Go and take a look here for inspiration, provocation and a general sense of wonder at where we’re going with mobile on Spaceship Earth. It’s probably worth a few revisits as there’s a lot to take in on just one.

As I said, there is some really great stuff here — take a look, and weigh in with your thoughts and predictions for the next decade in the comments.

Mobile Trends 2020 includes contributions from oward Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Gerd Leonhard, Timo Arnall, Carlo Longino, Katrin Verclas, Atau Tanaka, Alan Moore, Marek Pawloski, Ajit Jaokar, Nicolas Nova, Inma Martinez, Tony Fish, Jonathan MacDonald, Willem Boijens, Carlos Domingo, Russ McGuire, Raimo van der Klein, Michael Breidenbruecker, Robert Rice, Steve O’Hear, Ted Morgan, Martin Duval, Andreas Constantinou, Fabien Girardin, Matthäus Krzykowski, Rich Wong, Andy Abramson, Ilja Laurs, David Wood, Stefan Constantinescu, Henri Moissinac, Kevin C. Tofel, Enrique C. Ortiz, Felix Petersen, and Tom Hume

This week, we were asked the question “How do you think mobile phones will look like in 10 years?”.

This is something that I ponder quite a lot in the back of my brain and I thought I’d share my response here.

In 10 years, we’ll be well into the post PC era and laptops will seem as quaint and nostalgic as the ginormous brick phones of the 80s. We may even have blown ourselves up, been decimated by a new virus (manmade or otherwise) or even be in a post-Singularity world, in which case, all bets are off.

But assuming that the world progresses without a major Black Swan event (big assumption!), mobiles as visible, handheld devices will have disappeared. They’ll be replaced by a tiny ear piece, an equally tiny hand controller (let’s visualize that as a ring, for the sake of illustration) and a set of contact lenses or glasses, which will allow us to see three views, by simply changing our eyes’ focus; the web, the web overlayed onto the real world and the real world if anyone ever wants to go au naturel for some quirky reason.

Controlling these virtual mobiles will be by a mix of gestures and haptics, with a voice option for those of you reading this who never got the hang of fluent gesturespeak. A common sight will be middle aged people wondering around twitching, waving their arms around and bumping into things as they try to make a phone call. The froody 20 year olds will be in total command without apparently moving a muscle.

By that time, it’ll be impossible to live any kind of mainstream life without a mobile. Banking, payments, shopping, access to your house and car – all will be via your virtual mobile. All interfacing with Government bill be done via mobile too, including daily mandatory voting on key issues of the day as representative democracy is replaced by Direct Democracy – a result of the repeated parliamentary scandals of the Blair and succeeding Governments.

Over 50’s mainly opt to live in sheltered accommodation, which offer largely tech free environments, where they can be seen hunched over old-style netbooks playing Solitaire and wondering why the kids of today never reply to their emails.

Check out the other responses too.

7. Mobile Payments Gain Traction

Ultimately, I believe that the mobile will swallow up the credit card industry, just as it’s fundamentally changed the photo business and decimated alarm clock and calculator sales. But it’s going to be pretty tricky getting from where we are today to achieving this vision.

However, there are some really encouraging signs and I expect 2009 to show quiet, steady, growth, especially in developing markets, where there’s already a lot of traction.

I wrote about Crandy a few years back, describing this European-based payment provider as the “dark horse of mobile payments” and it’s continued to thrive, largely under the radar, quietly building a user base of 500,000+. That’s certainly impressive enough to build the foundations of a big business.

In the meantime, some of my colleagues at Forum Oxford (the free discussion forum), point to equally impressive case studies such as Kenya’s M-Pesa and India’s Hello Money. Both these enable peer-to-peer transactions at their core, especially facilitating migrant workers’ ability to send money home to their families.

These three companies have cleverly identified P2P as the essential first step in over-coming the classic chicken-and-egg of mobile payments – you can’t build consumer interest until you have places to spend the money, but you can’t build a merchant base until you have consumers. But if you focus on P2P, you can build your consumer base and then talk to merchants later.

Definitely an area to watch in 2009.

