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 [...]

Like the flying car, teleportation, and artificial intelligence, the concept of micropayments has been espoused for years by some futurists — and many crackpots — as not just a good idea but something that will do nothing less than transform society. Others have been less than thrilled with the idea. But what has happened over the last 10 years or so since real investments were made (and almost without exception, lost) on the concept is startling. Micropayments are fast becoming a part of the fabric of the commercial internet, although in very practical context and mostly due to two companies - Apple and Amazon - who are competing for the future of digital music sales.

The comic artist Scott McCloud made a name for himself during the early 2000’s with unique and visually compelling arguments in his own web comic form for why micropayments were the future of at least one type of digital content: web comics, drawing the ire of everyone from Clay Shirky to Tycho of Penny Arcade (many original links of what became one of the web’s legendary flame wars are dead but see Wired’s coverage of McCloud from 2001 here). Micropayments - a simple and innovative idea in principle if not in practice - has been one of the [...]