Mobile Mania

Internet penetration in India: still not quite there. On the other hand: mobile usage very much there. That seems to be the general consensus of everybody.

Given this, I posed to myself the question: what are possible future mobile applications ? If we could answer that question, may be we will have insight into opportunities that entrepreneurs should be seeking out. Here, I try to answer this question by extrapolating trends in the Internet space into the mobile world.

Personalization
This is Amazon – personalized recommendations based on past behavior. Can we have a personalized “comedy service” – sending me jokes of my favorite genre? Personalized content for the sports lover, the stock broker and so on?

Ecommerce
Financial industry M-commerce is mainstream. As music download is kind of getting there. But it is possible to purchase a variety of goods – flowers for the sweetheart, clothes & CDs for oneself, airline tickets, real estate ….I also believe that auctions could lend themselves easily to the mobile world. Variation of ecommerce is sending money (or money equivalent such as talk time) in communities that do not have access to banking.

Promotion Campaigns
The Shoppers Stop and a hip nightspot in the city that I stay in send me SMSs on promotions and events. What I think is missing is tracking and customization to my individual tastes.

Publishing & Content
News, directories, maps, sports scores and movie reviews are interesting mobile applications with or without GPRS. But there are others. When I heard that the Japanese manga is going mobile, the possibility of Amar Chitra Katha on my i-mate, quickly crossed my mind.

Social Networking
This is interesting. Think of easy ways to build buddy groups and share news and views. Think of rating jokes, content and sharing this within the group. Think of passing recommendations on purchases. Think of organizing events as in Upcoming.org. And of course dating.

Games
Not snakes and ladder as you have today. Real games. Battleships. Bridge. Chess, if you are not too busy blogging.

I think interesting new ventures would be coming up in developing technology platforms for some of these applications. The other area that is interesting is technologies that would allow companies to seamlessly repurpose advertising content for mobile media and to track effectiveness at a user level.

I am researching companies that are developing these technologies and plan to profile them in a future post. If there is any company that you find interesting, send me a mail or add a comment.