I am often asked where the next growth market to realise its potential for mobile is going to be. It does not take a great deal of thought because the answer is always and increasingly – Africa! I am also particularly pleased to be asked this question because this week Mobestar embarks on its own African adventure emanating from Nairobi, Kenya. This country has the most intensive mobile internet users in Africa, with each user browsing an average of 525 pages each month, according to a new report by Opera. Here, the number of unique users grew by 246.2 per cent in the year to November 2009 while page-views grew by 615 per cent in a similar period. Applications are starting to proliferate like the cash transfer system provided by the market leaders, M-PESA, which is now less than three years old but has 7 million customers and is reputed to process as much as 10% of Kenya’s GDP. Kenya is launching a branded version of our own mDate mobile dating platform which, we trust, will produce a similar uptake. In fact all over Africa the story is the same, massive mobile utilisation and exponential growth. Read more »

Unless you’ve spent the last few months trapped in a cave you will undoubtedly have seen, read or heard that cloud computing is on its way and is likely to affect the way that many of us use our computers and interact with the internet over the coming years.  Much has been written elsewhere about the implications of cloud computing in general and whether it is indeed destined to transform the way we use the web but, at this juncture, I am particularly interested in exploring what the impact of cloud computing will be on mobile applications.

For the uninitiated, it is probably worth reiterating briefly the key characteristics of cloud computing.  In layman’s terms, cloud computing simply refers to the use of powerful shared computing resources which are accessed remotely, typically via a web browser over the internet.  Users don’t need to know (or care) where the servers are located or where the programs they are using are running – they just need access to a web browser to use the service from anywhere in the world.  In practice, the term cloud computing has grown to refer to a number of related capabilities that can broadly be summarised under following categories:
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When asked to write a blog entry, I thought long and hard about “stuff” and tried to come up with something deep, meaningful and full of wisdom. But eventually I decided that as we are approaching the end of the first decade of the “new millennium” that I should stare into  a  crystal ball and come up with some future insights of my own.

Most people seem to look upon 2009 as a year to forget, and speed away from as fast a possible, but really the past year has been a time of great change and invention, necessitated by the fact that everyone has had to think a lot harder this year to find new and innovative solutions to their problems. That said our challenges have by no means disappeared and hopefully this will continue our hunger to create and develop new ideas and technologies no matter how weird, wonderful or just plain strange they may appear at the time.

This brings me nicely onto a few technology advancements (or perhaps a wish list) for the future:

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Contrary to popular opinion Apple has not taken over the world – well not yet perhaps. Granted – the iPhone is a phenomenon and with the number of apps (sic) now exceeding 100,000 (http://bit.ly/W6w4P) – the other smart phone providers have ingested a considerable amount of exhaust fumes. But the more important story for both business and consumers is going to involve the services that are enabled by those applications and the mobile devices they run on. Infrastructure providers, both internal and external, need to start providing guidance on how to properly bring business efforts to the mobile arena, including line of business applications, marketing and customer support, as well as determining which mobile platforms will be supported. There is a very important distinction between applications and apps and as time evolves the supplier of the former will be in an increasingly strong position. For example, if my organisation supplies a leading business intelligence application to some of the world biggest companies I will sooner, rather than later, have to supply a mobile version of the same that works on every iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. that incorporates all the values of my flagship product.
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Well we all know that the market for mobile applications is here at last. Just have a look at the proliferation of iPhone applications to see what we are talking about or even the number of people fiddling about with their handsets on the train home on non-conversational pursuits. From the consumers perspective the question of  whether or not to use mobile applications is not in doubt but from a brands viewpoint the question of “what is our mobile strategy” is a more thorny issue. Firstly 9 out 10 brands do not even have a mobile strategy because they have seldom been able to answer the question of “what is it and why do I need one” in the first place.  Once the more innovative organisations have asked themselves this question they are down to the how, what, where and why and that’s where the real fun starts.
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The mobile industry is now completing a huge shift in its attitude toward mobile data. Until pretty recently, the prevailing attitude among mobile operators was that data was a disappointment. It had been hyped for a decade, and although there were some successes, it had never lived up to the huge growth expectations that were set at the start of the decade. Most operators viewed it as a nice incremental add-on rather than the driver of their businesses.

But in the last year or so, the attitude has shifted dramatically from “no one is using mobile data” to “oh my God, there’s so much demand for mobile data that it’ll destroy the network.” A lot of this attitude shift was caused by the iPhone, which has indeed overloaded some mobile networks. But there’s also a general uptick in data usage from various sources, and the rate of growth seems to be accelerating.

The increased forecasts are driven by a couple of simple observations:
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I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about my new iPhone. It is a thing of beauty that I, quite literally, take to bed with me and, more than once, have found myself licking with affection. When I finally converted from my totally unusable Sony Ericsson, I was accused of simply being a sheep and following the herd, but I care not a jot, I’m in love. The best part of course, is that I don’t have the slightest inkling how to use the damn thing and am only just starting to discover the possibilities. Which are endless.

My wife has already banned me from holding it when I’m talking to her because, apparently, I’m more interested in the content on my phone. She actually hides it when we have visitors to the house because, “Sitting on the sofa with your phone and grunting occasionally does not count as joining the conversation…” Of course, I am actually fully engaged in the conversation, just not hers.
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A few days ago AdMob announced that they had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for €500 million (http://bit.ly/3V4lal).  And recently Facebook announced that in it’s first month their mobile site had 65 million hits (http://bit.ly/MRwip).  This is very exiting news for all of us at Mobestar and indeed any of the other ‘mobile’ suppliers who have been toiling away for years without getting their just reward.

For many years I have been hitting my head against a brick wall only to discover how hard it was.  The company had produced innovative mobile products for years and sold them to equally innovative brands only to discover a marked slowness of uptake by the end user.  However, my excitement, whilst possibly tempered in the last years, has now been reinvigorated by regular good news events that mobile is finally happening.
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The long awaited day is finally here and we are very pleased to announce the release of our new product mLite™ – an easy-to-use, cost effective and budget-friendly application that will allow you to make the most out of the mobile web or will at least let you determine whether the hype is worth the column inches. Having been involved in a number of ‘hi-tech’ product launches in the past it has always been difficult from a customer’s viewpoint to determine what is real and what is brochure-ware without actually using the product. When once a humble photo copier salesman my employer launched a new personal colour copier – which only became so once you had personally removed the toner cartridge and replaced it with either a red, blue or brown one at the added risk and probable result of getting the stuff all over you.
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It can be as simple as putting your website onto the mobile, extending an application onto the handset, or increasing the reach of your proposition to the ‘Y’ generation.

Apparently the world’s 3 billion mobile phone users should all be enjoying the multi-layered benefits provided by the advanced state of today’s global infrastructure – wrong ! You only have to go onto a limited number of mobile web sites to get the real picture – bad response time, illegible graphics, little or no interactivity etc. etc. There are of course one or two exceptions to the rule but by and large there is a paucity of mobile sites offering good two way traffic. So why is all this so difficult when the technology has been available for years?
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