10 for ’10: T360’s predictions for the hot topics of 2010

Hello and happy new year. What with it being the first working day of 2010 and I being nothing if not clichéd, it seems fitting to kick things off with a look at what is going to be hot and happening in 2010 for the telemedia industry.

Everyone who makes predictions is trumpeting how they all got it right at the start of 2009 about how apps were going to be the big thing of last year. Looking back through most of the material I have from then, many soothsayers did indeed predicted “growth in apps” but none as far as I can see really saw how significant they were going to be.

Now, before you all get uppity about it, no apps aren’t that special in themselves I agree. What is significant about them – and about the mobile industry’s other bet noir, the iPhone – is that it changed the consumer’s perception of what is possible with a mobile phone. The iPhone, I believe, ushered in the mobile web era. The app has made doing interesting, multimedia stuff on your phone much easier. Nokia didn’t make this happen. Vodafone didn’t make this happen. Apple did. And, whether the hype distorts its true success or not, the iPhone and the app are the key mobile things to happen in the last decade, let alone the last year.

And if you don’t believe that the development of cool mobile services shouldn’t be left to network operators, then check out today’s launched of the Nexus One, the latest, and best, Android phone. Disappointed with how lacking Motorola’s stab at it was, Google has ‘personally’ overseen the development of Nexus One with HTC and has, by all accounts developed a much better competitor to the iPhone.

Anyhoo, what does this all mean for 2010? Well the app will continue to shape how mobile works I think, in quite a profound way. Apple’s dominance of the apps market will be challenged, mainly by Android and GetJar in 2010. The issue of app store fragmentation will also play a role in how 2010 shapes up, but before you know it, it won’t be about the store, it will be about where to get the best apps, which is why GetJar, the independent apps store, will I believe have a great year in 2010.

But the real impact apps will have is on how they will reshape the media’s approach to mobile and what this then spawns. So while apps are number one on my list of 10 for ’10, the media and billing come in at joint number one rather than two and three respectively.

Why? Well 2010 will be the year the media – particularly the print end of the spectrum – becomes multi-media and it will achieve this through apps. 2010 is also the year the media will start to charge for its ‘online’ content and services and, again lead by apps, will look at how micro-billing will play a part in that.

We have already looked at how mobile billing has quite a role to play in how media monetises its content, but the kind of mobile billing that will succeed is still up fro grabs. Payforit and other operator led WAP billing tools are no way guaranteed to garner widespread use. Instead, as the media industry turns to apps as the easiest way to engage people – forget for a minute whether apps are right or not, they are what people want – so in-app billing will become a key tool in how media monetises itself in 2010.

This will also lead to another, less welcome, trend in 2010: in-app billing fraud. Remember diallers? Well unauthorised in-app billing could wreak similar havoc on this fledgling industry and could well, if not regulated properly, become the PTV scam of the 2010s… and we don’t want that now do we?

There is also the worrying trend that, with recession biting the telemedia sector, some of the old scams are rearing their heads again. So this is another of my predictions for 2010 – regulatory chaos. Is PPP up to the job? Will it be able to move fast enough to encompass these changes in its next code? On past form, no it can’t. The next decade is going to have to see a radical rethink of media and telemedia regulation as, to my mind, what is in place now no longer reflects the world we are about to live in.

What else are we going to see in 2010: well the rise of  telemedia in retail will become apparent. Couponing, ticketing, contactless payments, m-wallets, mobile banking and even peer-to-peer mobile cash transfers will all come in to their own.

Purchasing using text or the web from a phone from a poster advert will be the big thing of the latter half of this new year, I think. Contact-less payments will take longer because of the inherent infrastructure issues… unless of course people wise up to the fact that there are prototype apps out there that can turn a phone into a contactless payment terminal, obviating the need for expensive infrastructure.

And it won’t be just a smartphone thing either. Stickers that turn the phone into a payment tool are already in use in Germany. Look out for more of these in the UK and the rest of the world this year.

Other techie developments to look forward to include augmented reality, which will add a whole new dimension to social networking, GPS and finder apps and even interactive TV.

This platform interaction marks another trend for 2010, which will see a greater degree of cross platform offerings hitting the scene – and along with it, a rise in issues of who actually has the rights to do what with what content and where.

Another trend that all this will unleash starting in 2010 is operator network sharing, driven by the fact that all the media services being piled on are crippling network capacity and infrastructure investment is tough in the current climate. Look out for more networks sharing infrastructure as demand grows.

So that’s it. 2010 looks like being quite a year for the telecoms and telemedia sectors, so all we have to do is get on with it…