What can we expect next in mobile?

At day one of the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco, a panel is asked the question “what can we expect next in mobile?” A great panel, assembled from Directors and C-level executives across the mobile market, who gave us the benefit of their experience.

Why are you famous?

The moderator asked the panel members to introduce themselves by describing why they are famous - so I’ve included a summary of that answer beside each panelist’s name!

Moderator: Tony Fish from AMF Ventures - mobile web advocate and mobile business creator

Pankaj Kedia, Director Global Ecosystem Programs, Intel - 13 years in Intel, 12 years working on Mobile.
Roy Satterthwaite, VP of Business Development, Opera Software - helping make the web browser the platform for mobile apps
Jackie Lu, Director of Strategy and Planning, Sprint - famous for being the only woman in the panel (her words, not mine!)
Fabio Sisinni, Director of Paypal Mobile - for delivering products and making money
Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless - for delivering location on the iPhone

Mod: What do you want mobile to be in the next 5 years? What do you think the gap is that you’ll get?

Roy - We want the mobile web to be synonymous with the consumers view of what the world-wide web is on their desktop. But because of sacrifices the industry had to make to get things to fit on the mobile platform, and operate within mobile network latency, we probably won’t see that in the next five years. Opera thinks that within that time we’ll see a certain amount of seamless data sharing between mobile, TV and on-line… but it will take time.

Pankaj - There are about 5 billion websites. 100,000 websites made every day. You can create a website overnight on a Dell computer… and people all over the world can access it from a million different computers the next day.  But that’s not how it works right now on the mobile! We need to combat fragmentation on the mobile web. I expect that in 5 years, we’ll get to a point where things will no longer be fragmented in the mobile market.

Jackie - I expect that mobility will be an integral part of business communication teleservices. I think businesses will start to cut their cables and go completely wireless, and mobile applications will become a more integral part of managing businesses.

Fabio - the user will be able to pay smoothly for anything. Removing friction from payment, and providing a safe environment, is essential. Pankaj was talking about defragmentation - we see a future where a merchant can create a mobile website and start taking payments within an hour. I think we’re getting closer to this. We’ve been working with Ebay, and we saw the iPhone client generate over 380 million dollars in 9 months. When you make the experience seamless and painless, people will use it.

Ted - Skyhook would like to see the carriers continue to operate great networks, continue to put up towers… and do nothing else. That’s what we desire, but I’m not sure that’s what will happen! We see innovation happening at such a pace at the app level and the device level, that we really want carriers to make the networks better, and other than that not get in the way.

Mod: Do you think openness will really work? Apple works, but it’s not open. Open or closed?

Ted - we’re not so much invested in openness… what we’re saying is let the device guys lead the way for now. The developers are making money from device app stores, not operator stores.

Jackie - it’s not so important to us… the question is how do we leverage the mobile web to offer business advantages and tools to our business customers? The consumer world is very hectic, and I’m not sure developers on their own can make money without a larger support structure. From the operator perspective, we don’t care if it’s open or closed, so long as it works and it makes money.

Roy - there seems to be a debate of apps vs. browser, and I don’t think that’s an issue. The browser platform works as a great platform for the user, but it works great for apps as well - widgets that are downloaded and work on a browser. Apps are definitely going to live for the forseeable future, but browsers are agnostic.

Ted - right now if you want to take advantage of the cooler functions of the phone itself, like the accelerometer, you can’t use the browser for that. You need to develop an app.

Mod: What do you see as the barriers to the some of the visions we’ve discussed?

Pankaj - let’s look at a vision. First, open vs. closed. If you want to be able to scale to 100s of millions of units, it has to be open. If you stay closed, you can definitely hit single figure millions… but you need to be open to get your product EVERYWHERE. As for barriers - there is significant fragmentation in the space, to the extent that there are multiple consortiums trying to reduce it, and they are fighting with each other to figure out how! This kind of thing hampers openness. As for the second vision - browser vs. app. I think this is the wrong way to look at it. Applications are applications, how you access them is irrelevant. But embracing open standards is important. There are just too many people arguing. Ten years from now, will every device access the same web? I would say absolutely yes. But I doubt that will be the case 5 years from now.

Roy - Some of the barriers that existed last year might not be a problem going forward. For example, the barrier of browser developers not getting access to phone features. This isn’t true going forward. The Joint Innovation Lab, that has members including Vodafone and China Mobile, announced earlier this year that it will allow browser apps to access about 12 or so device APIs. A big barrier we see still is lack of adoption and too many options in the industry, there’s too much confusion.

Fabio - Open vs. closed is the main barrier in my mind. We’re moving away from closed gatekeepers, where the time to market was very long and only big developers could afford to release apps. The current payment method is great for purchasing digital goods over your iPhone, but a more open system could allow more things to be bought and paid for over mobile. The larger your monetisation model, the more innovation you’ll see.

Q&A from Cisco - a lot of the conversation here seems to be about the mobile web as an extension of the on-line web. What are the likely scenarios for when we’ll see the mobile web become something we use to interact with the world around us, rather than just be a way to interact with content we’ve put on-line?

Jackie - I think it has already happened. You’ve seen a wave of mobile enterprise apps that are used to automate paper functions for companies. These are solutions that can only be applied by mobile. You’ll continue to see this happen.

Pankaj - The discussion shouldn’t be “is the web written for mobile, and how do you mobilize it?”, it should be “how can I create content and information once and interact with it on both web and on-line”? The ways you want to access data over your phone are different, but the data should remain the same.

The Quote of the Panel came from Tony: “I understand that Intel wants mobiles to become more powerful, because that way you get to put more Intel chips in them. That’s fine. But I want my phone to become LESS powerful… and only have to charge it once a year, because having to charge it three times a day really hacks me off”