This blog post has two meanings, hence the title. First part is about my blog that has been dead for a while (over a year in fact) and I have been thinking about writing one last post saying good bye and thanks to all my past readers and asking them to continue following me in Twitter or Facebook since that is where I do socialize on the Web these days (as the joke in the title say, social networking killed the blogging star even though I was not that much of a star but the rest is totally true).

Then few days ago, I got an email from Rudy De Waele inviting me (thanks a lot Rudy for the opportunity) along with many others to take the chance that we are entering a new decade to send him my list of what are the 5 game changing trends for the mobile industry in the next decade. This is the second part of the title.

In his email, Rudy asked us to post in our blog the predictions so we could explain them there in more detail (the rules were to send him only one sentence per trend). Then I realized that I did had a blog that I started way back in 2005 (5 years in Internet time is a long time ago…) and that 2009, for the first time, was the first year that I had not updated my blog a single time (In fact, it has been already a year and a half). The main reason I stopped writing in my blog besides lack of time and the fact that, in spite of what most people think, I do have a personal live, has been the raise of social networking and sites like Facebook or Twitter where I became active since mid 2007. Those sites allow me to communicate with people much more frequently and in a much more dynamic way and specially since I got an iPhone and had both Facebook and Twitter access from it (with a great user experience by the way), then the urge to write a post about something to tell people has pretty much disappear. Now I can do it in real time, sharing quick thoughts, links, comment about what is happening at the moment if I am attending a conference or seeing a talk and get immediate feedback, something I will never achieve with a blog. I still like the more permanent nature of blog posts and, of course, the length, but I realized that I am not going to be updating my blog frequently enough anymore so it is time to officially close it. I have even now changed my twitter username from @unpocodetodo to @carlosdomingo to signal the divergence of my Twitter account from my blog.

And what could be the best way to close it than talking about what has become one of my passions for the last 3,5 years, the mobile industry and its (imminent now) convergence with the Internet industry? When I started my current job at Telefónica 3,5 years ago we had long discussions about whether mobile Internet was going to take off and when. On one side, there were the ones that claimed that this will take very long time to happen, that flat rates for mobile will never arrived because the economics did not add up, that user experience on phones was inferior than on desktop, that needs were different, etc. These are probably the same ones that never saw the raise of mobile phones when they started because mobile phones were bulky, expensive and quality of voice was bad compared to fix line phones. On the other hand, there were the more optimists and visionaries saying that this was going to be the biggest revolution since the Web. Obviously, I sided with the second group. I am optimistic by nature but I had also spend most of my time in Japan for the last 15 years before returning to Spain and I had seen there that mobile Internet was a reality since long ago. Even though people tend to discount what happens in Japan because of cultural differences, in this case there was no reason why mobile Internet was not going to take off in the West as well. Inevitably, someone was going to build a cool phone with a good user experience, a rich application and content ecosystem and network costs will come down so that flat rates on fast networks become a reality. Then Apple´s iPhone came along with the deals with the major operator in each country and all that became true.

Unfortunately, I cannot now look back and see what is happening in Japan since although some trends are still showing there before the rest of the world (think of mobile books, mobile social networks or mobile payments) now the field has leveled and we are all at a similar point in technology usage time. So what´s next? Here is my pick for the next decade:

• Ubiquity of cheap mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of connected devices (ala Kindle also, not just phones) and M2M services (machines to machine services, without a human behind the device). This is perhaps the most important game-changing trend as mobile broadband connectivity is the basis for the explosion in usage of any other type of services and devices. Throughout the next decade, we are going to see 3G+ penetration reaching 90% in Western Europe and North America and +50% in the rest of the world. Also, we are going to start seeing the first LTE deployments in the second half of the decade. As with any other technology, 3G+ technologies (3G, HSDPA, etc.) will become cheaper and cheaper, past networks cost will get amortized and inevitable this will lead to much cheaper mobile broadband (after all, we are in a deflationary industry). Ubiquity of mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of m-X services: mobile health, mobile commerce, mobile banking, mobile education, mobile gaming, mobile multimedia, etc…And particularly in developing economies, the mobile phone will become the personal computer. Moreover, ubiquity of cheap mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of Kindle-like devices that are preconnected to a mobile broadband connection. As has been also noted by the recent report on mobile Internet by Morgan Stanley, we will have 1 order of magnitude more devices connected to the Internet than ever and the majority of them will do through a mobile broadband connection. M2M services (machines to machine services, without a human behind the device) via mobile broadband will also explode due to the availability of this wealth of cheap mobile broadband and in 10 year, more machines will be connected to the mobile network than persons.

• Convergence of desktop and mobile web into one web, everything moving to the cloud and “the end” of native mobile applications and application stores. Today, a lot of people are still talking about the mobile Web or mobile applications and building specific mobile applications using specific mobile technologies. Two things will change. First, the majority of the applications what we will use will be the same, indistinctly of the platform. Even now that we are still at the infancy of usage of mobile Internet applications, this is already happening as the top applications that people use on mobile are the same ones that people use on the Web (think of Facebook). The second consequence is that people will build Web platforms on the cloud that will be access from browsers in different devices and the platform will adapt its features depending on the browser requests. This does not mean that the usage from a mobile phone has some different features (see my next two predictions for examples of that) but the application will be essentially the same one, going after the same server in the cloud and built in a convergent way that uses both web technologies for all accesses (whether is desktop, mobile or any other device) and that synchronizes the usages between desktop and mobile without distinguishing which was the platform that you use to access the application (think of how you access your email server from either your Outlook or iPhone and the status of the email changes indistinctively). So within the next decade, say goodbye to close application stores and the current fragmentation of specific mobile platform development. Over time, the web will win because it always does. Firefox, although still immature on mobile, is pointing towards this trend creating a browser that is cross-platform and synchronizes what you do on the desktop with what you do on the mobile version. Google will eventually also port Chrome to the Android platform and we will have another cross-platform browser. In spite of the explosion of mobile applications exemplified by the iPhone´s AppStore, I think that Web developers are only really starting to be interested in the mobile arena and when this true convergence between this will change the pace of innovation and the quality of execution of (mobile) applications. This will also mean that mobile advertising will grow much faster than expected and it will become the primary way of monetization for the Mobile Web as it is of the desktop web.

