the reflexions insider

If you haven’t yet seen it I recommend you take 20 minutes and review Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker’s presentation from last week’s Web 2.0 Summit. Her focus on macro trends in the tech sector and mobile in particular are insightful and compelling.

We’ve been working with a few different mobile platforms recently and have seen an increasing level of interest among our clients in exploring what a mobile strategy should look like.

Of course, mobile is just one piece of the larger strategy puzzle (one common mistake: not everyone should have their own iPhone app). And anticipating what’s on the horizon is key to leveraging trends, rather than reacting to them.

With that in mind, here are some trends and predictions that we think will be relevant for the mobile landscape over the next four quarters:

• Location-aware apps combined with push notification services will add a new dimension to consumer marketing campaigns and social networking.
• Peer-to-peer wifi is scheduled to become a formal standard in the middle of 2010. This will usher in a new wave of apps that can communicate directly from device-to-device, and will enable apps that leverage “mesh” networking and new kinds of peer-to-peer gaming (imagine playing a distributed game in real life where you can compete with or exchange virtual tokens with strangers on the street). This is also noteworthy because it will chip away at carriers’ role as intermediary between users, albeit slightly.
• The iPhone will overtake Blackberry with the biggest smartphone marketshare, and will remain the dominant platform for developers (see this analysis on SAI about how iPhone is closing in on Blackberry’s share). Android, through its partnerships with Motorola and Verizon and embrace of open standards, will become a serious competitor.
• “Augmented reality” will still remain a fringe technology until two things happen: a) Apple opens the iPhone video stream to apps, and b) there is a better solution to user interaction than holding your phone in front of you (retina projection anyone?).

Finally, here are some insightful thoughts from Fred Wilson on openness and portability as a prerequisite for innovation on the mobile web. I couldn’t agree with him more.

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