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17. Mobile payments still won't take off outside Asia.
18. Presence, or some sort of availability management software/system will be a hotly desired feature by the end of the year.
The mobile phone is a wonderful thing. It lets us make calls and send text messages and check our e-mail and all sorts of other things pretty much any time we want, from any place.
The mobile phone is an awful thing. It interrupts us with phone calls, text messages and e-mails all the time, no matter where we are.
Thus the problem. There's a significant need for a balance to be struck between the two, putting people in control of the inbound communications on their phones while still taking full advantage of all the different ways in which they can communicate. With calls, it's easy -- put your phone on silent, let the voicemail pick up if you don't want to answer. Texts make things a little more difficult: you can simply ignore text messages, but in many cultures, there's an expectation that texts will be immediately answered. So if somebody sends you a text, and you don't respond, what will they infer? Things become even similarly complicated when e-mail, IM and other services get added in.
It's easy to be overwhelmed by all of this. There's always the solution of just turning your device off, but to do so means being unplugged from the network, whether it's a social network, a work one, or something else. The best solution would be able to control how people are able to reach us at any given time, while communicating to them our current level of responsiveness.
I've had several friends tell me that their employers have been willing to get them Blackberrys or similar devices, and they've asked me my thoughts. The first thing I say is that while I think those kinds of devices are great and fun and useful, along with all their benefits comes an unspoken expectation that since you can receive your email at any time, that means you can -- and should -- respond at any time. How that plays out depends on their job and their boss, really, but there's always the question if the benefits are worth being able to be reached by work e-mail at any time. It's an all or nothing question, but with presence, it wouldn't have to be.
So as services like push e-mail and mobile IM become more pervasive, so will the desire to be able to control them. We should own our mobile phones, they shouldn't own us -- and there's a great opportunity for companies that can crack this.
15. Mobile virus FUD will continue unabated, but with no real threat or impact.
16. Mobile blogging and photoblogging will grow, filling in a personal media-sharing gap intended for MMS.
MMS has never materialized as a replacement for SMS, mainly because it's not suited for the types of communication at which SMS excels. Marketing MMS as "like SMS, but with a picture" doesn't make it so. After all, how do I ask someone what they're doing with a picture -- and furthermore, why would I want to, particularly for a much higher cost than a simple text message?
SMS is great for simple one-to-one communications, perfect even. The ability to be able to send somebody a photo every once in a while is nice, but it's little more than that. With the rise of digital photos, sharing services and blogs, communicating via pictures has become a one-to-many activity, something to which P2P messaging isn't always well equipped. People like to share their photos -- look at Flickr, Ofoto, Xanga, Myspace, Facebook and so on. Melding the mobile with these types of services will grow, conspiring to still hold MMS usage down.
We've written before about applications like ShoZu that let people send their mobile photos to their own Flickr site, along with applications like Nokia's Lifeblog that let them post to their own blogs as well. These solve one side of the equation -- letting people share their photos from their mobile -- but the other side, accessing the shared photos from a mobile, is still a bit difficult. This is one place where an RSS-to-SMS service, like Yahoo's makes a great deal of sense. Replace sending multiple MMS with a single upload to Flickr, then Yahoo's service sends an SMS to all your friends when the Flickr RSS feed gets updated.
Instead of building their own moblog offerings or opening photo-sharing services based around pushing people to order printed photos, operators could instead leverage these existing services and help people better use them with their mobile devices. There's far more value in helping people get their photos onto an open system like Flickr or Blogspot than trying to fence them into a proprietary operator-labeled service. Nobody's going to send the same MMS with the same picture to ten different people anyway, so why not encourage people to use MMS (or whatever means) to upload the photo to a web service, then help them get word out to their friends' mobiles to come and look at the photo?
Photo and video sharing, along with moblogging are ideal uses for the mobile, because they're forms of communication -- the central characteristic of the mobile phone. But MMS isn't really the ideal medium. It can, though, instead of being a one-to-one service, be the platform for a one-to-many service. Facilitating this one-to-many sharing via mobile will be a hot market in 2006.
