Future Of Mobile London 2008

Once again, Carsonified hosted another fantastic conference in London. Although Future Of Mobile was not as eventful as FOWA, the conference still had a number of great speakers talking about the future of the mobile industry.

Doug Richard from Trutap was my favorite speaker, gave a very strong argument thagt the future of mobile will not come from Silicon Valley, but rather driven from emerging markets in developing countries. These markets are the fastest growing in the world and willing to take risks with new technologies.

Tomi Ahonen author of Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, gave an entertaining talk about global mobile trends, some were completely shocking!

• 91% of mobile users keep their phones within arms reach 24 hours a day
• the mobile book market is worth $82 million in Japan, majority of these books written on actual phones
• the Chinese pop song Mice Love Rice which was available free to download, made over $22 million as ringback tone for phones
• the Japanese snack brand Tohato created a virtual war between two chip flavours combining multiplayer online gaming with advertising, breaking new ground in advertising with incredible sales

Other observations from the conference:

• the mobile industry is worth over $50 billion
  
• over 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, over 1 billion sold in 2007
• mobile devices are: very personal, always connected, always carried, built in payment mechanism, present at creative impulse and can capture social context
• the old shotgun approach to advertising does not work, we need to apply location and context to make ads relevant to users
  
• Prior to App Store, people were not comfortable to installing apps on their mobile. Now, people demand ability to install mobile apps on their devices
• Symbian and Windows Mobile have the most to lose from the success of Android
• Android will be to iPhone, what the PC was to Macintosh

As usual, the conference had heavy Twitter traffic.