13 reasons why location-based services could grow bigtime by 2013
That would be 13 billion reasons: “Mobile location-based services will generate annual global revenues of $13.3 billion by 2013, up from $515 million in 2007, according to a new forecast released by market analysis firm ABI Research.”
AT&T wireless service revenues surge due to data usage AKA iPhone sales?
AT&T today announced 22% increase in profits in 1Q08 from 1Q07, up to $3.46B. Of much interest to us here at Zedmo is how important the growth in wireless data revenues to this surge. From their announcement: “wireless data revenues grew 57.3 percent versus results in the year-earlier first quarter to $2.3 billion, reflecting robust increases in Internet access, e-mail, messaging, data access and media bundles. Data now represents 21.5 percent of AT&T’s total wireless service revenues.”
Wow.
Well, if we must, let’s consider how much is attributable to iPhone sales (of course, you can’t even legitimately buy the Apple iPhone anywhere else in North America!):
- 73% of iPhones in the US are still locked to AT&T
- The average iPhone user spends more than $90 a month on wireless service, including Internet access, text messaging, and other features. Compare that to the $50.18 average for all of AT&T’s wireless customers!
- The iPhone (plus Apple’s WiFi-only iPod Touch) is the most used mobile browser for Internet access in the US. (Actually Symbian OS still leads globally.)
- BUT… Apple is receiving $3 a month from AT&T for each iPhone user, and an additional $8 a month for new subscribers to AT&T’s network lured by the iPhone.
So, while one might be tempted to see where these subsidies fit into AT&T’s income statements, how much this eats into the otherwise glorious iPhone usage payments, and how Apple has this death-grip upon AT&T, couldn’t we instead just be excited about the long-awaited catalyst to “The Great American Mobile Web Revolution?” I sure am, and everyday consider dumping my beloved Symbian device for one.
Location Based Services: Desperately Seeking Service
Here’s a flare but yet inspiring panel video by Martyn Warwick and the TelecomTV team onsite at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few weeks ago. The title is “Location Based Services: Desperately Seeking Service,” and it was attended by Michael O’Hara from Microsoft and Mike Amorosa from True Position. We at Zedmo got a very different takeaway from this — that the larger companies are focused on building the backend to enable LBS services but not actually building the innovative services themselves. It’s up to some risky and creative companies to take advantage of the peculiarities of mobility and geo-tagging that they’re enabling. It will also be up to the mobile carriers to embrace data-hungry (but hopefully not too hungry and slow!) applications.
Location based social community for… TOILETS
Here’s a great example of a useful and simple location-based service that relies on its social community to scale its value. It’s MizPee, and it does nothing less than provide you with the oh-so-important locations of clean public toilets. This is sure to come in handy this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
95 million access internet exclusively through cellular
Dean Bubley at Disruptive Wireless has taken a stab at the number of people globally connecting to the internet through all access options: cellular, wired, WiFi, and combinations of all three. The results? Out of 1.295B people connected, 700 million acess the internet only through wired, 95 million access it through cellular only, and only 26 million have a mix of all three, etc.
I’m dubious of the cellular-only numbers. 80 million connectors not touching a PC? This seems large, but the concept is fascinating. Certainly in developing countries, this makes a worthwhile cultural observation — all the build-out of cellular connectivity over fixed connectivity. Why build fixed networks when you can skip them entirely!
How will these numbers look in 10 years? I’d venture to say that exactly contrary to my doubts above, the cellular-only piece of the pie will grow the most. This has so many implications to how the web will be used and how it ought to be so much more geared for those little screens.
Zedmo at StartupCampMontreal tomorrow!
Come check out Zedmo at StartupCampMontreal. We’ll be there, meeting, greeting, and demoing. This is a great event for the Montreal tech startup community, and it’s being organized and sponsored by BDC, BCF, EMBRASE, SAT, Microsoft, and bitHeads.
The internet VS the mobile internet IS the internet
Many recent events, like the launch of the iPhone, have opened up the discussion on what exactly the “mobile internet” is. Apple proclaims that, on its iPhone, “it’s not a watered down version of the internet. It’s just the internet. On your phone.” It’s part of a long line of commentators saying that the mobile web is weak.
