A giant leap for mobile

Mobile World Congress is just around the corner, and usually the giant mobile jamboree is where the trends for mobile emerge over five days of stand hopping, conference surfing and late night tapas-snorting networking. But I think that, with more than a week to go until we all decamp to Barcelona, the trends in mobile that will change how the telemedia business works over the coming year or more have already been established.

In short, mobile is going through a huge cultural shift. The ground work has of course been laid during the past few years, but we are now seeing it come to fruition and, as you will see in Barcelona later this month -- and at our own telemedia events in Leeds on 11 May and Amsterdam in the autumn -- how consumers use mobile and what the mobile industry has to do to meet their demands has shifted significantly and fundamentally.

A study by the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) mobile arm reveals that 27% of consumers are choosing their mobiles as the best way to access content and services, and typically they are doing this through their mobile browser, rather than clicking links, using shortcodes, or firing up apps. This is a huge shift. Apps have been seen as the great white hope for mobile and, compared to early browsing experiences, they were. But now people just want the web.

This is borne out by the three year deal signed between UK broadcaster ITV and MIG where the former is using the latter's new interactive platform start to offer apps and m-web based interaction. The good news is that money enters the system through PRS among other billing tools, but the picture is clear: how media interaction with mobile happens is changing. As is how people pay to do it is also shifting.

The IAB research also points to the fact that mobile marketing may also now be hitting critical mass. 40% of those surveyed reveal that when they see an advert they reach for their mobile to find out more.

While some agencies are starting to put QR codes in ads, most don't. Moreover, most companies don't bother -- yet -- to mobile optimise their websites. And they are missing a huge opportunity. Consumers want to come in through mobile, the brands aren't letting them.

And then there is billing. Contactless payments have been much vaunted and it seems that now they are on their way. Everything Everywhere -- the Chimera created by the splicing of T-Mobile and Orange -- has teamed up with card company Barclaycard to roll out a mobile NFC-enabled payment network across the UK, so that shoppers can start to pay with a card embedded in their phone.

Finally, proper mobile billing has arrived in the UK. But as we revealed two weeks ago, Starbucks has got there first with it's barcode based stored value app for iPhones. While it is likely that bank-backed NFC-enabled chip and PIN based mobile payments will eventually win out (once the redemption infrastructure has a been put in place) but for the rest of this year we are going to see an explosion in mobile payments in shops, stations, everywhere.

Naturally you won't find it on planes, the radio will interfere with the avionics, so it may well be that we will still have to have a payment card or cash if travelling by air, but everywhere else we will all be waving our phones about willy nilly paying for things.

There will be some great mess ups, there will be issues with chargebacks and there will certainly be some clever, well thought through new frauds perpetrated on the unsuspecting, but overall it will be part of the huge revolution how people use their mobiles.

And it will all form the central pillar of the next Telemedia360 event taking place on 11 May in Leeds. The conference will be taking shape over the next few weeks -- and we'll keep you up to date -- but never has it been more needed to get then industry together to look at where the next set of opportunities for the Telemedia industry lie.