TREND WATCH

At the outset, Mobile and wireless had prosperous year so far after the transformation it has seen over the past couple of years from a voice-only medium to a more interactive, entertaining and immersive communication platform. While the mobile market is growing at a rapid pace, there is a need to design and develop components, devices and applications which can enable the better and richer platform sought by the discerning users.

WiMAX technology has also seen a transformation with the focus now shifting to the mobile version (802.16e). The deployments expected to happen in 2007/08 is providing further momentum by fueling growth of more startups as well as providing a rich opportunity for the existing .16d and .16e vendors.

Similarly, WiFi is seeing a resurgence of investment with innovations like MIMO (802.11n) driving growth besides the expansion of WiFi market with municipalities (muni-wifi), enterprises, Hotspots, SOHOs and end-users adopting the technology at a rapid pace.

From a consumer point of view, the trend has moved towards social collaboration with consumer technologies and behaviors driving its evolution. Mobile 2.0 (As it may be known) will clearly be driven by a blend of collaborative opportunities and mobile technology and services.

Another key trend is mobile data that is driven from websites, collaborative systems. Following are the key areas that are playing a significant role in mobile data space:

• Mobile search
• Mobile enablement of various web applications
• Instant messaging
• Emails
• Location based services
• Business transactions through mobile
• M-learning
• Mobile TV

The trends are not only changing the way the consumer interacts with the data systems, but also the business models are being fundamentally changed to enable the wider usage.

Following are the technologies that support the mobile collaboration:

• Peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging and communications
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
• MIT's Serendipity and Nokia's Sensor
• Multi-radio smart phones
• Time- and location-based communities
• GPS and other location-sensing technologies
• Mobile video messaging and videoconferencing
• Multimedia messaging services (MMS)
• Integration between 3G video calling and corporate video conferencing systems
• Document sharing
• E.g. – SharePoint/Wikis on mobile phone
• Lightweight edits on documents
• Photo and video blogs and communities
• ShoZu or YouTube on mobile
• Podcasting
• Social networking
• Enabling users to create their own communities from mobile

“Driven by a seemingly insatiable consumer appetite for personalization and entertainment content on wireless handsets, companies that provide the platforms that deliver premium content to mobile phones reaped a $4.2 billion share of the $16.3 billion mobile premium content market in 2006, according to iSuppli Corp. These mobile-content-enablement platform companies perform the tasks involving the ingesting, cataloging, storing and delivering of content and handling all of the corresponding financial transactions.

These market factors will drive the share of revenue for the mobile content enablement platform companies to $7.4 billion of the more than $35 billion premium mobile content market in 2011.” iSuppli Corp