Up until now, Java (J2ME) has been mostly a platform for mobile gaming.
2006 will see a whole bunch of non-gaming applications, ranging from messaging/IM to banking, from presence management to browsers, like the new Opera Mini.
Watch the wave come in.
14. Wi-Fi enabled 2.5G Phones Go Mass Market
So far, wi-fi enabled mobiles have been specialist and high end models. 2006 will see this feature in more mainstream, mass market phones, assuming (and it's a big assumption) that operators agree to sell them.
This means that you can potentially surf the net via a hotspot or at home. And even make VoIP calls at a far cheaper rate than offered by network operators - and if the hotspot is free, your call will be free too.
Analysts are very divided over the impact this will have - will it be the death knell of operators as we all stand in one place (you can't move around, as you'll loose your connection) making cheap calls?
I think it won't have much of an impact at all next year. Setting up the phones will beyond the ken of most people, even if they understand what their phones can now do. It seems that although many of us buy new models becasue they have lots of features, these are forgotten as we leave the shop, as we settle in to the old patterns of voice, sms and the occasional game of Snake.
Wi-fi on phones will have a negigible impact until the phone automatically detects the best quality/best priced network to use and hands over from one to the other without bothering the user. That's what? At least 5 years down the line.
So yes, some of us techno fiends may set up our phones and make the odd VoIP call in 2006, but operators can sleep safely in their beds next year - from this danger at least.
Image from Slate.com
11. It will become common for low-end devices for emerging markets to have color screens and cameras.
12. Myopic thinking, bad pricing and pointless services will continue keep mobile music from realizing its potential.
I'm thinking this one is a slam dunk for Russell's year-end review next December, but I don't want to get too over-confident. Still, I can't help but feel this one's a little too easy to predict. Alongside mobile TV, operators won't shut up about mobile music. But, like so many things, theire understanding and implementation of it is off-base.
Operators want to put themselves at the middle of users' music experiences, and replace the iTunes Music Store, Napster, and any place else from which they buy music, online or off, and they think that offering dual-delivery downloads to both mobile and PC will help them accomplish this, and also justifies prices much higher than the typical online services.
They need to accept that people are never going to buy all their music from their mobile operator -- they've never bought their music from just one source, whether it was one particular record store or another, or Starbucks or Amazon or Target. Operators assume they can replace these sources, many of which feed on providing instant gratification, because people can now by music anytime, anywhere. But seeing a CD at Starbucks and deciding to buy it along with your latte is very different than thinking, "hey, I want that new Bob Dylan CD *right now*" and whipping out your phone and paying $2.50 a track for it.
Another problem is that people don't compartmentalize their music into "music I can listen to on my stereo," "music I can listen to on my computer," "music I can listen to on my MP3 player," and they won't add "music I can listen to on my phone". People just have their music, and expect it to travel across all their playback devices. The problem with dual-delivery isn't getting music bought on the phone to the PC, but getting it from the PC to other portable devices. But looming even larger is the difficulty, if not inability (depending on the operator and handset), to get music users already own -- regardless of the source -- onto their phone.
To blame this on mobile operators isn't fair. I prefer to blame the entire music industry that's forced the adoption of copy-protection technologies, and companies that are happy to implement them because they provide a significant amount of lock-in to particular products and services. The problem is all the lock out that occurs on the flip side. If mobile operators really wanted to make waves in the music download business, they'd do everything they could to foster interoperability -- let users play songs on their phones from any store, let songs from their store play on any device, and so on.
But, of course, if they let people do that, there's the potential they'd never buy anything from the operator. Forcing customers to use their store if they want to listen to music on their phones forces them to make a choice -- use the operator store, or don't use the phone for music. That's a zero-sum game, and one they're not likely to win.
9. Mobile TV and P2P video struggle again in 2006
10. Happy Slapping - more attacks and export potential
Unfortunately, Happy Slapping has really gone mainstream in the UK now, with more and more attacks reported. Just in the course of the last month, we had our first celebrity Happy Slap on c-list, Myleene Klass as well as the first murder convictions associated with the phenomenon.
