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Well, it was roughly ten years ago that I started up a site devoted to the nascent mobile Internet industry, largely because in my own quest to learn more on the subject, I had found precious few resources on the subject. I say roughly, as the domain name really only came later and I had the original site hosted on Tripod. Finally I got round to registering a domain name (just after the .com was registered, naturally) and the rest is history - or archived, the image here is actually from a 2001 Web Archive copy.

Looking back on the last ten years, the mobile Internet has changed greatly in terms of technology, but commercially change has been far slower. The reason for the latter can be boiled down to two reasons, the mobile operators and the lack of ability to monetize over the mobile.

The relationship between mobile operators and service providers has been a difficult one at best. At the beginning, the operators sought to own and control content outright, which led to a lot of very poor content selected on the basis of what their marketing departments (who comissioned or bought the content), rather than consumers, actually liked.

WAP didn't help either. Personally, I always felt that despite certain criticisms (largely that it was based on a closed standard that seemed to benefit WAP gateway providers more than consumers) it was a good, if early, technology. With its demise, certain mobile specific functionality has regrettably been lost; most notably the promising, if never properly implemented, WTA specification.

Nonetheless, WAP failed in the end; partially because the mobile operators, gateway providers and handset manufactures could never fully implement the actual standards, but mainly because of the unrealistic expectations that were sold to the public between 1999 and 2001 and which resulted in the so-called

Needless to say consumers were just a bit miffed at this.

Nonetheless, as time (and costs) went on 'profit sharing' models slowly developed and as technology and public adoption improved; colour screens appeared and even WAP was 're-branded' - what do you think MMS essentially is? Also, in no small part, although I hate to admit it, the iPhone popularized mobile Internet use.

Added to this consumer cost to go online dropped, access to putting services and content on the mobile Internet, without having to go through the operators, improved dramatically.

However, this did not solve the thorny issue of how to make money - the fixed Internet had solved this problem in the late nineties, as e-commerce became a reality. Premium rate SMS seemed to be the answer to everyone's prayers, ushering in a new era of mobile micro-payments - until, that is, we all discovered that the operators would be keeping often the majority of any revenue, making any but the most 'aggressive' (and I use this word for legal reasons) business models unworkable.

So-called m-commerce, still remains illusive today, for a variety of technical and commercial reasons. There have been limited attempts at addressing this, such as that by Paypal, but outside of premium rate SMS and e-commerce based 'wallet' applications, we still have to wait.

But where exactly will this go in the next decade is the question. To begin with I suspect that the technological gap between mobile and traditional Internet devices will continue to narrow - especially in light of the mobile operators' own entrance into the ISP market, the difference between fixed line and mobile Internet will blur. However, blur does not mean vanish and certainly some differences will always remain; screen sizes are a practical example that in turn affects usability and thus what types of services or content will be commerically viable.

Understanding this narrow difference will likely be key in the success of any future mobile venture.

A workable m-commerce solution is also inevitable, all that has surprised me is that it has not already happened. When it does, we'll likely see an explosion in services and content, given that there will finally be an incentive to place it there. The only caveat I would add regards the use of the word 'workable'.

The rest is more difficult to judge. Social networking, especially when combined with LBS, will no doubt become big. Games, and in particular Massive Multi-Player Online Games will also prove successful, I believe.

Mobile TV will likely succeed too, but there are still far too many commercial and technological issues that need to be addressed there - not least of all the basic business case; if the entertainment industry still has not found a way to get people to pay for content rather than file-share it for free, what what chance does Mobile TV have?

Ultimately, the mobile Internet and all the technologies associated with it are not only here to stay but will likely grow in the next decade. Hopefully, my site will still be around in the next ten years too to help people in the industry get their heads around it all, just as I sought to do so ten years ago.

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