Phonetainment...and mobile musings

There are thousands of apps to show the computing profess of the touch based mini computers from graphic intensive video games to professional slide makers but the point is out of thousands of those applications each person uses few and the firms that are trying to reach their consumers need to target their advertising dollars to a person and not an audience. It took me a short time to download a music sequencing application on Android and program a few bars. About 5 years ago, this would have been unthinkable and cost me an arm and a leg in software and hardware bundle, but today I spent my coffee money on a recurring happiness.

Mobile to business is same as wheels were to business earlier. The smart connected devices make targeted advertising easier in certain sense, since the user location can be triangulated and also the fact that the retailers warming up to free in store WiFi for their customers will lock in the user location to that store making it much easier to provide customized offers based on user shopping history or their location within the store. A device that has the computing power of a reasonable desktop computer coupled with WiFi capability and broadband data connection makes a very informed consumer. Approaching the consumer with the right channel is of utmost important, specially when the operating system and respective mobile devices are fragmented over regions.

I was reading AdMob metrics highlights and mobile developer survey from Appcelerator and there are some interesting details. For example thinking of iOS from Apple, the first thing that comes to mind is iPhone, and then the iPAD depending upon which line you were standing in last time. But in reality iPod touch still makes a large portion of Apple device usage. The access to broadband is also divided among WiFi users and WAN users thereby signifying usage patterns based on location/connection, since neither of the two technologies is available everywhere. Android has surpassed iPhone in the smartphone market share but in reality, the iOS devices lead the Android devices 2:1 ratio in US and 3.5 to 1 ratio worldwide. With the incoming onslaught of Honeycomb, WebOS, QnX and WP7 tablets/phones, these ratios will change, but with iPhone5, iPAD2 and "mini me" of iPhone coming, the balance will remain in Apple's favor.

Based on Appcelerator survey of mobile developers the interest in iPAD and iPhone app development remains more than for Android based devices. But the landscape will slowly morph into a tightly packed space with Android, Windows phone 7, WebOS and Blackberry. I am sure that many of the newly energized WP7 developers will jump into foray with the Nokia and Microsoft alliance along with the two companies themselves putting their developers to this task. The appcelarator mobile developer survey divides the developer landscape in three tiers Leaders (iPhone, Android, and iPad), up & comers (Blackberry and Windows Phone), and laggards (Symbian, Palm, Meego, and Kindle). The main theme remains that applications are becoming table stakes for the survival of platforms because the device is now a broad service platform and apps are the front face of those services. The adoption of hardware devices drives advertising as well as technology infrastructure of enterprises that have to factor in the hazards of supporting increasingly mobile work force which is blending consumer devices with work.

Smart interaction with such a consumer can be a deciding factor for hyper competitive industries which vie for similar pie of consumer segment with more or less same offerings. One need only look at any of the Mobile projections from industry analysts for smart mobile devices to mobile Internet usage for the next 5 years and one can see an exponential growth. The speed of technology evolution around mobile devices is evident from TI announcing OMAP5 when the OMAP4 devices have barely surfaced, not forgetting, Qualcomm, Nvidia and forgetting Intel. The focus has clearly shifted from PC and online to mobile and always on.This is transformational time and companies that are even in the early majority of adopters will reap the benefits of their efforts; the area under the curve for innovators and early adopters has long been filled. This is not simple specially for global firms because different device manufacturers have dominant market share in specific regions and with that comes variety of software platforms and usage habits, crucial to deciding upon which mobile channels to follow. For example in Africa and Asia Nokia has the lead market share, they are on Symbian platform but Nokia recently chose Microsoft Windows Phone 7 for their next generation smartphone OS, how will this effect the usage habits if at all of users in those regions.

Well, if CES and NRF were any indication of trends we can guess the talk of the floor on MWC and it will be all about the big fat data pipes and the containers they load up for the consumers to slurp all that data resulting in consumers knowing what they want; "more" than the marketing machines...or do they!.