And so, we come to the final few predictions I made, with my score running at 13 out of a maximum 14 points to date. How did I dio in the final stretch?
15. Adult services continue to quietly boom
Yes, this is continuing to boom as far as all the data I’ve seen, which I have to admit isn’t very much.
People often miss the point of mobile porn, pointing out tiny screen sizes as not being friendly to view images and video, for example. That’s like saying sms doesn’t work as it’s hard to input the text - if there a need for something, people will put up with poor experience and usability. Especially if that need is err…urgent.
What mobile can offer the adult services user is privacy, on two levels. Privacy from others viewing what you’ve been looking at (computers are often shared or tracked by IT departments), but also portable privacy - no one would think twice about popping into the loo with your mobile, whereas taking your laptop would raise a few eyebrows.
Points 1.
16. Cheaper calls, fixed price packages
I was wrong on this one, but I think it’ll happen this year - I was just a little ahead of the market. Watch out for an MVNO to start this inexorable trend.
What I said was that we’ll see an “all the voice and data you can eat for $50 a month” package? Or $25 or $100 maybe?”.
Still, no points for me on this one.
17. Java Portals
In the last two months of last year a load of brands announced that they too were launching their own Java portal and going direct to the market, cutting out the operators. This included no less than The Sun, MTV, GMTV (UK breakfast TV), Celador (Millionaire) and Endamol (Big Brother).
My prediction was that this would go strangely silent as they realised quite how difficult and therefore ridiculously expensive this would be. You see, despite Java purporting to be a common platform, it actually needs an awful lot of testing and tweaking to work on every handset.
The strange silence continues as I award myself a point, unless I’ve missed all the launches. I’m quite pleased with this one, as it went right against what everyone else was saying at the time.
18. WAP
I said it would continue to grow strongly. Latest stats say in the UK that it’s come up from 1.3 billion page impressions a month to 1.82 billion. But the MDA are a little lax at releasing the latest figures, so it’s probably significantly more.
Points: 1
19. Child Tracking Fails to Take Off
This sounds like it’s a parental dream - know where your little darling is whenever you feel the need.
Unfortunately, it’s flawed as a concept as you only know where the phone is, not the kid. Therefore, it’s next to useless in those cases when it would be most useful - when the child is abducted or when the little fella doesn’t want you to know that he’s off partying, not doing homework with a study buddy.
It’s certainly failed to get traction in the UK and I haven’t heard any success stories, so I’ll claim my point.
So there you have it, 17 from 19. Please feel free to comment or critique.
This is my second to last post for 2005, though Carlo and I will be posting virtually over the holiday period until our return on January 9th. This means that we’ll be posting our predictions for 2006 during that time.
My final post will be the Year End Carnival of the Mobilists - look out for it later, together with some special guest stars!