MEF's Crystal Ball

On 06/03/2009, in Uncategorized, by Volker

Industry body MEF had put out its top 10 predictions for the year a few weeks ago (inexplicably missed by me; well it was somewhere around Mobile World Congress, so probably at least excusable), which they gathered from their members and deep discussions around this. They believe that 2009 – recession and all – will be the year in which mobile entertainment (if you count everything in, apparently a $25bn industry) will start to deliver returns.

So now, without any further ado, here are the predictions:
  • The ‘iPhone effect’ -Mobile applications have emerged as a new content category and the mobile internet will finally come of age
  • Greater value and transparency for consumers will help sustain demand in 2009
  • Some delay in the proliferation of mobile advertising
  • Telcos begin to acts as enablers for the Entertainment industry with services such as billing, authentication and zero tariff data
  • The emerging dominance of services that operate at a multi-platform level
  • The rise of ring back tones
  • Social networking becomes an important driver of mobile entertainment consumption
  • 2009 will be the year that mobile video really takes off
  • Emerging economies will become an increasingly important driver for mobile entertainment worldwide
  • A proliferation of touch screen devices drives discoverability and content usage

Now, now. I am glad to see that a lot of this ties in with “what I have been saying all along”… ;-) But let’s have a closer look at a few of the points:
The iPhone effect. Yes, I have elaborated on this plenty a time, so I will only refer to previous posts, for instance here, here and here.
“Some” delays in mobile advertising. Also: dealt with on numerous occasions, and a while ago, too (see here and here)…
And now for a whole bunch of stuff that can, I believe, be grouped, namely greater (perceived?) value to consumers and carriers moving into smart-pipe models. The jury is still out on this, isn’t it? Although it has to be said that there seems to be a learning curve indeed. But is this from new-found wisdom or because of the fruity pain from the guys in Cupertino?
Another group: multi-platform services and social networking. I would class the latter as the shining beacon of the former: social networks do one thing. They connect the dots, they are the switchboards of the digital life. And since users per se do not really care on which screen this happens, a lot of them have seen significant value contributions from mobile (e.g. MySpace sees incredible growth rates).
So there you have it…
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"Recession? Where?" Asks the Smartphone…

On 03/03/2009, in Uncategorized, by Volker

I previously looked at recession-busting sectors and products, and here’s more proof that not all is bad: two reports point out that smartphones continue to outperform the market rather significantly, recording growth figures of 25.9% year-on-year in Europe; the growth for all of 2007 vs 2008 was even more impressive: they grew by 36.1%. In the US, smartphones increased their share of the overall mobile phone market from 12% in Q4/2007 to 25% a year later. Good numbers!

Half of the (US) smartphones now come with touchscreens, with 70% “instead” (?) having a QWERTY keyboard (my best guess is that this includes phones with a slide-out keyboard, such as the T-Mobile G1 or the Sony Ericsson Xperia).

So how come? The iPhone but also other devices like Blackberries, Nokia’s higher-end phones (e.g. the N95) have powerfully demonstrated that the use of a mobile for things other than using voice and SMS (and take the occasional snap with a so-so camera) is not the end of all things. The overall feature sets of smartphones but – possibly more importantly still – the overall user experience is generally significantly better on a fairly comprehensive scale, and this – in particular in times of recession – would suggest a much higher value for money (“if I pay £50, then I get 4x in value of what I would otherwise have.”): they now all contain decent cameras, enough storage to work as a decent MP3 player (or in Apple’s case even as an iPod…), they do e-mail, connect more effortlessly to the Internet, play more fulfilling games and generally provide a much richer content experience (did I just hear “widgets”?).
For the content industry, this is good news: more powerful devices are generally easier to address and provide a better route to transport brands and production values across to the small screen. The iPhone has shown (see e.g. here and here) that users DO use their phones for all sorts of things if one makes it easy for them. Therefore, the smarter the phone, the higher the consumption. Good, good!
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