It’s no longer about the year of mobile. The decade of mobile has begun and holds more promise than the interweb did in the early 2000s.
Here are 9 predictions I have for the mobile space in 2012:
- As I’ve been saying for years, the mobile web (thanks to HTML5) will overtake any specific App platform. It just makes too much sense to develop once and publish across all platforms – especially since you don’t lose any of the experience you would get in an App environment. Consumers are catching on that many times you actually don’t need an app for that.
- The mobile web will surpass traffic of the desktop web for the first time
- Just as QR or 2d bar codes have replaced the need to have an SMS marketing campaign for most marketers, NFC enabled phones will start replacing the need for QR codes. First you’ll see the two of them together (like we used to see an SMS shortcode and QR code) then very quickly everything you see will be NFC enabled
- Brands and marketers will realize that the tablet web experience is a different context than their desktop website or mobile website and will start building out HTML5 driven experiences to take advantage of this channel
- All screens become mobile. It’s no longer just about the size of your smartphone or tablet, very quickly it will become about which screens (taxi cab, your car, TV etc…) you can connect to
- With the connection of everything to everything all the time, security and privacy will become differentiators for those who can both make it simple to use and understand
- Just as the touch experience has revolutionized the way we interact with our electronics, gesture based interfaces will start to appear and will soon replace touch. Could this mean the return of the clapper?
- I first realized the potential of a bendable & scrollable mobile screen when I blogged about it from the Mobile World Congress in 2008. 2012 will be the year when we will first be introduced to mobile devices that either have bendable / flexible screens and / or are scrollable
- Social media becomes more mobile and more local
