2010 – Mobile Marketing Predictions for the Future
Imagine Steve, Bill, the Google Boys, Warren (Buffet) and myself get together to chat about 2010 and the Telco space. Warren is not really in the mood for TMT investments but he is listening. Bill believes that Windows will finally make a play in the mobile space with their first good product – Windows Mobile 7.0. The rest smile and say ‘good luck’ to him because being good most of your handset suppliers like HTC are now with the Google Boys and Android.
The Google boys look puzzled but excited. They brought to the chat more than 50 devices with Android for 2010. However they’ve not got enough apps and transactions yet (why is Steve managing to do this just with one device?) and it is still unclear how long it will take for mobile advertising to become a reality. There is still not enough money on mobile search, “… No worries, we just bought AdMob and there is lots of room for smaller companies to play in this space and find interesting niches and then we will buy them”. How many companies will they buy in 2010?
Warren is watching the Advercontent (advertising based games and applications) space, but just watching and learning and maybe China, India, Brazil and South Africa is where real scale will happen for this (paired with finally fast enough networks and accessible medium end handsets, we can imagine the big smiles of the Huawei and ZTE fellas). The internet boys don’t make any money on social media but he does believe mobile in these territories may be the place to monetize social media (content, analytics, location based). He also took several calls to listen to some interesting ventures on m-payments and micro-transactions in Africa and the Middle East. Hmmmmm
Why did we not invite Nokia to the meeting? They are too busy sorting out their house. It is true, first they shout OVI for president, now Symbian is not good enough, and now instead of embracing Android or buying Palm OS they are going to create another Linux based OS!!! Now we start understanding why they did not come today or they are not going to WMC 2010
Hey the RIM boys got to the meeting late. The rest have already divided the mass market application space between them and some upcoming startups. However vertical oriented apps is going to be an upcoming segment and the blackberry device is king here. Can their OS and their app store be a business oriented apps thriving space and take upcoming tech young companies on the ride. Warren is listening and nods
Where is Steve? Did he leave to launch another Apple phone or they were just getting ready to open up the app store next year. We agree to give him the 2009 champion, will he win again in 2010?
As we were walking out the room, Warren says ‘What about the operators?’ I said we need to get together again for lunch to figure that one out.
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