This morning I am speaking to a group of women entrepreneurs out here in Westchester about opportunities coming out of mobile. I have written about this before on the USV blog, but here is what I am planning to talk about today..
To understand mobile opportunities we need to look at
- Device capabilities
- Adoption rates
- Behavioral changes
Something that is intentionally left off this list are specific technologies. Whether it will be Android or iPhone or Flash or HTML5 are largely tactical considerations. This doesn’t mean they cannot make or break a specific company, but they won’t fundamentally shape the trends at large.
On the capabilities side I have come to think of mobile as a collection of sensors that are always with us, nearly always connected to the network, and have a fair bit of local compute power. To make this more concrete, the camera is one of these sensors. Instagram is a great example of using the local compute power (for effects) and the network connectivity for sharing. There will be many more use cases for the camera sensor then had ever been possible for traditional cameras, such as recognizing objects (Google Goggles, BarcodeHero) or even diagnosis (measuring heart rate). Foursquare builds off the location sensor. Navigation apps use location, acceleration and direction sensors. And so on.
On the capabilities side one should not forget messaging. That of course includes voice, which may, however, be delivered over IP. It also includes lM and even SMS will play an important role. Importantly, these messaging capabilities can now be more easily combined with the other capabilities of the phones which changes the possible use cases dramatically.
Looking at adoption rates it is clear that mobile devices with the capabilities described above are being adopted faster than even the first go around of the web. This means that many ideas that had been tried in the past and failed are worth trying again. More often than not, they failed because of a lack of a critical mass of users rather than because the ideas themselves were fundamentally flawed.
The most interesting part to watch are of course behavioral changes. Those tend to point in the direction of the biggest opportunities. Here are a few that seem particularly interesting. First, SMS is now widely used in the US with some established usage patterns. A text message is a higher urgency than an email but carries less than a phone call. Second, people are beginning to leave standalone cameras at home. Taking a picture with your phone has now become completely acceptable. Third, installing apps is no longer geek behavior but something widespread.
The most powerful opportunities live at the intersection between these behavioral changes, increased adoption and device capabilities. These opportunities will deliver a “native” mobile experience, which means an experience that is not some marginal improvement on an existing experience, but rather something that simply could not have existed in a pre-mobile world.