8. First Scare Stories Hit MoSoSo

It’s long been a bugbear of online social networking that the press loves to focus on the negative. You know the kind of thing – kid arranges to meet that fit dude they met online, only to find that it’s a 40 year old pervert, who kidnaps and kills her. Most of these stories aren’t accurate and blown out of all proportion by the media, but retractions are rarely printed and that much mud tends to stick eventually. That doesn’t mean I ever advocate kids meeting others they met online, by the way – it’s a stupid thing to do, just like crossing a busy road blindfolded.

Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) has exploded in usage in the last few years and the downside of going mainstream will be that the press start to leap on the scandal bandwagon. I predict the first big MoSoSo abduction story in 2009, as well as quite a few more.

9. Buzz Words for 2009

Last year, we suggested that “open” and “privacy” would be the big buzz words of the year and they certainly were. They’re not going away either, but it would be a little boring to say the same thing twice.

So this year, I’d say we’re going to be hearing an awful lot of “App Store” as everyone jumps on this particular bandwagon (don’t forget, if you can see the bandwagon it’s too late, folks) and “security”.

For a long time the anti-virus industry has been desperately trying to convince us that our phones are really at risk, even though viruses are both difficult to install and rarely seen in the wild – and I don’t think ever in serious numbers (please tell me if I’m wrong). However, with smart phones commanding more and more market share in 2009, I think their efforts to persuade us that our phones are about to explode without their software are going to become more and more strident.

I’m not going to succumb, but that isn’t a recommendation that you don’t either. But, for sure, the S-word is going to be big this year.

10. Mobile Learning

Not so much a prediction, more a 2009 wish.

The mobile represents a unique tool to teach, in both the developed and developing worlds – especially the latter, in my view. We’ve seen the great vision behind the One Laptop per Child project, but it’s fraught with difficulties, as are most huge ideas. Big business has tried to launch competitive projects and software and then there’s the whole issue that the organisation must get the laptops into the field in the first place, involving notoriously tricky Government negotiation and funding.

In the meantime, many of these target kids already have access to a mobile, albeit one per family or even one per village, but the point is that they already are connected to a digital device today. So take the principle of the OLpC project and combine all that goodness with the mobile and we have something that’s already capable of changing the world. And once you start educating ordinary people, they’re less easy to indoctrinate with propaganda and fanatical messages, so in a way, the mobile could be responsible for sowing the seeds of world peace, if that doesn’t sound too hippyish.

If you missed it earlier in the year, take a look at this inspiring video and you’ll see the potential:

I actually wrote these predictions at the beginning of December to intitially present at the National Mobile Monday Congress in Munich. So it’s great to see this announcement in the last few days from the BBC and Sony Ericsson about their joint initiative to teach English via the mobile in Bangladesh. It’s going to be the tip of the iceberg for projects like this, some charitable and some for-profit and all are to be welcomed.

So, my actual prediction is that we’ll see a bunch of these ideas launched this year (I was going to say at least one major project, but that’s already happened now!), as I think mobile and learning is part of the zeitgeist.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in this whole “mobile meets learning” area, a great resource is Judy Breck’s blog, Golden Swamp. Check it out.

So all that remains is to wish you a great 2009 and I hope you’ll come back from time to time to see what Carlo and I are writing about.

4. Global messaging revenues pass $150 Billion

Pretty unequivocal that. Currently, it’s around $130 Billion, so I’d say it’s very aggressive growth that I’m forecasting. It assumes more rapid growth for sms and the fact that mms is finally taking off, albeit mainly sending photos on a P2P basis currently.

When we talk such big numbers, it’s useful to put perspective to play. Current Hollywood box office revenues worldwide in 2008 were about $9 billion – yes, it’s dwarfed by messaging revenues alone.

5. It’s the Economy, Stupid

This isn’t really a prediction, but a series of mini-predictions that I’ve bundled up into one, which will result from the current dire economic situation the bankers and Governments have dumped us all in – thanks guys, we love ya! The list also includes suggestions from various MobHappy readers too – thanks.

