BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: What Is The Future Of Mobile?

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The Future Of Mobile (.net magazine)
Mobile consultant and web evangelist Jonathan Stark answers questions on the future of mobile:

Advice on selling change / progress without scaring the site owner? It’s a lot more effective to try to attract clients who already value what you offer than to attempt to convince, cajole, or otherwise 'educate' existing clients. Be awesome at what you do, shout about it from the rooftops, and eventually the clients you want will come knocking. That said, mobile is white-hot and I’m seeing it become an inadvertent backdoor that can lead to big change.
Will rearranging and showing / hiding be best practice in the future, or will server-side queries drive device-centric content? Client-side because it's more about feature detection than UA (user agent) sniffing, which is a more future-friendly approach. You don't want to get yourself into a position where you have to update your site every time a new device or browser is released.
What do you predict for the future of mobile app development? More massive change. Platform and device diversity is going to continue to accelerate. The iPhone 5 is going to look like a fax machine compared to what’s coming. Devices will get smaller, faster, and more specialized. Completely new input / output methods will emerge. Everything will be connected to the network.

He answers a few more questions which are quite insightful, like how companies should look at their API as their app.

What's The Next Big Thing For Mobile Advertising? (Forbes)
Tom Taulli at Forbes spoke with Victor Malachard, CEO and co-founder of mobile ad network Adfonic. When asked about innovations and trends impacting mobile advertising next year, Victor believes that campaigns will integrate across channels as we move towards a society of multi-screen consumers who ‘screen hop’ as they progress throughout their day. Following these consumers by creating campaigns that work across all these channels, playing each to its strengths while focusing on the same messages through consistent, compelling creatives will be the goal. In other words retargeting. Real-time bidding will also emerge to become the dominant way to buy mobile media, which involves using a programmatic, instantaneous auction. And mobile rich media will gain traction outside North America and mobile video is likely to take off.

Mobile Web Has Enhanced Print Advertising Forever (Tappinn)
Connecting printed collateral with digital content using vehicles such as QR codes, SMS keywords, augmented reality, NFC tags, and image recognition are all viable new methods to engage mobile consumers. Here are the ways that mobile has enhanced print advertising:

Print to Palm
ROI and Behavior Metrics
CRM Data Collector
Mobile Commerce Initiator
Social Lubricator

In this new economy, if a piece of print advertising is connected to a digital offer or exclusive mobile content, that print vehicle is truly interactive and valuable.

Solving The Mobile Monetization Riddle (Econsultancy)
The good news: there's little reason to believe that the future of mobile advertising isn't bright. The bad news: mobile isn't, by and large, generating incremental ad revenue for ad publishers. Instead, it's forcing them to replace lost ad revenue from the desktop. The shift to mobile is still mostly, well, a shift. The fact that 50% of a publisher's traffic comes from mobile doesn't mean that a publisher has doubled its traffic. It simply means that more of the publisher's traffic is mobile. Put simply, the mobile traffic has, to a varying but typically significant extent, cannibalized non-mobile traffic. This means one thing: when it comes to ad revenue, many if not most publishers are effectively running to stand still. The rush to figure mobile monetization out isn't an exercise in exploiting a new gold mine; it's an exercise in trying to monetize mobile traffic well enough to offset the ad revenue from the displaced non-mobile traffic. Just as the newspapers.

Does Creating A Better Mobile Experience Really Matter? (brad frost web)
Yes. Yes it does. Because...

this is not the web

The point of creating adaptive mobile sites is to create functional and optimal user experiences for a growing number of web-enabled devices and contexts.

this is the web

In order to deal with all this diversity, we can no longer just cross our fingers and hope that these devices’ browsers are capable enough to properly render desktop designs. We need to actively take matters into our own hands and do all we can to create more contextually-aware, flexible experiences. The desktop-only days are gone. And yes, addressing this involves adapting layouts, but it also involves addressing a ton of other stuff. Because mobile experiences matter.

Mobile Internet Traffic Surpasses Desktop Traffic In Some Countries (BI Intelligence)
Mobile traffic as a share of all Internet traffic has been increasing steadily worldwide. As of September, 12% of the world's Internet traffic came from mobile devices, and 88% from desktop, according to StatCounter. A closer look at the data reveals that in some countries, mobile already accounts for the lion's share of traffic. And some world regions tilt more toward mobile than others.

MobileTraffic_World

The U.S. is not too far from the global average, with mobile at 10%. But in Asia, 20% of traffic now comes from mobile (that proportion almost doubled compared to a year before). In Africa, mobile traffic is at 14%. In Europe, the number's 7%, and in South America, 4%. Looking at country-level data reveals some markets in which mobile already has surpassed desktop traffic. That's the case in India, where 53% of traffic now comes from mobile; and in African countries like Nigeria, where mobile is 56% of Internet traffic.

Smartphones Extend Our Workdays By Two Hours (Mashable)
At least. With smartphones and gadgets in hand, we’re having a hard time dropping our work load when closing time rolls around. Even after an average 9- to 10-hour work day, employees report checking emails and taking work-related calls after hours, according to a study by British tech retailer Pixmania. Having constant access to our mobile communication streams tacks on an extra two hours of work a day. "The advent of smartphones has had a massive benefit for people all over the UK," Ghadi Hobeika, marketing director, said. "However, there are drawbacks. Smartphones mean that people literally cannot get away from work." About 1 in 10 people report spending an extra three hours our of work checking emails and taking calls. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents start work correspondence as soon as they wake up and before they go to bed. Thank you Blackberry for starting this all.

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