2011 To Be A Major Year For Mobile

4. Smartphone application search

One of the big new areas in mobile will be application Search inside mobile application stores. This will offer beneficial services beyond looking up applications by categories.

Personal profiles will be inputted to assist in the application Search process. This is an area ripe for innovation.

5. Tablets

It’s easy to notice that tablets are becoming very popular. I believe tablets will form the “three legs of the mobile stool” in which we have:

a) a notebook for creating information (Microsoft Office) and doing serious message management, for example, via Outlook, ) a smartphone on which to talk and do quick reviews and c) tablets on which to review, think and do more thorough on-the-go messaging.

6. Tablet applications

Just as the smartphone helped spur the creation of application stores, watch for tablets to help create application stores that are more focused on the tablet environment.

You already see this with publishing applications for the iPad that are designed for the tablet and not the iPhone. I think that education will be a huge area for tablets.

7. Education/technology renaissance

I have always thought that, someday, high school and college kids won’t have to drag around a load of textbooks. Tablets can already help reduce the burden. For example, Kno Computing is migrating college textbooks to their own reader platform.

I think longer term, the more exciting thing will be to see textbooks migrate from being static to being dynamic so that authors can constantly revise their textbooks – adding better examples, more animation and more testing, etc. – and students can interact with them for active learning instead of passive reading.

8. Mobile commerce

The announcement of the creation of Isis by US mobile operators like AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile is very important.

The real innovation will come in 2012 when the Near Field Communication (NFC) chip is included in all major popular phones, and software is provided so that everyone will have a “mobile wallet” in which they can select their payment type and then touch the checkout terminal in the store to complete the payment.

Between now and then, there are many other things such as transfer of funds between phones, payment of bills and mobile banking that will drive the market in 2011.