Where will you be in 2020 and what will your life look like? Such a question seems almost impossible to answer, especially when looking at the speed and acceleration of innovation throughout the last decade. In the beginning of 2008, for example, nobody really knew about mobile apps. At best, the bulk of consumers knew about downloadable “programmes” for mobile phones, most of which were games. Just two years later apps seem to be everywhere, not only for the iPhone but as a topic in blogs, among entrepreneurs and even mainstream media.

Despite the difficulty of making sophisticated predictions about the future, Rudy De Waele, mobile expert, co-founder of dotopen and blogger at m-trends.org put together an impressive list of people to write down their trends for the coming decade.

The aggregated list is quite extensive, so here goes our short-list of trends we find most important in general and with reference to app developers and mobile publishers. Some of the following are freely interpreted and commented – hopefully they still display the intended meaning:

• We’re all value creators – the notation here is that value creation and exchange will be democratized, collaboration and co-creation in real time become vital as we move forward to the next billion of Internet users
• App businesses – by 2011/2012 we will see $100m/yr businesses built on apps
• App Stores will open up – less restrictions, more user/developer control.
• Powerful mobile devices will cost less – dramatically increasing the number of people with access to the Internet. Also, data plans will become cheaper.
• More than 50% of the word’s households will carry a mobile device – that’s roughly 3 billion. Just imagine that.
• The mobile browser becomes the main applications platform – no more native apps? We are not so sure about that.
• Mobile phones as remotes – TVs, cars, everything.
• Mobile Gaming – browser gaming (including mobile) pretty much replaces the current console market in the western world.
• Things and services – the connection between online services and physical devices will keep increasing. This will cause a need for new applications that help us make use of all our personal data. Think Foursquare or CitySourced as early examples of this.
• Data and things – things will generate more data traffic than the average human.
• Daily data – already, the Internet knows a lot about us. This will dramatically increase with the mobile wave. As we learn to „create and manipulate“ this data, we will learn to value personal information that stays personal.
• Privacy and “always-on” backlash or “the value of being offline” – with increased personal data and visibility of our everyday activities, privacy will be a big issue and a challenge for new services to handle and solves these. Furthermore, as a reaction to always being connected, people will pay for the ability to be offline – going ’dark’ and to disconnect will become a USP for certain products and services.
• Mobile Advertising and “ContVertising”– Advertisers will massively convert to mobile. New means of ad-targeting consumers (consumer interests) will lead to an increased relevance of consumer marketing – the combination of very high relevance and paid ads will be perceived as content rather than an intrusion. The improved possibilities will lead advertisers to move one third of their budgets to mobile. As part of this, the bulk of brands will use apps to increase brand awareness.
• Augmented reality, live information based on context and NFC – this was mentioned multiple times, though without many details to it. Bottom line: many products and services will make use of AR, it will be adding value to products and services and will be (a value proposition in) a big market. Receiving information based on live information of one’s environment and context will be possible and part of our every day life. Near Field Communication (NFC) will take off.
• Indoor smartness – intelligent environments and indoor positioning. This corresponds to the mentioned AR-Services, contextual relevance and NFC.
• Mobile payment and money transfer beyond mobile banking – pay everything with your mobile device (we should stop calling it a mobile phone, as if that were its main purpose or use case). No more need for a wallet.
• Mobile Commerce – will take off. In our opinion this is strongly connected to receiving contextually relevant information and connecting online with actual things.

 
If you find the time, go check out entire presentation, there are a lot more points in it that are worth a thought and we haven’t mentioned here.

The new AdMob Mobile Metrics Report for November is out and it has some interesting metrics in it, especially because it looks at the trends of the past year 2009. It is always a little biased in that it only takes AdMob’s own publisher network into account, but the scale of their network gives the report more than just a little representability.

Some of the major developments were the increase of smartphones regarding share of mobile web and app traffic (up 48% from 30% last year) and the tripled amount of requests via Wifi. Another interesting fact is that traffic regarding Android devices seems to spread almost equally between different devices as they keep adding to the number of Android devices in the market. In our opinion this substantiates the assumption that not one Android device will be able to compete with the iPhone, but rather a whole array of different handsets that will enter the market.

What’s most interesting about it is how the amount of iPhone and iPod touch users is divided between countries and how this has developed throughout the last year. 50% of all iPhone and iPod touch users in the AdMob network now come from the U.S., while the other half seems to have evolved into a “country long-tail”, with the U.K. at 8%, France at 6% and Germany as well as Canada at 4% (17% are made up by countries with a share below 1%). Especially Japan, France, Australia, China and Germany have seen a massive user growth, with Japan at more than 300% increase and the others mentioned close to 300% or above 200%. And (we think) we are only at the beginning of the mobile “revolution”. Great times ahead – Android will probably take a similar route in terms of distribuion by country.

Find the entire report here – it’s well worth your while, we think. As weekend reading you should also take a look at the Morgan Stanley “Mobile Internet Report” though for this one, you should really bring some time.