Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

3.1 INTRODUCTION

In the first edition of this book, I spent a lot of effort in the opening chapters trying to promote the idea of mobile applications. Since then, things have moved on. There are now many mobile services in the market, many companies producing mobile applications and there is significant interest in using mobiles to deliver services previously confined to the Internet. Indeed, many of the ideas that I introduced in the first edition, which were possibly novel or visionary at the time, have since been widely discussed or even implemented. Given the degree of progress since the first edition of the book, I shall spend some time in this chapter summarising what I see to be the major trends in next generation mobile applications. This will hopefully provide additional context for the rest of the book.

Of course, the critical question always arises – where does the revenue come from? In my experience, this question is often raised early and vigorously during presentations to operators. This is because they already run very successful businesses with clearly defined and measurable revenues. Indeed, the obsession with revenue in the mobile telecoms world is demonstrated by the invention of a metric to measure it, called ARPU, which stands for average revenue per user. Such a metric might cause an entrepreneur in Web 2.0 world to turn white, knowing that he or she doesn't yet know how to generate revenue from their prodigious efforts, never mind plotting it on a graph. ...