The Sunjay Times

Tomi T Ahonen wrote an excellent post at 7th Mass Media Report, recapping the 10 years of mobile (a testament to his experience!), and how it’s worth 71Bil today. I’d like to share a condensed, nay, a tiny hand-picked section of it here—to highlight something would help mobile app entrepreneur-developers. I’ve written before about why I’m excited about mobile apps, but it’s always good to get some words of wisdom from a real industry veteran.

A word of advice on developing for mobile:

To succeed in this space, you should not copy your existing content formats and try to squeeze them onto the mobile phone. Yes, we can of course take the existing web page, and squeeze it to the phone screen. Yes, we can chop up movies into 5 minute clips and offer them on phones. Yes, we can do the headline news, and offer them on SMS alerts. But that is copying existing legacy mass media. Television did not succeed by showing “cinema” content on the TV screen. Yes, movies were always a part of television, but TV innovated and created. Talk shows, 24 hour news, Game shows, Music Videos, Reality TV. You can’t do those in the cinema. They are not copies of an older media. They are content invented for TV. Now we have to do the same with mobile.

Mobile is a new mass media (the seventh). Not the dumb little brother of the internet. Mobile is a superior mass media platform, with seven unique benefits. And yes, it can be done. I have a rapidly expanding collection of examples of true mobile content innovations here at this blogsite. Obviously I have 16 case studies in my latest book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, to show how to go beyond the copy, and into the creative and innovative. Remember, mobile content is not a “struggling industry” like the internet, where content owners hope to find “eyeballs” and then desperately try to sell advertising. We get 71 billion dollars of revenues, and 68 billion of that – 96 percent of it – is content that is paid for by the end-users. We have a far healthier industry than the internet. You can make money in mobile.

Just a quick comparison of other industries to get a sense of how huge this opportunity is, and how fast it’s growing:

The mobile content industry is now ten years old. In the past ten years, mobile content has turned into a global giant industry worth over 71 billion dollars of annual revenues. That is as big as all hollywood box office revenues, plus all global music revenues, and all videogaming software revenues – put together. Hollywood and music are 100 year old industries. Videogaming is a 30 year old industry. But mobile has already grown bigger than all three, combined, in only ten years. This is a juggernaut. Its a runaway train. Its the opportunity that will suck in every cliche that pundits can think of.

This post is much longer and I do no justice summarizing, thus I highly recommend you set aside 20 mins to fully read and absorb the knowledge from here (I found this insightful gem from this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists).

On a related note, I’ve been collecting some thoughts on how developers should approach the mobile platform (not treating it like a traditional desktop app or web app platform), and the key properties of a good mobile app. Stay tuned for that!

Entrepreneurs are necessarily delusional—crazy enough to try make turn a vision into a reality. If you have any doubts that mobile applications can change the world, here’s a video clip of how a mobile app is used to transform the education landscape at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Share it