Just in case you missed the Happy Slap thing (which must mean you don't consume UK media), what sounds as if it might be a childish prank, is actually illegal assault. These attacks sometimes result in serious injury and murder, as we see above. The idea is that a group of kids/youths beat someone up, film it on their video phones and then circulate it among their mates, for a laugh.
Films are usually circulated by Bluetooth, so are impossible to prevent or track to their source, even if they are discovered by the authorities.
You can read my theories into the origin of these attacker here. I have actually seen some happy slapping attacks on video and they are genuinely violent and stomach-turning. It's not comic violence in any form.
Sadly, my 10th Prediction is that we'll see a lot more of these attacks, along with copycat Happy Slapping outside the UK - the US and Germany would be my best guess (assuming this hasn't happened already).
This will be accompanied by idiots blaming mobile phones and not society for the problem, as well as clueless MPs calling for action.
Member of Parliament, Mr Adrian Bailey, for example has already called for mobiles to be jammed in school grounds. Do they let anyone into parliament these days? Doesn't the man know:
1. Jamming phones will be about as effective as jamming all cuckoo clocks in schools, as this would neither disable the camera nor the Bluetooth functionality.
2. Some kids need their phones and mostly for perfectly legitimate and legal reasons - like phoning parliament to protest about the standards of MPs these days and how they seem terminally stupid in comparison to yesteryear.
3. Most Happy Slapping attacks take place away from school grounds anyway. It's like banning automobiles from driving on railway lines as a way of reducing drunk driving related deaths.
7. MVNOs will gain in popularity, with new services announced and launching regularly. But the thinning of the herd will also begin, with at least one high-profile casualty before the end of the year.
8. RIM will take it on the chin, even if it comes out of its patent suit okay. Push e-mail will become a commodity offering from carriers, and rivals like Visto, Seven, Nokia and Good will make gains in the enterprise market, partly because of their support of all types of mobile devices.
Things are again looking good for Research In Motion in its patent fight with NTP -- the latest update has the Patent Office saying it expects to throw out all of NTP's relevant patents, and it's moving quickly to beat the tight schedule the judge in the case has imposed. I'm not going to wade into the issue of the patents too deeply -- there are people with far deeper knowledge on that topic than I -- other than to say I think the right move is for the USPTO to revoke the patents, and I hope this and other high-profile cases will lead to a badly needed overhaul of the US patent system.
The court case, though, is the least of RIM's concerns. Several rivals are waiting to pounce as the spectre of a Blackberry shutdown has lead plenty of potential (and existing) customers to explore other push e-mail options, giving companies like Good a significant, if somewhat artificial, marketing boost, increasing their foothold in the market. This exposure will help them in the long run, in addition to any customers they can grab in the short term.
But the real rivals for Blackberry are the carriers it depends on for sales on connectivity. They're realizing that people like getting their e-mail, both business users, and to a lesser extent, general consumers. Push e-mail will quickly become a commodity, carriers offering the service either for free or very cheaply as a way to push data charges. They'll do it on all the devices they sell, whether it's through built-in messaging applications or J2ME e-mail clients. Most people, even business users, will find this a good enough solution, both in terms of cost, but also because they don't have to switch to a bulky Blackberry device, they can use whatever handset they want -- even their existing one. They might give up the Blackberry keyboard, but can get a Treo or other device that has one instead.
RIM has licensed Blackberry Connect to other device manufacturers, though devices that feature it are coming out in a trickle rather than a torrent. The crux is what RIM can add to the Blackberry service to make it better than a commoditized offering -- and from where I'm standing, I see very little. The differentiation in delivering e-mail to a mobile device and processing responses is pretty invisible, and isn't apparent at all when users have a smartphone that can handle attachments and do all the other things a Blackberry can, with the added bonus of supporting far more add-on applications than the Blackberry OS.
So, if RIM ends up prevailing in its patent fight, its stock will undoubtedly bounce and some observers will say it's smooth sailing for the company. But, in reality, 2006 will be a tough year for the Blackberry.
