the usage changes, it will become more important to recognize that mobile devices are much more than phones. They are in fact media.

Source: http://www.wireless-watch.com/2008/01/02/americans-more-c...

1. The first was the printing press which allowed mass distribution of books.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nitsrejk/126982680/

2. Then came recordings.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/317559195/

3. Third was cinema.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snurb/172039084/

4. Then radio.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kt/249301268/

5. Followed by its sister technology: Television. The one we commonly think of when we think mass media.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_aughton/2178768452/

6. The sixth mass media is the Internet. It is so pervasive that you can get it with your Tacos.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lecates/454787692

7. Is mobile phones. And like all previous developments in mass media, it doubles the size of the previous market.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/118885175/

It seems that many of the people that I talk to have moments of epiphany when it comes to mobile development. I described how my epiphany came from a conversation with Kinan and realizing just how many mobile devices there are in the world.

For Eric Peterson, it was a trip to Asia. At the time, Web Analytics was just coming to grips with what was being termed Web Analytics 2.0. The move towards Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and Flex had broke traditional metrics like the page view.

Eric returned from his trip to Asia and said, 'Web Analytics 2.0? I am more worried about Web Analytics 3.0!'

Eric had come to a similar realization that 'new wave' of the mobile web was posed to take over. When it did, it again would break the metrics being used.

I shared with Eric the numbers for the market, at which point he said, 'I'm not sure we can call it a wave. Tsunami?'

He is right. The mobile web will likely be a tsunami of growth, and it is coming soon.

Flickr photo by look4u: http://www.flickr.com/photos/look4u/279668622/

http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2007/09/we...

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt recently called the mobile web the recreation of the Internet. I knew instantly what he was referring to.

For many months, I've been seeing parallels between the early days of the web and the mobile market. The identification of these parallels started in an unlikely way.

During the days of the Internet boom, I was afraid to tell people what I did. I was once stopped by a stranger in Barnes and Noble because I was looking at books on web site development.

At parties, I would tell people that I worked on computers lest I spend the entire evening talking to someone about what tech stocks to buy and what their company should do for a web site.

After the bubble burst, I watched as the conversation changed. My wife happened to be a Realtor. We would go to parties and people would ask what I did. I would say, 'I'm a web developer.' They would say, 'Oh. That's nice. What do you do Dana?' She would say that she was a Realtor. 'Oh, really?' they would say as they shifted in their chairs and focused their attention on her. The next hour would be full of questions about the market, improvements they were planning and questions about the real estate they were thinking about investing in.

The first clue I had that we might be looking at a similar change in mobile development came in watching people react to iPhones at parties. The entire conversation would shift and people clamored to play with the phone. I had seen this before.

But there are a lot more than just anecdotal similarities. In fact, for anyone who spent a lot of time developing in the wild, wild west of the early web, these factors should be familiar.

Email is still the killer app. There is no consistency on how devices render content. The environments are proprietary. There is poor documentation.

And what standards we have are not going to be able to keep pace with the industry. Who knows the javascript for accessing the phone's gps location? Can you look that up on the W3C's web site?

To their credit, the W3C has started a task force to standardize access for device attributes, but I doubt that the standards will be able to keep up with the phone manufacturers.

This will likely mean a return to browser wars except in a new space. We've got WebKit on the iPhone, Nokia, and Google phones. Opera's mobile browser is very popular. IE isn't going away. And Firefox is getting into the game with their own mobile version.

And all of these companies are not only competing for the browser, but also for developers. Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, and Google all have their own mobile development environments. Don't doubt for a moment that they will attempt to woo developers with more features in their mobile browsers.

You can already see this with Apple's iPhone and simple javascript for accessing the orientation of the phone. Nokia also has a large library of javascript for use in its browser.

Mobile growth will break business plans, advertising strategics, metrics and our development practices. It throws a curve ball at our established market.

Finally, just like the early days of the web, the potential is tremendous, but no one knows the patterns for how to be successful whether it is design, development or business models.

How quickly will mobile internet access take off? Here again we see parallels to the early days of the web.

We're actually ahead of where we were in 1994 when it comes to mobile internet access. And there are countries in the world like Japan and India where more people access the web via mobile devices than do via PCs.

This is ultimately what we’re hoping for. This is the exponential growth of the Internet. Is it unrealistic to hope for such growth again?

Several articles have answered the question negatively. They look at what’s happening and say that while the mobile web holds promise, that it isn’t coming in the near future. Why do they believe that?

First, we've heard this all before. Dr. Eli Harai, the CEO of San Disk, said at CES in January that mobile was 'the mother of all markets.'

This is exactly what John Scullely, then Apple's CEO, said in 1992 about 'wireless personal communicators.'

Eric Schmidt's quote from Davos about the mobile web being the recreation of the Internet is eerily similar to another quote from this 1992 New York Times article where Nobuo Mii, IBM, said that 'we are writing Chapter 2 of the history of personal computers.'

After so many years of crying wolf about the impending mobile web, why should anyone believe it now?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE5D914...

But similar doubts were raised during the early days of the Internet. This New York Times article from 1994 asks if the Internet has been overhyped. 13 years later, the New York Times wonders if the mobile web is all hype.

