Unless you’ve been living under a pretty big rock for the last three months you’ll know that the eyes of the world will be turning towards Britain this Friday when Prince William will marry Catherine Middleton. The wedding, which will take place at Westminster Abbey, will be a fabulously expensive affair, but is also expected to generate up to £1bn from extra tourist revenues and sales of memorabilia. Even conservative estimates put the likely television/online audience of the wedding above 1 billion people around the planet and hundreds of thousands more are expected to line the route between Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.

According to a survey conducted by Antenna earlier this year, 1 in 4 British and 1 in 5 US consumers are using the mobile internet on a daily basis. With the mobile internet increasingly taking on a role more like that of the internet internet, it is a fair bet that the mobile internet will play a big part in the way the public views Friday’s pomp and circumstance. In all likelihood, the Royal Wedding will be the biggest mobile internet ‘event’ of all time, with users streaming video of the ceremony, sharing pictures, using social media like Twitter and Facebook to commentate on the event in tandem with their friends, and of course, texting and making phone calls about it.

If you need any further proof about the public’s willingness to ‘mobilize’ the Royal Wedding, check out the number of third-party mobile applications that have been built to celebrate on the nuptials; at present there are 68 such applications for the iPhone alone and another 30 for the Android platform! Needless to say these apps offer wildly different experiences – from keeping up with the news via BBC America’s Royal Insider to watching a cartoon of the story of the couple’s relationship to enjoying the sight of a rather irreverent pair of ‘Wills & Kate bouncing heads’.

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Back in December I made a series of predictions for 2011. Let’s look at two in particular, numbers 2 and 3–predictions for Top Chef and Top Tablet.

The number 2 prediction was that Richard Blais would win Top Chef All-Stars on Bravo TV. I really wasn’t going out on the limb here, considering that many TC fans considered him to be the best contestant to never win it all–or maybe even the best contestant period. The competition was fierce and there were times that I thought he was going to pack his knives, but he really stepped it up. If you’re a fan of the show, you know that Richard is one of the most intense and self-critical chefs and if he had lost I swear he would’ve had a panic attack! Luckily he won and I can’t wait to try his food one of these days.

The number 3 prediction was that the RIM PlayBook would revitalize RIM and would actually outnumber iPads at airports. Well, the PlayBook just launched (finally!) and although there’s seven more months left in the year, Steve Jobs can rest easy that my prediction probably won’t come true.

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As I interact with customers, partners and everybody else I notice that many of these interactions involve mobility (I actually do have conversations about other things too). The odd thing is that many people already have a very good understanding of “mobility” without realizing it. I’m usually credited with the mobility vision that we end up with but it isn’t just me that contributes to that vision.

I once had a coworker who made the statement, “If you are a customer of a cable TV company, you are an expert in field service…” I thought that was one of the strangest comments I’d ever heard. I couldn’t see how the two were related and more importantly, expert is a hugely overused term. His logic was that if you have ever had to call a cable company for service you know all you need to know about field service through that interaction. While you may be a victim of some shoddy cable company’s process you can’t claim to be an expert at anything (short of having the patience of a saint).

The same can be said about “mobility”. If you spend any time working out in the field, away from your desk, at a customer’s location or a wide array of other places you know a substantial amount of what you need to have a successful mobility approach. Here’s what I mean, if you were at a customer’s location and suddenly found yourself saying, ”I wish I had access to that system, information, order history, fill-in-the-blank,” you have the basis of your mobility needs. Anything that prevents you from being effective while you are away from your desk becomes a true mobility need.

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