Institute For The Future

Food for thought on the mobile Web

From Eric Peterson, a web analytics guy who Richard mentioned at our last meeting:

"While I know that Judah [one of Peterson's colleagues] is all hopped up on the notion of the semantic web, after having traveled to Tokyo and Europe in the past month, I find myself absolutely convinced that the next technology era will be characterized by our collective ability to access the Internet anyplace, anytime, using so many devices we begin to look back on computers much the same way young people do television today ˜ as something nice to use when YouTube is unavailable. Rolf Skyberg, a disruptive innovator from eBay who I met in Rotterdam a few weeks back, called it „digital ubiquity‰ ˜ the point where we forget that the Internet actually exists and take our ability to access information completely for granted.

"Given so many sexy alternatives ˜ 3D web, transforming the Internet into a database, artificial intelligence, and the such ˜ why am I so convinced that in the next three years we‚ll be talking about Web 3.0 when we talk about mobile phones and non-traditional browsers?

"Easy. The financial opportunity available via the mobile Internet makes the billions transacted today look like pocket change.

"Think about it:

* Most people in the U.S. haven‚t seen QR codes in advertising yet, but they will.

* Most mobile users around the globe don‚t have access to a brilliant browsing experience through their phones, but they will.

* Most marketers aren‚t advertising on mobile platforms yet, but they will.

* The most-loved company in the world isn‚t in the mobile market yet, but they will be.

* Most mobile platforms aren‚t passing the phone number (or a derivative) along with HTTP requests, but they certainly could.

* Most mobile platforms aren‚t passing along GPS coordinates along with HTTP requests, but they certainly could.

"Just think for a minute about how your browsing experience might change if the web sites you visited remembered you and delivered a tailored experience based on your demographic profile (theoretically available via your phone number), your browsing history (accurate because you‚re not deleting your phone number) and your specific geographic location when you make the request?

"Now think about how the advertising buying experience would change if the same were true, not to mention behavioral targeting. I mean, given GPS and demographic data, the behavior being tracked could be „works downtown during the day, checks Facebook on his phone often, lives in the suburbs, surfs sports scores from his neighborhood bar.‰ The Starbucks web site could have a link at the top with a coupon to save $1 on my double-tall non-fat latte in stores 1 block, 2 blocks, and 5 blocks from my current location; the Best Buy web site could have an in-store promotion for the store I am standing in, targeted to my age and gender; and my search engine could disambiguate my searches based on my demographic profile, my geographic location, and my recent search history to serve me paid search ads designed to influence my geo-spatial movement, not just my likelihood to click.

"Jeepers, huh?

"Sure there are privacy issues, but given the intensely personal relationship most people have with their cell phones, and the fact that far more people in the world have mobile phones than computers (Gartner estimates 271 million units sold to end-users by Q2 2007) it is easy to make a convincing case for mobile computing and digital ubiquity defining the next technology era, much like social networking, AJAX, XML, and mashed-up business models define the current Web 2.0 era we‚re living in today."