- More messaging at the expense of voice, leading to a faster decline in voice revenues.
- Flat rate data spreading more widely to pre-pay (James Cooper of mjelly.
- More and more people cutting the cord and abandoning landlines.
- Mobile advertising continues to thrive due to proven ROI against traditional media(Bango). Phew!
- VC funded startups begin to fail (mjelly and Rudy)

So all in all, dire, gnashing of teeth, but some bright spots in the other areas I’m writing about.

6. Location Based Services Proliferate

I think that this is the year when creativity comes to Location and some very interesting things happen as a result – albeit in a small way. We’ll start to move away from find-my-nearest and simple buddy trackers and start to see innovation.

Mind you, there’ll be a plethora of buddy finders too, enabled via various technologies but especially good old Google Maps. Leaving aside whether buddy finders are enough of a mass market proposition, I’m still not convinced that there’s much of a business model here yet. While there are some indictions that people will pay (Loopt and Flirtomatic’s bolt-on service spring to mind), there’s lots of people relying on advertising to make a business case.

The trouble is that the ad industry is generally not geared up to this kind of thinking and the market is a few years away yet. Which leaves these startups in the middle of a recession without an obvious revenue model. Not a comfortable place to be.

So I’d predict at least 3 players out there don’t make 2009 – sorry people, but timing is a very cruel mistress.

Look out for my remaining predictions next week and if you have anything to add or generally wish to scoff and call me wrong, please leave a comment.

6. WiMAX networks become a success, at least in the US.

WiMAX largely been a moot point in the US thus far, but it should enter the mainstream in 2009. It’ll find success as more WiMAX-capable devices emerge, in all sorts of form factors, but also because WiMAX operators like Clearwire aren’t burdened with legacy networks they don’t want to cannibalize.

7. Mobile transactions take off in Europe and the US.

Note I said transactions, and not payments. Using the mobile phone as a transaction platform — for things like public tranportation ticketing, airline boarding passes, coupons and so on — will take off in 2009 in Western Europe and the US. I specify transactions and not payments because I think payments will remain stuck in neutral for the time being, because the value chain is a mess, with too many people wanting cuts of the action and too little harmonization of technology among the various parties. But transactions that can be carried out without something like NFC, for instance boarding passes and coupons using on-screen barcodes, will start to be a hit.

8. By the end of 2009, I’ll be able to count the failure of at least 5 mobile startups whose products I really enjoy or use.

The news about Trutap from a few weeks ago was pretty disheartening, but I have a feeling that it’s just the tip of the iceberg for 2009, as lots of startups (in mobile and elsewhere) will get caught out between pre-profitability and a lack of further funding.

9. Unless Android gets put into a really sexy device, it’ll stay in the background.

Android’s functionality is pretty solid. It’s biggest problem so far is the hunk of plastic that is the T-Mobile G1. Having all that nice software is wonderful, but until you can put it in a package that itself becomes an object of desire for normobs (see iPhone), all you’ve got is something for geeks, nerds and early adopters. The iPhone’s software is, by many normobs’ accounts, great. But what got it into so many pockets was the combination of function and fashion.

10. Term of the year: “app store.”

Everybody will want one, have one, or talk about having one. See already O2 Litmus, Android Market, etc etc etc. Still, this newfound fondness for applications won’t see operators stop trying to screw developers, nor will it make all of these new app stores successful.

1. Palm and/or Motorola’s handset business will die.

One or both of these companies will cease to be in 2009. They’ll go out of business or be swallowed by somebody, finally paying the price for their years of poor management and poor products. Palm’s going to try to make a big splash at CES with its long-overdue new software platform, but it’s very much too little, too late. Motorola’s business is dwindling as it’s unable to rein in costs quickly and effectively enough, while its sales remain mired in a slump with no products to change that on the horizon.

2. Apple will release more versions of the iPhone.

Incremental upgrades won’t be enough for Apple, and it will look to emulate the iPod in 2009 by introducing at least one more model of the iPhone. While my preference would be for an iPhone Shuffle, that seems unlikely. I also predict this will be a mess, particularly when it comes to the App Store, thanks to different screen sizes. I’ll probably also chuckle a little as Apple learns what a pain fragmentation can be.