In both 1994 and 2007, strong cases could be made based on the existing data that the new technology is going to take off. While strong, both cases would be wrong.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D616...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/technology/25proto.html...

Before Mosaic, there was Gopher. There was also Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe.

If you looked at the adoption rate of Gopher or any of those other networks before the release of Mosaic, you would have never been able to guess the pace of growth for the Web.

Similarly, if you look at the usage of Internet on mobile phones before the iPhone, you will never be able to extrapolate what the growth will be like as more phones follow the iPhone's lead in making the mobile web more accessible.

The iPhone is the Mosaic of the Mobile Web. It is the first phone that many consumers have used that makes the mobile web easy to use. It heralds a new age for the mobile web. And every other phone manufacturer is attempting to replicate its success.

This isn't simply rhetoric. The numbers back up the iPhone as being a game changer when it comes to the mobile web.

In January 2008, the iPhone and iPod Touch accounted for 65% of the mobile browser usage tracked by NetApplications. This more than doubles the usage by Windows Mobile devices despite the fact that there are over 20 million WIndows Mobile devices in use compared to 4 million iPhones.

Google recently announced that they were creating iPhone optimized versions of their services because of the growth they were seeing from iPhone users. In the article, one of the Google representatives said that 'it's about usage. Not units.'

And this is the clearest evidence that the iPhone with its easy-to-use interface and its unlimited data plan change the mobile market so radically that it would be foolish to look at what has come before and use it to predict what will come.

There is no way to look at the previous data on Internet usage on mobile phones and predict that iPhone users would use 30 times the amount of data as other phone users or that they would execute 50 times the number of searches.

These aren't incremental increases from previous usage patterns. These are monumental shifts in usage.

http://devphone.com/a-case-for-the-mobile-web-google-ipho...
http://www.last100.com/2008/01/14/google-unveils-new-slic...
http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-iphone-users-eat-30-tim...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/667f13de-da60-11dc-9bb9-0000779fd...
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/20080...

But it's not all about the iPhone. The iPhone is very important in the United States because it serves as a wake up call for the media and the technology industry which has largely ignored the mobile market. However, in other countries, the iPhone is considered a very nice phone, but not necessarily the best.

Not only are there other phones that can compete with what the iPhone offers today, but all of the phone manufacturers are racing to replicate the user interface and other features that made the iPhone a hit.

We are likely to see these innovations--particularly those related to the mobile web--start to become a standard feature on higher-end mobile phones within the next year or two.

Throughout the mobile industry, the pace of innovation is speeding up. Platforms are being developed and bought. Consortium are being formed. Competing advertising networks are being created.

Software companies like Google are bidding on spectrum and creating handset alliances. Traditional handset manufacturers like Nokia are offering services and launching advertising platforms.

Remember, most mobile phones go from concept to market in less than a year and half and the average mobile phone owner replaces their phone every year and half. The mobile industry is already on what we used to call Internet time and things are speeding up.

In addition, the carrier landscape is changing. The success of the iPhone has made carriers aware that their dreams of data services revenue may be becoming a reality. But to get there, they have to give up some of their control. Some carriers still want it both ways and may have difficulty adapting.

Flat rate plan options are growing. Networks are promising to be open. And carriers are trying new plans that offer unlimited voice and data options.

The mobile web is beginning to change businesses. The first to experience this are the carriers themselves. Blyk provides free mobile phone access in exchange for advertising. The advertising is highly successful.

Advertising may be one of the first industries to be transformed by mobile. Blyk gets 12 to 24% response rates versus less than 1% for Internet and direct response advertising.

http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=458

So how can you prepare for this upcoming mobile wave?

Embrace the constraints. Remember why standards are important, but accept that if you're building for mobile devices, you're going to have to let go of them for a few years.

You may also have to choose to build an application versus building a web page if you want access to more complex phone interfaces like the camera or gps.

Finally, you'll have to decide what device classes you're going to spend the time and money to support.

To be successful, you can’t build the same thing you would build for the web. You have to understand what makes mobile unique.

http://weblog.cenriqueortiz.com/mobile-context
http://dev.mobi/node/744

Finally, in the early stages of the mobile web: Pick the right audience and be willing to experiment. Remember the early days of the web when no one knew what types of web sites would succeed.

Revel in this period of exploration.

And remember why this is important. Mobile technology is already changing the world. Many developing countries are skipping the cost of building telephone infrastructure and are instead building mobile networks.

During the recent turmoil in Kenya, one of the lead stories on NPR was about how this unrest had affected businesses because they were unable to get prepaid mobile cards.

It is likely that we will see one mobile phone per child long before we see one laptop per child.

And with technology that is this pervasive and that provides people with unlimited information no matter where they are, we can accomplish big, world-changing things. And as someone who believes that we are all responsible for making a difference in the world, I want to see everyone embracing what we can accomplish using this technology.

And that is why we're announcing the formation of a local mobile development group called Mobile Portland. We encourage you to sign up to receive further information on our first meeting.

Thank you to the generous people who published their photos under Creative Commons on Flickr. Thank you for reading or listening to this presentation.