Mobile Mastery

Guidance from a Mobile Guru

As 2012 quickly approaches, all minds start shifting to what will move the market in the year to come.  As someone who’s constantly looking at the next wave of technology and implications on the mobile industry, this is a fun time for me to hone in on what is driving mobile technology innovation.  Without further ado, here are a few mobile related technologies I expect to be realized in the next few years.

• Mobile commerce and m-payments represent a hot but fragmented space, with a slew of the new tech innovations for these areas being incorporated into mobile devices. NFC chips are part of it, but further down the road we can expect to see Micro-SD proximity solutions, which are being trialed in devices now, as well as enhanced bump capabilities and new kinds of bar code scanning and shopping solutions. Mobile wallets will also be continuing to make a big show as companies across the spectrum – including Google, Apple, banks, credit card companies and even carriers – try to figure out how they will solve the problem best and create new revenue streams from innovative payment services.  

• Sensors and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication are also growing rapidly and a killer application we expect to see here will be mobile point-of-sale.  M2M capabilities will be increasingly incorporated into devices as they follow the standard evolution of new technologies – starting as peripherals and now starting to be incorporated directly into the hardware of mobile devices.  Sensors will be used for some interesting security functionality as well, making it easier to lock down phones in the event they are lost or compromised.  Think biometrics with finger swipe technology and voice recognition that can be used to lock and unlock a device and device-resident data.

• Speech recognition has piqued consumer interest with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S.  We can expect to see speech recognition and virtual assistants being used in many mobile apps and integrated with mobile search for powerful mobile web and application capabilities. The technology has already come a long way in overcoming challenges of dialects, accents, and speaking styles, and will continue to be a growth area and drive mobile adoption.

• Many companies have a mobile strategy and many more realize they need one.  However, as the demand for mobile content shows no sign of slowing down, many organizations have missed one key aspect in their mobile strategy — mobile content distribution. The challenge many businesses will face is how to get content AND apps to customers AND employees on a myriad of devices, something beyond the capabilities of many traditional CMS’. The importance of mobile search and the growth of mobile web are changing how people interact with brands and shifting their content expectations, which in turn are changing the way businesses must solve this problem.  Mobile content hubs, with capabilities beyond a traditional CMS, will provide a single channel for making content available and help make distribution strategies a reality.  Furthermore, content distribution should take user information and context into account to tune content to the user at the right time and place to have optimal impact.  Certainly consumer and customer opt-in programs can enrich this user experience.  Both classes of users – those that have registered for specialized content and those that have not need to be considered in a comprehensive mobile strategy.

• Enterprise social will also make a major showing in 2012. The recent successful IPO of Jive, and market movement by other enterprise social companies like Yammer and Spigit will continue to drum up interest in these segments, and you can expect that some of the big players will start making acquisitions in this space to compete and gain market share. As companies strive to help employees collaborate better internally offerings in this space will improve and start to gain significant traction.