3. Flat-rate data will make a big move to prepaid phones.

We’ve seen the availiability of relatively reasonably priced flat-rate data plans expand to almost anybody who wants one in most Western countries, and 2009 will see this shift to prepaid phones. Operators will look to boost prepaid ARPU, particularly as the economy drives some contract users over to PAYG. Flat-rate data plans will continue to be a major story, if only because they make offloading mobile data to WiFi or fixed networks more palatable for operators. Offloading itself will become a bigger issue in 2009 as sales of 3G dongles continue to boom, and networks get more and more crowded.

4. Streaming audio services will start to show some of the promise of mobile music — then they’ll get smacked down by operators.

The popularity of Pandora among iPhone users hints at how well streaming music can go down on mobile devices. It’s great — until operators start getting tetchy about all that traffic and start blocking streaming (unless it comes from one of their paid services).

5. Nokia’s services strategy will succeed — in emerging markets.

My take on Nokia’s services strategy is no secret: I think it’s a mess that stands little chance of success. In developed Western nations, at least, where it faces the impossible task of getting users to give up the internet services they’re affiliated with and used to, in favor of Nokia’s services, which may work better on the phone, but far less well on the PC. But in emerging markets where PC ownership isn’t as high and the mobile phone has primacy when it comes to connecting to the internet, Nokia’s services could look very compelling to users, and the PC versions may be good enough to suffice.

And if you’re not from around these parts, Carlo and my Predictions have become something of a tradition and we’re actually not bad (if you’re American, this means “very good”). Read the results of my predictions last year here and here and Carlo’s here.

Finally, before launching right in with them, leave some of your own in the comments, or on your own blog and link to the article so we can see what you think the year has in store. I’ve already incorporated some readers’ predictions that they sent me already.

1. mCommerce starts to take off (finally !)

I guess you could argue that mCommerce has already taken off for a while now – indeed a lot of AdMob’s (my day job) business model has been built on selling stuff on mobiles. But mostly mCommerce to date has been selling stuff on mobiles for mobiles, or mobile content. What I’m talking about here is using the mobile to sell goods and services that are designed to be consumed or used in the analogue world, as mobile becomes just another media channel.

This is really starting to happen already.

Good examples are Papa John’s Pizza, who recently announced that they’d sold over $1 million worth of pizza over the mobile web or BMW who sold over $45 million in winter tyres from a $60,000 investment in an MMS campaign, that Tomi Ahonen writes about here.

We’re going to see a ton of success stories in the next year like this, as mainstream marketers catch up with their more adventurous peers and start to drive transactions via mobile. The US will lead the way as they’ve firmly snatched back any lead Europe might once have had in mobile usage, but there’ll be some interesting successes in Europe too.

Since commerce drives revenue, which we all need to work harder for in these straightened times, thinking how to sell via the mobile should certainly be high on the business agenda for the next year.

2. Handset Reprise.

The succinct version here is: Tough year for Nokia. Worse for Sony Ericsson and Moto. Great for RIM and Apple. Android is the dark horse.

Poor Nokia seems beleagured on two fronts. The iPhone stole all the headlines this year, followed by Android, leaving Nokia wondering what they had done wrong. And they’re also coming head-to-head with the mighty Google in services (as well as Android). As all good generals know, it’s never a good idea to fight a war on two fronts and I hope history doesn’t prove this once again.

Android’s launch proved to be a little disappointing this year, with pundits being underwhelmed by the hardware. But the platform itself earned a lot of praise. MobHappy reader and writer at Venture Beat, Matthäus Krzykowski predicts that 40 Android devices will come out 2009. And that by June it’ll be outselling iPhone. This is pretty bullish, but if he’s in the right ballpark, Nokia should be pretty worried, as they’ll be squeezed between the multi-faceted Android, iPhone and Blackberry, all of whom will have world class handsets to compete directly against popular models in Nokia’s range.

Having said that, it’s not all doom and gloom for Nokia. They’re still easily the largest handset manufacturer and Symbian the largest platform in both sales and usage – AdMob’s new metrics (out today) show nearly 50% share for Symbian of the smartphone sector and a 32% share for Nokia of the mobile web usage. Although tellingly, the overall mobile web usage does show a decline and that’s almost all down the the success of the iPhone in stimulating mobile web use. Even so, Nokia have a formidable lead and it’s theirs to lose, but it’s still be a tough one.

