For quite some years we already see the mobile web being promoted by carriers without a real breakthrough. The web on a mobile device so far meant an expensive service, in many cases a misfit of the content to be displayed on tiny screens and the lack of convincing (business) ideas for the web on the go.

This year things seem to change in many ways:

1. The market for portable navigation systems (especially in Germany) has grown since 3 years from the nearly non-existence to an estimated 1 billion euro business in 2007. This tremendous growth made companies like Nokia wake up and enter the market with their mobile phones (equipped with GPS). So from now on we will see an interesting contest between those stand alone navigation devices and mobile phones with GPS inbuilt. Older cellphones get help from the french startup BlueSky Positioning: They integrate GPS on the (normal) SIM card! So in my opinion it’s not difficult to forecast the market development in this field: Cellphones will gain the battle and navigation will be the breakthrough feature for the mobile web.
2. The Web 2.0 and its idea of social communities offers more and more applications for meeting oder making friends on the go. Most of them might fail sooner or later. But they will help a lot to establish the idea of web services especially designed for mobile devices. The Open Gardens Blog has some examples. In addition to that Geo Tagging is a growing business and one of its most prominent companies, Plazes, is located in Berlin. Mobile Tagging so far is very popular in Japan but still more or less unkown in Europe. Meanwhile Google is on the rush for Mobile Search. So in the past there was only browsing the “normal web”. Now we see more and more applications specially designed for the “mobile web” adressing needs for people on the way. Without doubt this will change people’s attitudes and habits.
3. In the longer run features like Mobile Gaming and Mobile Payment may also contribute significantly. So far only Mobile Gaming really is a (fast growing) market while solutions for Mobile Payment from PayPal or Google still wait for broader acceptance (Did you notice that Google seems to take part in nearly any of those new fields?).
4. Finally this article would not be complete without mentioning this week’s market launch of the iPhone. I am sure that the iPhone will alter the market of mobile phones a lot and bring an important shift from regarding mobile phones no longer as simple telephone devices (with some additional functions) but as multimedia machines that also can make telephone calls. Apple’s advertising strategy clearly shows how they want the iPhone to be used (although there will be no GPS on board).

But still we do have one major problem: Surfing the internet on a mobile device is (very) expensive compared to the fees for home computing. But here again the remedies are not far off: Apple’s famous iPhone counts on Wi-Fi and quite a few startup companies work on algorithms, that will be able to compress data into packages of bearable size. In Germany the market leading carriers, Vodafone and T-Mobile, started this month offering affordable flat-rate fees.

So in a few years time we might look back and declare 2007 as the real beginning of the mobile web and many mobile business models. But in the same time we also might (nervously) look forward to the start of the 4G mobile networks, that will bring us transmission capacities of 100 MB per second (or even more). And once again things will change dramatically. But that’s another story…

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