Big-headed ideas for mobile systems

It is time to think large and ambitious, not small and niche, for mobile enterprise applications.

Debates on mobile IT tend to be rather dynamic. At a Mobile Web 2.0 discussion in the City of London on 19 January, in front of 200 people, speakers are in combative mood. We need more events like this in IT.

Chris Burke, ex-chief technology officer at Vodafone, is pugilistic. Market penetration of 3G phones in Europe will only reach 50 percent in 2010. So forget HSDPA – it’s just “a turbo charger for 3G”. If, in mobile, you want to make cash, then invest in usability, design, messaging and voice, not on broadcast radio or TV.

Asians like email, Europeans favour SMS and Americans go for instant messaging, but mobile users have a taste for all three. Think about IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Oh yes, and BT deserves praise for trying to merge fixed and mobile in the home, but technically it’s very, very tricky.

When I ask about mobile video conferencing, Burke separates video messaging, processed in batches, from video telephony, done in real time. He holds that ” see-what-I-see” applications in the latter are strong, but says that live face-to-face calls are slow to be adopted. Myself, I suspect that both will eventually do well in an enterprise context.

Venture capitalist Tony Fish of AMF Ventures is incisive. He believes that people change service providers and move house so much nowadays, they should publish tags of telecoms data about themselves – identities, interests, other stuff – on mobile networks, and then instruct service providers about their preferences for when, where, how and from whom they’re prepared to take a call. He says that mobile needs a new, Google-style directory system, and to my ears he sounds right.

Fish insists that the future of mobile is in millions of niche applications. In this, he follows Wired’s Chris Anderson, whose book, The Long Tail, is due out in May. Back in October 2004, Anderson decried the music industry’s efforts to squeeze millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of the emerging digital entertainment economy, he wrote, is in all the varied groups who like obscure musical “misses”. Plenty of money there.

Myself, I don’t go along with the long tail thesis. Google itself shows that killer applications can create new global demands. As early as February 1999 I attacked what Anderson celebrates – back catalogues and “retro” titles. The bottom-up, viral, word-of-mouth, online success of the Arctic Monkeys is one thing. But the Monkeys, by all accounts, produce great, new, innovative music, and it is that which the entertainment industry should concentrate on.

It’s the same with mobile enterprise apps. To write the 300 software  that might be needed to cover the basics of work in a sector such as the construction industry – that might appear a niche exercise. But the firm that does it will clean up worldwide. No sliver of a long tail there, but millions of customers, and a big contribution to global productivity.

When will mobile IT get some serious enterprise applications? When we strive for a Big Head, not a sliced-up Long Tail.