• Truly context aware mobile computing, where the context is far richer than just location and personalization and recommendations are ubiquitous. Location based services have been one of the promises of the mobile industry that has never taken off. However now location is becoming a commodity due to the explosion of smartphones (that throughout the next decade will become the majority of devices) that include a GPS and also the commoditization of other location information. If you look at the applications for the iPhone or Android phones, many of them already use location in a very obvious and simplistic way. For instance, when I post to Twitter from my phone it includes my location as part of the metadata from my tweet. What will be game-changing for the next decade is how access of applications from mobile phones becomes truly context aware beyond location. To give you an example of what I mean by this, suppose my Twitter application is context aware and when I am spending my new year break in the mountains and I tweet that I am going skiing, uses that information together with my location to determine which stations are near by and recommend me the best one to go based on the weather and quality of the snow, the least crowded route to get there and at what time to leave to avoid traffic jams and whether there is any of my friends actually skiing at the same stations. All these by just using two pieces of information (location and the fact that I post that I am going skiing) and then accessing and processing in a smart way the wealth of information that is already available on the web (information about the status of the ski resorts, traffic information, friends current location, etc.). For this to work we need that Web technologies like RSS that allow you to pull information in a structure way further evolve and that services that provide context information based on location appear on the Web for other applications to use in a simpler way. This example is not casual as I am doing all these during this Xmas break that I am skiing in the mountains but the difference is that I need to do all these manually and what I believe that will happen within the next ten years is that people will figure out a simple way to put all these together and make it available to applications so that they can use it in a smart way and I do not have to do all these manually.

• Augmented reality and mixed reality services/applications: pervasive services that seamlessly combine the physical and digital World. We have seen few startups and some of these services to start appearing on Iphone and Android platforms during 2009 mainly with two applications, local information (see the Yelp Monocle) or advertising although the idea and technology exists for a while. These are basically services where we combine physical things via a camera with digital information typically overlayed on top of it leveraging also improved object recognition technology (Google making inroads with Google Googles that is already on Android and I believe will come preinstalled very soon) and context information (see above prediction for info on this). Since all mobile phones have or will have cameras, Internet connection and large, pixel dense screens, I think that more and more we will see this type of functionality being added into mobile applications. Moreover, as augmented reality becomes more and more common and some of the necessary functionality to include it in services (Web based services, as discussed above) is included in browsers (which we will be seen happening within the next 3 years, today in fact the platforms for augmented reality are already refer to as augmented reality browsers) then we will see an explosion of usage of augmented reality in mobile applications also as a way to enhance the mobile experience of Web applications.

• Explosion of mobile video applications including mobile video communications. Within the next decade, video will be in mobile, as it is already on the desktop Web, the main source of traffic with forecasts predicting that it will be anywhere between 60% to 80% of the traffic (of course, this is a bit misleading as video takes up a huge amount of bandwidth compared with any other content type but you get the point). During this decade that we are leaving, two things have fundamentally changed on the web, the social networks/UGC phenomenon and the explosion of video usage. I believe that the same will happen in mobile and concerning the second one, video, I think that two things will happen. First, as people move to smartphones with flat rates and network bandwidth improves, people will access more and more videos from their devices. The second is that people will start using video from mobile phones as a way of communicating. This has a two fold meaning, the first thing that we will see is that as we have video cameras on mobile phones, people will start posting videos about their activities into the Web from their mobile phones the same way that we have seen happening with pictures. The second is that since the existing standard for videocalling from mobile phones has a really bad user experience (quality is really bad), other communication platforms (most likely Skype or Facebook although there might be other contenders) will, within the next few years, start offering better video calling functionality and people will eventually start using video communications on their mobile phones as it is starting to happen on the desktop with free Web conferencing tools like Skype.

Picking up the above five themes has been a challenge as I had some other important topics that might predominate within the next decade (social network access from mobile phones, mobile phones as payment systems, mobile phone usage for ehealth etc.) and some more disruptive ones (thanks Pablo) like mobile persuasive computing, mobile computing and smart cities, short range mobile applications or direct phone2phone communications using local PANs.

Here you have what has been compiled from Rudy based on the input of a ton of important people from the mobile industry (I am really proud to be in that list considering that compared to many of them I am a total newcomer). Many people have predicted similar things as I have done although not every list is the same, I think that is the beauty of the exercise that Rudy has done. That presentation has a wealth of information that I am planning on using for my own planning work at Telefónica. Very, very cool job, congratulations Rudy!!!

Thanks also to Oscar Divorra, Nuria Oliver, Oriol Lloret, Pablo Rodriguez, Jose Luis Landabaso, David Lopez Muñoz and Jaime Gonzalez because they have helped shape my initial list with their feedback.

And to all of you, thanks for reading me so far and see you in Facebook or Twitter

Perhaps 10 years from now I will update this blog again to see what has happened with my predictions….

Carlos Domingo

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We also discussed about Amazon Mechanical Turk and how that is a great platform for building a mobile device enable interface to access those job opportunities (Amazon has yet to release a Web Service API for that, so far the only API is for the companies posting jobs but Jeff Barr mentioned at Mind Camp that they were going to do so).

I recommend you to try so Jon can make money and eventually invite me to dinner instead of the other way around (just joking Jon

CD

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