01/14/10 08:29pm

Mobile Internet – The next delivery channel

January 14, 2010

Here we are, halfway through the first month of the New Year.  But now that we’re fully back from the holiday festivities, there was one thing that caught our eye during the last month of the old year.

In December, Morgan Stanley released their Mobile Internet Report in which their global technology and telecom analysts provide an assessment of where that market is headed.

Among their projections:

• Within 5 years, more people will access the Internet through a mobile device than they will from their desktop
• Mobile web is the fifth cycle of wealth creation and destruction in the computer age and, as before, the leaders in the previous cycle will not sustain their position, assuming they survive at all.
• Facebook – with its updates, chat, messages, media sharing, apps and VoIP calls — is becoming a desktop + mobile communications hub. It is positioned to become “…a communications platform/engine of one-to-one, one-to-some and one-to-many (and visa versa) for the mobile Internet…”
• Consumers want to find and watch video via the wired + wireless internet.  Mobile use could surprise for many years.
• 3G is the key to success of the Mobile Internet, but the surge in usage may force carriers to off-load to Wi-Fi.

Indeed, exponential growth in use of many 3G networks has resulted in considerable consumer frustration.  Consumers are likely ready to adopt and embrace the mobile Internet faster than the technology can support it.

And this report came out only about 6 weeks after Google purchased AdMob for $750 million in a move designed to push the search giant beyond simple text ads and into mobile display ads.

If you’d like to download your own copy. Morgan Stanley has a number of versions of it available here:

http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/mobile_internet_report122009.html

But be warned: they’re all huge!

As an option, you can view an Executive Summary slide presentations here:

http://www.slideshare.net/kvjs/morgan-stanleymobile-internet-reportexec-summarydec-2009

It’s fascinating to ponder how the mobile Internet will develop as a delivery channel for brand messaging – and in every direction: from the brand, to the brand, and about the brand.  Add to that the possibilities for geo-locating mobile device users and hyperlocal advertising…and you’ve got an incredibly fluid, shifting landscape for content creation and distribution.  We think it’s exciting….how about you?

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