2008 - The Year of Mobile
“Mobile goes big in 2008″ …okay, so I’ve been hearing this sentiment for the last 10 years or so (and it’s making the rounds in the plethora of ‘08 blogosphere predictions). Although, I don’t think ‘08 is going to be the breakout year, we are going to see a very interesting year in the mobile space:
- The iPhone was a big step in the direction of usability/beauty and will force Nokia, Microsoft, and RIM to up the ante - i.e., we will see some cool new devices
- We will see some Android phones in the wild and with that some innovate software and hardware
- Location based services will begin to emerge (Google’s “My Locations” is brilliant… if I could get the darn thing to work) and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle looks promising
- Very interesting mobile applications based around social software and location (that isn’t a PITA to use) will emerge and engage consumers
- One of the big guys (probably Google) will start to experiment w/ mobile payments which further entrenches mobile devices in the hands of consumers
- Live streaming video to/from mobile devices will mature and create a killer opportunity (Scoble is already messing around with Qik and comvu has had this for Windows Mobile for a while [thanx for that pointer Andrew]) - I called this one way back in the olden days
- Exposing and sharing data (docs, video, photos, etc) to your mobile will see some interesting action - I created a very cool syndication platform a couple of years ago that I tabled and now is the time for something like this to go big time.  Take a look at this to see what I am talking about - http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2007/12/run-vista-gadge.html
But, we won’t see the true mobile revolution until the middle man (yeh, you know who) is out of the equation!