Mobile search market – not so hot
I have to agree with Om over Piper Jaffray projections of $11 billion for mobile search market. Atleast half the cell phone users in the US do not use SMS actively. Atleast 75% of the users have outdated handsets and are locked in a year or two agreement. Its only users like Om who jump onto the latest handset in the market 
What are your thoughts on mobile search and which technology would you bet on in the mobile search domain?
Just like how Google is unveiling Writely, the Web Word Processor, which is speculated to be a cool and different from our routine MS-Word, so also, for the Mobile space it will be a totally different app. My experience suggests that its not just “e-”, “v-”, or “m-” nabling of technologies, it has to undergo some kind of transformation to be cool to use which ultimately makes it HOT in the market.
Finally, I don’t think US is the best market for m-search & commerce. With just 207 Million subscribers in the US at the end of 2005, it is way behind the number subscribers in the East(Japan, China, Malaysia and India). The East and the Europe have worldclass 3G & 4G infrastructure with highly affordable subscription rates for the mobile savvy consumers. While for the internet era, it was the opposite. I guess Mobile 1.0 is a whole different game than Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
Comments
One Response to “Mobile search market – not so hot”
Leave a Reply
Feed
[...] Timesonline is reporting that Google Mobile Labs is targetting the fastest growing Mobile marksts of the world, India and China. Earlier I had reporetd that the equation for Mobile 1.0 is not the same as Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 – East will rule the West Also the potential for value added services in the Indian mobile industry is very high, which is evident from the fact that Bharti-Airtel by itself was able to sell 75 Million tones so far. The concept of caller tones/tunes is absent in the west. [...]