The future of mobile will be always-on data

Data, structured or unstructured, is key all web apps.   One of the biggest problems I see today is that data is hard to obtain and manage.  The mobile device can be a great passive data capture device.  With features like the speaker, accelerometer, magnetic compass, proximity sensor, light sensor etc. Some early ideas that are [...]

Mobile Trends To 2020

Mobile-trends for the next 10 years

The next wave of search

Search is changing.  Here are some of the trends I keep reading about.  The blogs now talk about the idea of  “Serendipity” – the idea of search becoming more intuitive, more location centric, less pull and more push, less clutter, more relevant information,  more mobile.   New layers are going to be added to search engines. [...]

Beware of the administrative costs of text donations

Tonight I made a $10 donation to the earthquake victims in Haiti by Texting HAITI to 90999.    I started to wonder how much of the $10 donation was going to Haiti. After some digging here is what i found.  According to CSCS (www.usshortcodes.com), the short code 90999 is owned by a company called Mobile Accord [...]

Should Palm and Motorola merge?

Gigaom has written a piece on the idea of a Palm and Motorola getting together.  While this is one option to consider, I think there is another way to go that might create a lot more value for Palm. My thesis is that the Palm should start offering additional services around the device.  In effect [...]

Investing in mobile – where are the opportunities?

Mobile remains a huge opportunity for venture capital.  In the first wave (the Soviet Era as some would call it), the money was made from ringtone platforms like Dwango, Thumbplay, Jamba, mobile publishers like Vindigo, Zingy, Jamdat etc., SMS platform provider like mQube, 365 etc..  In the Soviet Era, content was king, but distribution was [...]

Top 5 things to be aware of when going mobile

App downloads seem to be picking up steam.  Apple announced 2 billion downloads of their 85K apps at the end of September 2009.  On Jan 5, 2010, Apple says over 3 billion iphone/itouch apps have been downloaded from over 100K apps.   While this is great news, I have been thinking a bit about what this [...]