Mobile computing was a segment that was very much in Yahoo!’s roadmap when I worked there back in 2005. The problem with mobile was the variety of cell phone manufacturers and carriers which made it close to impossible to develop anything that looked like something useful.
Fast forward an outstanding 4 years and we see a completely different picture, thanks to the two major punches we’ve all witnessed: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. It is not crazy to know that mobile is poised to surpass PC’s as the main consumption point for users. Just read this quote from Google’s CFO in their most recent earnings call:
On a quarter over quarter basis, mobile searches grew 30% on Google. It tells you something about the mobile space, the smartphones, and how they are transformative. They are basically transforming how people live on a mobile basis. If we move forward the adoption of these mobile phones by lowering the cost because it is open source, think of how many searches that will produce.
Google’s CEO mentioned on the same conference call that “Android Adoption is About to Explode“. Some reference that Schmidt was talking about Verizon’s launch of the Motorola Droid, the best competitor, according to people who have tested it, to the iPhone.
I disagree. I think Schmidt is looking at the big picture.
Santiago Martinez, a good friend of mine from Argentinian web development firm Cuoma recently told me how they had taken down a section on their site offering iPhone application development because they were getting hammered with client requests.
I have to say mobile apps are not where they should be. Most of them are games and other leisure-based things. I still can’t see how Foursquare can become a useful app (to be honest, I haven’t been able to check in any place yet, because none of them are “fashionable”) although I can see them be successful and even profitable.
But I think we will see Twitter, Facebook and Google pushing with far more impetus in the near future in using the benefits of mobile computing, and so should your startup if you are thinking of having any chance of making it:
- Ubiquity: users are carrying the computer with them and it’s on at all times, which makes it the perfect real time node
- Geolocalization: the phone knows at all times where it is, which makes it perfect for business discovery or social graph leveraging (are my friends around?)
- Common Operating Systems: yes, you have two right now (iPhone and Android) but it’s much better than the 15 different cellphone units we had in the past
- Extension: If your app lives on the PC, you can extend it so that user is hooked 24 hours a day instead of 8.
Users are complaining that mobile applications are too slow. This is something carriers and unit manufacturers are working feverishly to solve with 4G and new versions of handsets and operating systems.
But the potential is there for you to blow up your competition. He is surely working on a mobile app as we speak.
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