Upcoming Challenges For Mobile Development and Mobile Marketing

The digital world is evolving and the trends are changing in real world, making the world faster than ever before and technology more stable. Mobile is all about today’s world which took birth with the invention of first pager in 1956. The world started getting mobile and the launch of first commercial mobile phone by NTT in Japan was the next step to stabilize this mobility.

The innovation in this mobility with SMS happened to be originated in Europe in 1985. SMS was a boom in the later part of 1900s and early 2000s, and still it’s the top cellular activity. Now, there’re above 4 billion mobile phone subscribers, with 74% of them using SMS of which 94% of SMSs are read. Just in UK 1.4 billion text messages now being sent every week.

This is just about mobile phones and SMS, innovations like iPhone, Blackberry, Android and mobile-internet integration are constantly opening the new horizons of excellence for mobile marketing. Web marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing methods with maximum outreach. Since there’re more mobile phone subscribers than that of internet users, so mobile opens broad ways for marketing from small and medium to large businesses.

Mobile-web integrated marketed is still in the process of development, reason being the lack of awareness among most of mobile phone subscribers, i.e. there’re about 10 million users worldwide using GPRS services that makes only about 0.25% of the total subscribers. But, this low percentage doesn’t mean that mobile marketing is not growing. There’re various alternative methods within mobile marketing including SMS Marketing, Ingame Mobile Marketing, Location Based Services etc.

Ingame Mobile Marketing is the fastly growing area and the future of mobile marketing. The reason is that more than 90% of mobile phone subscribers play mobile games. From simple interactive real-time 3D games to massive multi-player and social networking games, mobile gaming is everywhere. This trend is accelerating the growth of mobile 2.0 on one hand and hence the mobile development on other.

Mobile development being the next big thing is now the focus of small, medium and large business, and hence it’s becoming a competitive industry. The cometition is becoming tougher as the industry leaders Nokia and Google have moved to opensource, and this situation is critical for ISVs. ZDNet also reports that, it’ll not be the great UI as only challenge instead, things that matter more are ideas and methodologies. Though ISV’s are more under pressure, but companies will have equal pressure and will have to face almost same challenges. It’ll be the race of collective innovation [what I can term it as] or Product Innovation [combination of innovation in methodologies, design, productivity etc] so, innovation in over all performance will win!