As for the rest of the pack, I’d see a decline for Sony Ericsson and a disastrous year for Moto as the Razr generation flock to the iPhone, starting in earnest this Christmas.

The interesting one will be Android. Will it be a major player by this time next year? Matthäus thinks so. What about you? I’ll go with an AdMob data point and say that by the end of the year, Android will more than 5% share of page views of the billions that AdMob serves every month. To put that in perspective, Apple’s is currently 7.8%.

3. Mobile Web overtakes PC Web

In many ways, this is already the case. In lots of emerging markets the mobile web has leapfrogged the PC already, making the mobile the only digital device and de facto, the most important. Indeed, on a recent visit to the Far East, I spoke to Joshua Maa, the founder of Chinese mobile ad network, Madhouse. He told me that he has 3 Billion page requests a day from China and that the market size was over 5 Billion pages a day. Not all is quite as rosy as it seems as only a small fraction of these pages get monetised, but it does give an ideal of the scale.

So what measure am I using for my prediction? Certainly not the number of pages available to be viewed, which currently stands at around 25 billion for the indexed PC web. But this has taken at least 15 years to happen and it’ll take time for mobile to catch up. As a ballpark gut feel, I’d say maybe the mobile web has a little less than 1 billion today, but if anyone has a better idea, I’d love to know.

Neither am I using the number of mobile handsets that could access the mobile web, in comparison to the number of PCs. This milestone has passed already.

I’m predicting that more people will access the web via a mobile than via a PC. It’s hard to find proper stats on this, but if it hasn’t happened already, it’ll happen in the first quarter of 2009.

Watch this space and Twitter for more predictions from both Carlo and me.

1. Apple won’t grow organic market share by much.

Nothing like starting off with a challenge. This one sort of depends on how you look at it. Strategy Analytics says that Apple had a global market share of 2.3% in the third quarter, compared to 0.3% in Q307. So, on one hand, 2% isn’t a huge absolute gain, but it’s a pretty solid relative one. That said, Samsung gained 2.7% over the same period, and you don’t see much talk of its huge growth in the market. I’m inclined to give myself a point, based not solely on the numbers, but on my statement that “Any new models won’t appeal to a much wider crowd without adding something significantly new and cool — and just chunking in 3G isn’t enough.” Adding the App Store and GPS helped — but not as much as the big upfront price cut. Furthermore, it’s hard to find data on organic growth vs. how much of that market share growth was from new countries, and my anecdotal evidence suggests that many iPhone 3G users have upgraded from the earlier model.

2. Android won’t match the hype.

Full point here: one device, from one operator, and it’s not especially impressive to boot. I’m still very much in “wait-and-see” mode about Android.

3. Ad-supported content will continue to grow, but there will be some friction as operators figure out how to insert themselves in the experience.

I’ll take another point here. The mobile ad market has boomed in 2008, and is one of the year’s success stories. There has been some friction, but maybe less than I expected, but we’ve still seen operators doing things like installing transcoders that get around mobile content (and its advertising). I’d imagine that in 2009, this will increase, particularly as consumer spending will remain depressed, affecting ARPU.

4. The 700 MHz auction in the US will toss up an interesting license holder.

Define “interesting” — companies like Dish Network and Cox cable won licenses, and Cox says it’ll deploy its own wireless network in the areas it serves. While Google didn’t win a license, it did succeed in forcing the open-access rules onto the C-block licenses, which will (supposedly) force the winning bidder, Verizon, to follow them, which in itself is pretty significant, and interesting. I’ll generously award myself the point.

5. Smartphone sales won’t accelerate much, as existing users get fed up with poor usability, and featurephones get smarter.

Gartner says “in the third quarter of 2008, the global smartphone market reported its weakest year-on-year growth since they began tracking the industry.” That’s a point.

6. Euro 2008 and the Summer Olympics in Beijing will generate a decent amount of interest in mobile TV, but that interest won’t be sustained.

