And now for my inevitable predictions for 2007—they’re a little bit late because I decided to see if Apple would launch an iPhone at MacWorld...no point predicting something that’s only a week away. So without further ado (or reference to my past prediction failures), my 10 predictions for 2007:
-- Mobile broadcast TV will be launched in a number of markets in 2007, with DVB-H gaining the most number of new deployments. DMB will get a couple and MediaFLO will get at least one launch outside of the US. There’s quite a few other mobile TV standards, and while they’ll have trials they’ll struggle to get any commercial launches.
-- In the US MediaFLO will see a few successfull launches with large carriers. Modeo won’t—it may get some launches with regional carriers or MVNO’s, but will start talking about offering the service itself. As for prices, any service that launches with one of the big four carriers is likely to be priced at a premium to avoid cannabalizing other services.
-- Full track downloads to mobile will take off...and never be seen again. They’ll continue to be overpriced and the different industry players will continue to blame each other for that. The ringtone market in developed markets will fall, and bundles of music content will become the fastest growing segment.
-- The iPhone will sell well enough to avoid being considered a failure, but not enough to be a runaway success. You might say I’m fence sitting, but the handset appeals to a certain market and it’s a market that Apple is good at targeting, but it’s one of the smaller fragments of the overall mobile market.
-- The number of mobile social networks will increase (and by that I mean social networks designed for mobiles from the beginning, not web sites that start offering mobile functions). There’ll be a lot of launches but few will achieve any substantial level of success.
-- Someone will finally figure out a location-based service that gains wide adoption. I have no idea what it will be, or I’d do it myself.
-- Mobile advertising will continue to be in the news and large numbers will continue to be thrown about, although there will be disagreement over whether that’s hype or not.
-- Mobile games will continue to increase slowly but steadily, and will never get attention except for conference panels titled “Mobile games: why have they plateaued?”
-- In more and more cases companies will release products and services as “digital”, which will be able to be accessed via mobile or PC without any major differences.
-- Chinese officials will be quoted saying that the country will finally issue 3G licenses...but it won’t. There will be some trial licenses issued for the cities that have Olympic events in 2008, and the same applies for mobile TV.