I wrote a blog post some time ago about the iPhone being a catalyst to the growth of mobile media content. A year later it remains a fact that smartphone access to mobile content and applications are in hockey stick growth. Even Morgan Stanley predicts that in the next five years the web will be accessed by more mobile users than PC users. Bottom line, if you are a media company, content owner, developer, or entrepreneur you should be thinking about, learning from, or implementing your mobile strategy to compete and monetize. Yes, I agree, there has been a lot of historic “hurry-up-and-wait” related to mobile content distribution. However, 2009 numbers are healthy and having that empirical evidence should motivate you to act accordingly in 2010.
I think Kevin Nakao (VP of Mobile & Business Search for Whitepages.com) has it right in his Mashable posting on Mobile Advertising. He focuses on several issues and opportunities related to mobile content distribution and customer acquisition. Given my background I receive lots of questions about mobile content distribution, especially with the latest iPhone app frenzy. Yes, all the applications are great, and for me it was about time. However, I will use this post to express my suggestions to those making investments in time, capital, and mindshare to carefully look at the data and be strategic. In other words, build your mobile strategy with a customer point of view, rather than only drinking the Apple Kool-Aid.
Although Apple now offers 126,939 applications available for download in the iTunes App store (as of 1/3/2010,) commands 41.5% of US smartphone handset data requests, and is on track to sell over 40 million iPhone and iPod touches this year worldwide there are sizable amounts of mobile data consumers not served by Apple.
Why you ask?
- AT&T is the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US and their 3G coverage is limited, excluding 25% of the US population. I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials.
- Google’s Android is showing the most sizable penetration and likely surpassed shipping over 1 million devices as of the end of 2009. Whitepages.com is predicting that Android will penetrate roughly 6% of Sprint, Verizon, and TMobile customers by the end of 2010, representing 10.1 million Android devices.
- Apple and AT&T (similar to Blackberry apps) require that each application is submitted for review and approval before it can be exclusively sold in the iTunes store. These applications can take weeks to get approved. Android and Palm do not require this blessing from Steve Jobs and it remains a point of frustration for many.
- The iPhone currently allows only one application to run at a time. Imagine you could only run one application at a time on your office computer. In other words, you would have to quit typing that document in MS Word to write an email. Then quit Outlook to surf the web… super frustrating. This is the reality today with the iPhone. If you are listening to Pandora and want to check your email, you lose your Pandora connection and the music stops. Palm and Android both allow multiple applications to run at the same time. As Kevin points out correctly, 2010 will likely be the year when mobile location-based services see substantial growth. Without Apple figuring out how to let the iPhone freely run multiple applications at the same time, location-based services within applications could be crippled.
- On 12/18/09 Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry) reported stellar earnings, selling 10 million devices in that quarter. Interestingly, these devices were primarily purchased by non-business users outside of North America.
- Mobile users are starting to get used to seeing mobile web sites that look great on their devices. It often raises the frustration levels when popular sites don’t sniff the device and thus provide a weak interface to their respective content. This trend of delivering great mobile web experiences is getting more and more popular and yielding strong performance and monitization benefits for media companies and publishers. It begs the age-old question, “is there a need for a device-specific client-based application or can I do everything on the web?” Aside from fueling Apple’s business model, I suspect this trend to continue in scale making AT&T more of a dumb pipe.
- Significant international competitors in the mobile handset business (Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Sony, Motorola, LG, etc.) have seen Apple eat their lunch over the past year. Some of these companies still command double digit market share positions in the worldwide smartphone business and I expect an aggressive 2010 where many capitalize on Android as a strong competitor to the iPhone.
The moral of this story is not to ignore the iPhone/iTouch as a wildly popular platform, rather embrace a more holistic view of where and how to target all potential customers in 2010 with great mobile content and technologies. Look at other carriers in the US and abroad, build for Android, use the web to deploy your content/applications, etc.
Good luck.