I think I got this wrong, insofar as Euro 2008 and the Olympics didn’t generate much interest in mobile TV. My overall point was that mobile TV would remain stuck in neutral, which it did. Still few users and no revenues to speak of. Half a point.

7. Handset vendors will pay more attention, both lip service and real, to environmental issues.

I don’t see any compelling evidence that this came true in 2008. No point here.

8. Embedded radios in consumer electronics will become much more commonplace.

This was actually pretty disappointing, as the Kindle largely still stands alone here. Things such as the Dash GPS unit and the Peek email device launched this year, but I’d hardly say that represents “commonplace.” Ahead of the curve here, and thus, no point.

9. Operators will wake up to the threat of IM and push e-mail to their messaging revenues.

I’m not sure how to quantify this, but my pontification that “Forward-thinking operators will take a look at this space, and realize that mobile messaging needs an overhaul, and that a holistic approach combining disparate channels (SMS, e-mail, IM, social networks and so on) is the way forward,” seems like it missed the mark. I’m hard pressed to think of any operators that really did this, beyond maybe 3 in the UK, but if you have any examples, pop up in the comments and point them out and I’ll be glad to give myself a point.

10. “Open” will dominate the discussion in 2008.

Don’t think there’s much argument here: I get the point. I’ll resist my temptation to award myself a bonus point for saying “operators will fall all over themselves trying to persuade people that they’re open. Most of this will be BS…”

So, that’s a pretty dismal 6.5/10, but hey’ that’s half a point better than 2007. I am glad that my first semester’s grades weren’t based on these predictions… but I’ll bring you my predictions for 2009 next week, giving you an entire year to wonder at how I could get them so

Today, we’ll look at the other 5.

6. Explosion of Third Party IM Platforms

Well, these were certainly a success story this year, with the likes of Bluepulse, Mig33 and Mxit growing rapidly and between them, have tens of millions of users. And in the case of Bluepulse, they took on a new heavyweight Google exec, who says it’s going to be a “multi-hundred-million user, multi-billion dollar company” – words that may well prove remarkably prescient or come back to haunt him regularly in the years to come.

Anyway, I wasn’t saying they were going to be hugely financially successful, just that they’d explode this year. And they did.

7. Mobile Video Take Off

Just to be clear here, I was suggesting that short YouTube style clips (not mobile broadcast) would take off on mobile and indeed, quite a lot of traction did happen in 2008. I cited MyWaves as a particular contender and indeed, they get over 5 million unique visits to their mobile website per month.

Does 5 million UU a month count? No, I think I peaked too early on this one and no points for me.

8. Mobile as Digital Mouse

I said we’d start to see this emerge as a serious trend, where the mobile acts as a bridge between the analogue world (aka meat space) and the digital. And I think I was right. We’ve seen lots of first mover activity from 2D barcodes to Nokia’s Point & Find, from Ralph Lauren’s award winning campaign to Fanta’s virtual tennis.

I think I deserve my point for this.

9. The Battle for MoSoSo

I was predicting that it would be the year when the giants of social networking PC world started to pitch a battle with the behemoths of the specialist mobile world, such as Peperonity, Itsmy and Mocospace.

And yes, a battle has been quietly raging with all the big boys starting specialist mobile sites from MySpace to Bebo to Facebook – and dear old Friendster has had a lot of success in some markets too. Meanwhile, the mobile specialists have stood firm and proud and all that’s seemed to have happened so far is just market growth.

Anyway, the battle started, which gets me my point. But where will it end? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

10. A Tricky Year for Podcasting

And so it has been. Don’t get me wrong, this is a market poised to be huge. But not until we have flat rate data plans established and an easy way of getting them onto our phones. Sure, the iPhone does that and like many things, offers us a foretaste of the future.

But one point for me.

I think I’ve been pretty harsh, or certainly realistic, in judging myself. The points I didn’t get related to trends that are happening (look what a central role mobile did play in the US elections and quite a lot of us are watching video clips on our phones) but I was a little early in my timelines. Which could be the subtitle of my autobiography, if I ever come to write it.

So, the final count is 8 out of 10 – a little better than last year, but about average since we started this little game.

Watch out for 2009′s predictions in the next few weeks and of course, Carlo’s verdict on his predictions for this year.