What’s the mobile killer app? That was the question at Silicon South-West‘s recent conference ‘Wireless 2.0‘ in Bristol, England.
To which Dr. Tony Milbourn, CEO of Camitri, replied: “What is the iconic application that makes things happen?” Do people want the Swiss Army Knife or discrete functionality?”
David Wood, founder and executive vice president of Symbian, in 77 million smartphones last year, wanted “a killer app to drive buyer take-up.”
And he had a few ideas:
- Access email via mobile phone. “There are 600m business email addresses but under 10 per cent have mobile access”, said Wood..
- Smart voice – voice routed through the corporate switchboard so one number gets the guy wherever he is.
- Smart mobile access to maps with GPS showing routes, and with the ability to zoom in and out of maps and highlight the location of contacts. Plus a smart interpretation of the images generated explains what you’re seeing.
- Smart mobile access to the Web. Follow e-Bay auctions, access Facebook, YouTube etc.
- Mobile content creation. Blogging at the Point of Inspiration. Take photos, upload comments. For instance the stories written in Japan for mobiles phone users called Keitai Shosetsu have attracted 25m users.
“DoCoMo takes a very modest share of the revenue from applications – say 10 per cent”, said Wood, “Western operators like a much larger share and that drives developers out.”
Eamonn O’Neill, Director of the University of Bath’s mobile projects, reckoned the killer app is in supporting groups of people, rather than in the one-person-to-one-person interaction of today’s mobile Internet. Bath University has developed a sharing application called Cityware.
Half the population of Earth now has a mobile phone while one billion have access to the Internet. The next billion or two will be enabled by small, cheap devices and broadband wireless.
Apple’s WebApp Store offers a clear vision of the future. Open source communities are now forming around Android, LiMO, Open Moko and Symbian.
Open the box.