5. Ringtones implosion accelerates, as one of the shortest boom and bust cycles becomes clear to all.
6. Gizmondo withdraws from handheld gaming sector.
Gizmondo must be one of the big failures of 2005 and I'm really, really (no, really!) puzzled as to what the hell's going on there and why they seem to have access to so much money.
Firstly, they want to take on incredibly strong incumbents in the handheld sector, Nintendo's GameBoy and Sony's PSP. Not to mention N-Gage, that was patently struggling, despite the might and distribution strength of Nokia behind them. Why on earth would any company want to try this with limited resources?
Well, if the product was competitively priced, had a bunch of extra features and crucially, a range of great must-have, exclusive games, they may just stand a chance. But no, the games portfolio was shite and limited and it was more expensive than the entrenched incumbents.
And their distribution strategy in the US was laughably to hang out in a few malls.
Were their senior execs contrite and modest in their demands while overseeing this fiasco? Did they hold back their salaries for when they could demonstrate that this unpromising approach had worked? Not a bit of it! Salaries included several million dollars of cash and options and luxury $250,000 dollar cars.
Then we have loads of corporate shenanigans including buying companies owned by directors and paying off privately incurred legal bills. Admittedly, some of these actions were corrected, but why were they allowed to happen in the first place?
And did we mention "legal, accounting and consulting costs" in the first six months of 2005 of $75 million? And a net loss of $220 million in that period?
Pretty bad stuff - what next? Maybe some of the directors were a bunch of convicted white collar crooks that investors has entrusted their money to? Err, yes actually. On this discovery, they resigned.
Someone do the decent thing and put them out of their misery. No one can really believe that this mess can be saved. Can they?
So, Prediction 6 - Gizmondo must die.
3. 3G won't kill Wi-Fi, WiMAX won't kill 3G. There will be no killing of rival radio technologies.
4. Operators will still struggle to find the key selling points of 3G.
Mobile operators are still struggling to figure out what to say when customers ask why they should switch to 3G. Video calling failed miserably as a USP, and cheap voice and text remains the lure of choice for some operators' 3G offerings. They think that music and video will do the trick -- but they're wrong, there, too (we'll explain why in a couple later posts). What else have they got -- mobile turkey shoots?
Operators will have some success getting people onto 3G networks through a sort of soft forced handset upgrade. While they won't stop selling 2G handsets, the only cool ones available will be 3G ones. So if you want something new and something hot, at some point on many carriers, you'll have to go 3G. That may be more successful, really, than trying to sell people on any sort of application they've currently got.
The underlying problem here is how carriers approach this sort of thing, and their insistence they be at the middle of everything. If they haven't yet come up with something -- a few things -- to convince people that 3G can add some value to their life, they're not going to without changing how they go about it. The concern is that they'll be relegated to bit pipes, doing nothing but selling network access. There's two sides to this: first, there are plenty of successful ISPs out there that make money. Second, if they're smart, they can be more than just a bit pipe, if they're smart.
Operators need to be additive -- their role should be to add value, and if they're successful, people will pay. They need to facilitate communication, entertainment and whatever else people want to do, and make it as easy and fulfilling as they can. Typically, they take the opposite approach, limiting what people can do. Want to moblog? Use their blog site, with their rules and their charges, and lose your content if you change operators. Want to watch TV? You can watch anything, as long as it's something the operator sells you. Then, look at the flip side. Want to send something to your own blog? You're on your own. Want to watch your own video? Have fun getting everything set up. The whole attitude is "it we don't sell it, we don't want you to do it."
If carriers are going to insist on taking an active role in everything people do on their phones, they've got to take an active interest in making sure that people can do whatever they want. A total reversal of their attitude is needed, changing from explicitly telling people what they can do to letting them do whatever they want to do. Embrace this mentality, and people will figure out on their own what the value of 3G is.
So this is supposed to be a prediction -- well, that part's simple enough. Carriers won't figure this out in 2006. Expect more of the same old locked down networks and applications, and expect 3G to stutter because of it. This is one prediction I'd be happy to see not come true.
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