There's a lot happening in the mobile web arena.

And, as it turns out, Bango is a company that tracks this kind of stuff. Which is one reason why their "five predictions for the new year" are interesting: 

More and more people will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones. There are lots more mobile phones than there are PCs today. Over 50% of the world's population now have mobile phones, amounting to 3 billion mobile phones, while estimates peg 1.1 billion PCs (stats readily available at Pew and E-marketer). As the majority of new phones come with Internet access as standard, Bango expects that by Q3 2009, more people will access the Internet on mobiles than through a PC. (Coincidentally, ESPN announced its mobile site is seeing more visitors than its PC-Internet site and today I see that MSNBC is getting the bulk of political surfers through mobile ‘day of/morning alerts’).

Mobile advertising will surge. Get ready for ads on your phone. Mobile advertising has the potential to generate more than $10 billion in annual revenues by 2010. (Video banners anyone???)

We'll see a shift from messaging to Internet for data usage on mobile phones. Bango is already seeing more web browsing as operators introduced flat-rate charging in 2007 and moved from a portal model to a more open search-based model. The new model encourages search by including the search box prominently on the portal home page. Mobile search will become more like the PC-Internet experience but the quality of mobile search index needs to improve dramatically to achieve mass market adoption. During 2008, more brands and content providers will use the Internet instead of messaging for service delivery.

Mobile commerce of physical goods will come of age. Buying consumables via the mobile web has been common in Japan and Korea; this will soon move to the U.S. and Europe. This is possible in the Far East because the operator payout rates to content providers approach that of a credit card so people are paying for physical goods on their phone bill. For now, payout rates in Europe and the U.S. are too low but as they begin to increase so will the purchase of physical goods. Mobile commerce coupled with strategic promotions in shipping will be a big hit in 2008.

The PC and mobile will become closely linked. The two separate worlds of the PC and the mobile phone will come together. People will connect their PC life with their mobile life more easily. Anyone on Myspace, Facebook or Twitter, for example, will be able to share content and information with mobile phone users. On the B2B side, mobile technology will make it easier for remote sales staff and/or any other compliant need to communicate to leadership (hmm…..internal communication leaps daily?).

Gartner recently commented on the future of open source and this is an excellent blog in response.  As most of you know, Gartner, Like Forrester, is a renowned ‘thinktank’ for enterprise-wide commentary.

In summary, Gartner suggests that we're years away from enterprise adoption of the following open-source software categories:

• Content Management (5-10 years);
• Enterprise Service Bus (5-10 years);
• J2EE Application Servers (2-5 years); and
• IP Telephony (2-5 years).

Learn more