Remember the early days of the www? People shared good sites to "surf to". We still talk about surfing, but it's not some heady "let's sit down after dinner and surf the web" thing. It's now part of our everyday lives.
Early web sites were called brochure-ware. They were digital versions of print brochure content. There might be lots of it -- many of thousands of pages of it, in fact, on many corporate web sites. But the first people to put rich media content on their sites were lauded as visionaries.
Well, current mobile communication is the same. You have a device that can go on the internet, so you can read the same stuff, but very tiny. It's just so much web-ware for the handheld, the brochure-ware of our era.
We're now getting some interesting standalone applications. We can interact with the web from our mobile, like posting to Twitter. The whole concept is still largely about using the tiny screen in a highly visual way. For example, there aren't many mobile sites that have voice-driven interaction, for example.
And the real power of mobile -- to leverage location context and location technologies like GPS -- that's just starting. So the customer experience should get a lot better soon.
It should be fun. Remember those heady days of the dot-com bubble? Well the mobile bubble is going to reach a much bigger crowd, because it will reach the unwired developing world.