But maybe it doesn’t. Researchers will argue that “it’s incredibly challenging to create a desktop experience on a 2.5-inch screen,” Philippe Winthrop, research director of wireless and mobility at the Aberdeen Group. If it comes down to proportions, Stuart Carlaw at ABI Research says that “there is generally a 4-inch/7-inch question over screen size. Four-inch is the largest a screen can get and fit into a pocket and seven-inch is the smallest you can get to and still open up attachments in a rational way.”
And everyone wants a piece of the mobile internet. Do we build the internet in the same way for both mobile and PC? Or this is not even the question. It’s not about the viewing, the browsing. It’s about the context. The mobility of the “mobile internet” opens up so many options for location and event relevance and the challenge for fast answers. Mobile browsing is an active experience. It not about sitting back and surfing. What we’re looking for are pockets on the web that deliver immediate answers. But imagine if also we wrapped those answers in social communities. Now localize those social communities around events and places and anything else that’s brought you away from your computer with your phone into the real world.
I think we’ve got some catching up to do here.
My life with zedmo: The family dinner
So get this: It’s 6:52pm and I’m at work, about a 15-minute drive from home, when my mom calls me to ask how far I am from home, because she needs me to pick up some bread for dinner tonight. You know, the family dinner that starts at 7:00pm. The dinner with my uncle and aunt from out of town, the same one my mom has been preparing for since last week. You know that when the dining room table is set 7 days in advance, this dinner must be important.
Of course I’ve known about this dinner for, oh, two weeks now, so why shouldn’t I be on the road already? On a good day, with no traffic, it takes 15 minutes. I’m no math genius, but I don’t think adding 15 minutes to 6:52pm takes me to 7:00pm. And now I have to get bread, too. Great. There is no chance I can blame a 35-second bread stop for my being late by half an hour. What do I do? Enter zedmo.
I shut down my PC, throw on my jacket, and run for my car. All the while, I’ve opened my Blackberry Curve’s web browser to zedmo.com - where on my home page, I have Montreal traffic. The great thing is that I have traffic provided by some online service, as well as user comments - so I know exactly what route to take to minimize the likelihood of hitting traffic, or a police speed trap. Not that I speed…
As fate would have it, one of the user comments read: “st. louis accident near shop. ctr, take gratton” - this was the exact intersection that I was going to hit up for the bread that my mom needed. That would have made me like a day late - which would not have been good at all. So I hopped off the highway an exit early and went to the only other bakery I know of (I don’t really do all that much grocery shopping for myself). Got the bread, and was on my way.
Thanks to zedmo, I knew what streets to take and those to avoid. I must have saved half an hour.
I got to the dinner for 7:26pm. Still pretty late, but hey, no one ever said zedmo was a miracle worker… My mom was pretty pissed that I was late, but not nearly as pissed as she was when she saw that I cracked the bumper on her car when I was so speedily parallel parking. Can zedmo fix bumpers?
Redux: Where has zedmo been?
We apologize for the lack of blog entries, but this is about to change. We’ve been in stealth mode this summer building our team and coding and preparing for our launch. We’re now ready to start paving the way for our public launch, so expect some sneak peaks into what zedmo is right here on the blog. Remember, you can always enter your email address on the homepage to get privileged access to register… and be part of the revolution in mobile social communities.
~zmo
Internet on my phone??
The act of carrying a mobile phone has been the fastest growing trend the world has ever seen. Today, nearly three billion people carry one, and carry it everywhere they go! However, I’m constantly amazed that these “IV connections” are completely underutilized. There is information that people have gotten so used to getting when they’re sitting at a computer and cannot fathom being connected to it all the time, nor do we even know how to get it.
“I can get the internet on my phone?”
I’ve heard that before. Ok you won’t have the same experience on your mobile phone as on a PC. Some websites and content providers think they can do it. We have something different in mind. We are building mobile communities, firstly around the mobile device, and secondarily around all access. We won’t label it, let’s say, as mobile web 2.0 to follow the revolution of the user driven web 2.0, but it just might change how you use your mobile phone.
This is really cool. Stay tuned for more!
~zmo