The Third Wave of Mobile Data

Mobile Data 1.0 - Text on Ugly Phones
When I started out at Openwave as CMO in January 2001, part of my job was to posture the greatness of WAP. As you can imagine, that was a difficult task --- As is now pretty obvious, with black and white text phones with no graphics capability, the "mobile web 1.0" was a pretty crummy user experience. At this time, a combination of ten+ second setup times, and high latency on the un-tuned GSM and GPRS networks, and poorly written WAP applications basically made the experience unusable. Some witty writers in the UK described this first phase as the "WAPlash" phase of the market... I suppose it certainly was..

Mobile Data 2.0 - Graphics on Color Phones; J2ME MIDP2 arrives..
In the past 5 years has been the healthy second phase of mobile data and mobile content, with the emergence of color phones, picture phones, polyphonic ringers, and the proliferation of Java MIDP2 across a wide range of handsets. We saw the emergence of LG, Samsung, Sanyo, and Sharp into North America - pushing forward the pace of handset development. The first wave of successful mobile data content companies such as Glu Mobile, Jamdat, MQube, WiderThan, Jamba/Jamster were created in this era. Many have built successful businesses and have had successful exits

Mobile Data 3.0 - Starting now?
So what's next for Mobile 3.0. Certainly there's much talk in the marketplace around new business models and new technologies. Mobile advertising is a pretty interesting space these days, led by companies like AdMob, Medio, and ThirdScreenMedia, which are bringing new monetization models to the wireless space. Rich Media presentiation layers are another interesting space with Flash-lite beginning to build momentum (at least at Verizon), and AJAX-browsers, and AJAX-widgets starting to make their way out into the mobile world. The jury is out on mobile video in my opinion -- a ton of investment is flowing into the space, whether unicast or broadcast, but my guess is that this has still 3-5 years of technology work before it becomes real.

More to come, as CTIA Orlando kicks off in two weeks...