Strand Consulting is one of the analysts who really get mobile, so it was interesting to read over at 160 Characters their take on the current 7 most overhyped mobile technologies. It’s also nice to see that their views are pretty much aligned with MobHappy’s - or should that be the other way around?
Click on the link for the full list. But they’re very sceptical about Mobile TV (no one has the right business model yet), advertising’s contribution to operator ARPU, which I wrote about a few weeks back, anything but flat-rate priced mobile IM (some operators still think they can charge SMS prices per message) and legacy Internet plays thinking that the key to Underpants Gnome-like mobile wealth is deals with operators.
The big one they’ve missed in my view is dear old Location Based Services, which apart from nav systems and asset tracking (admittedly pretty big markets in their own right) has yet to hit its stride with either usable technology or compelling use cases.
Here’s an interesting quote I just dug up:
Location based services are certainly intriguing and it’s logical to assume that consumers will want to use their phone to find out more information about their area, if there’s no other obvious source.
However, we remain a little sceptical as to how many consumers will actually use these kinds of services in the next 5 years or so. For a start, consumers have to remember to use them in the first place, which means that the inertia effect is working against the promoter of the services – always a potentially fatal problem. This means, at the very least a considerable investment in marketing the services to ensure that consumers understand it, understand how to use it and remember how to access it. This is not an insignificant task.
A more interesting application of location is when a promoter can identify (via an operator) when a consumer is in the vicinity of something they may want to know about, thus allowing a push based message. However, this type of service is still some way away.
Our view is to ignore location for the time being. Mobile messaging offers such a rich seam to mine that location could just prove an un-necessary distraction for the time being.
It could have been written today given the state of LBS, but this is actually a quote from the book I wrote with Ajit Jaokar back in 2002. I’d pretty much stand by it for another 3 years at least (despite the hype), adding the mobile web to that rich seam ready to be exploited.
So, any other over-hyped mobile tech out there? Please leave a comment.
Sat nav on a phone/PDA seems like a good location application.
It’s a massive growth market on its own, so mobile can ride that wave of demand.
VZ Navigator and O2’s Orbit with CoPilot Live have been quite succesful.
Admittedly, the cost of the underlying data from Naveq and TeleAtlas make it difficult to massively undercut TomTom etc, but still… not total hype
Gabriel - I agree. As I wrote above, I excluded nav and asset tracking from my bearish view of the market. Admittedly, this little like the “What have Romans ever given us?” sequence in Life of Brian….”All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Russell
Another one I like on Orange UK is a London journey planner service… it’s mainly for finding train times and stuff, but a nice touch is that it automatically locates your nearest train or tube stops. It’s a free service offered on the portal.
I’ve read about your experiences with LBS before… so I’ll defer to that.
But still, i’m intrigued what could happen when GPS chips are common place and developers can build “over-the-top” apps that use location in some way… maybe these won’t be huge money makers, but they could be useful and fun.
Perhaps we are to hung up and LBS as being a separate entity and we should take it as part of providing greater personalisation of services through contextualisation. Whilst the original list dismisses IM as overhyped I can see an IM with added context such as the whereabouts of family and friends as being useful extension.
The most over hyped mobile technology right now has got to be femtocells imho. When meeting between closed walls, the industry (i.e. most vendors + MO) recognise the numbers of hurdles to make femto a success (security, end to end service, risk of other technology, etc…) . In the long term, these hurdles might of course be addressed and that is what we wish to the industry as a whole but as Dean Bubley rightly questions, what about the simple use case where there are multiple providers into a single home? How many femto boxes would be needed? Who subsidise what?
[...] Buckley von MobHappy hat mich mit seinen Gedanken in seinem Artikel "Most Overhyped Mobile Tech" inspiriert und ich habe mich gefragt, was aus meiner Sicht zur Zeit die am meisten [...]
So what isn’t overhyped. Text messaging. More people have more access on more phones to text messaging than anything else. Other than voice of course.
Hi Russell and all,
Jonathan, like the idea of thinking about what isnt hyped enough - and i would have to suggest ‘real world connection’ and specifically the use of picture recognition in marketing collateral distribution! (ahem,:-))
Scott.
Regarding UMA, the question posed by 160 Characters is “why should operators invest in infrastructure to be able to offer their customers a discount?”
The answer is: Because at least one of their competitors will do it first, probably gaining market share in the process. Also, competitors will not only be other mobile operators, but
WLAN operators (for example) as well.
It’s a bit like asking “why should supermarkets build new stores to be able to offer their customers a discount?”