Over Christmas and New Year, GoMo News is posting articles written for us by leaders and innovators in the mobile space. Start-ups and established businesses from all over the industry have sent us piece looking back at the year that was, and ahead to 2010. This article is from NewBay, the leader in digital lifestyle solutions for operators, enables subscribers to create, store, view and share user generated content.
There are over 80 million registered users using NewBay’s award-winning LifeCache, and LifeCache stores over 4 billion pieces of user-generated content. These factors underpin NewBay’s leadership position in the digital lifestyle space and afford NewBay high visibility with regards to key trends shaping the industry. The following are some of NewBay’s predictions for 2010.
NewBay predicts that one of the key trends for 2010 will be the explosion in the volume of media, particularly video content, created on the mobile handset as the sophistication of camera phones continues to evolve.
Another key trend will be a significant rise in the amount of user generated (e.g. photos, videos, audio, documents) and premium content (e.g. DVDs, music, books) uploaded, securely stored and accessed from ‘the cloud’, as consumers increasingly expect to access all their digital content, anytime and anywhere from multiple devices. This trend is fuelled by the ready availability of high speed, always-on access to the Internet, both from desktop and other Internet connected devices, and the increased availability of smartphones. With the mobile being the principle on-the-go communication device, the handset will be both a key creator of and connector to this content. Next year, more operators will seek to leverage the opportunity presented by this trend. Expect to see more converged operators providing secure, cloud storage services with a seamless user-experience across multiple devices including handsets, PC and TV.
The growing number of cloud services will also facilitate and stimulate new means of communication from different devices e.g. publishing real time data such as scores directly from game consoles to social networks and the growth in social networking from the TV screen.
Operators looking to position themselves at the center of subscribers’ digital lives will increasingly embrace technology that supports rapid internet-style innovation. E.g. Technology that features easily accessible APIs, enabling the development of new applications, widgets, mash ups and solutions.
2010 will see a growth in the number of Developer Programmes offered by technology providers to reduce the time and risk involved in prototyping and bringing solutions to market.
