Earlier this year I made 10 predictions for mobile - and many of them have already come true! Check out the original post here. 

As part of their mobile insert this month, Strategy Magazine asked if I could provide 10 new sets of predictions… so here they are 10 predictions for the Canadian Mobile marketing ecosystem over the next 12 months as printed in this month’s issue:  

1. Fixed Bluetooth networks will appear all over the country - giving marketers and advertisers proximity marketing abilities as seen in the UK and South Africa
2. One carrier will start the 2d bar code craze by introducing a line of devices that come with a decoder pre-installed. Scanning heads of lettuce for nutritional information will become common-place shortly after (as they already are in Japan)
3. The Mobile web will become more important for marketers as a channel than SMS as devices such as the iphone and the blackberry bold (and rumoured thunder) will raise the bar in terms of overall experience with a high speed mobile web experience on our national 3G network
4. Mobile widgets and applications become bigger drivers for consumer behaviour than the device itself. It will no longer be just about the hardware
5. Palm will make a comeback and once again compete in the “smartphone” space
6. Thanks to built-in GPS in many devices, Location based services (LBS) mashups will make your mobile device more personal and relevant. Marketers will be shortly behind
7. A new Social Networking utility goes totally mobile (with LBS) - and competes with facebook for Canadian mindshare
8. Mobile gaming will explode in popularity - leading to strong growth in mobile advertising
9. At least one new GSM national Carrier will enter the marketplace and will compete directly with Rogers. They’ll probably sell the iphone too. Look for either Bell or Telus (or both) to signal a move into supporting GSM in Canada as well
10. Over 30 billion SMS messages will be sent in Canada - up from the predicted 18 billion this year

itsmy.com - a popular mobile-only social network with over 1 million registered users announced today that they will be handing over control of ads to their users.

Users can now self-select from 15 categories what types of ads they’d like to receive. For example, there are fashion, sports, and entertainment categories. An initial test of 20,000 users saw 82% make their own ad selection. CTR response rates in the test group was 3%.

This whole strategy is interesting and worth following over the coming months as it’s essentially taking the exact opposite approach of behavioural targeting which has been working great in other online channels.

If they can combine user behavioural targeting with self-selection, my bet is that response rates would improve even more. I would even test a subscription model for self-selecting “no-ads”.

Having said that, many mobile devices do not support cookies or other user tracking mechanisms, so trying out a self-selection model makes sense… for now.

Here’s a re-post of a video demo of their platform from this year’s world mobile congress:

We knew this was coming… but results from a new report from Opera, a Norway-based mobile browsing company even surprised me!

According to the report, 40% of global mobile web traffic starts with popular social-networking sites such as MySpace, hi-5 and facebook. 

That number grows to 60% when you look at U.S. numbers - which is not surprising as Americans tend to spend more time on the mobile web relative to SMS than other markets. No Canadian specific data was published in the report.

It will be interesting to see how mobile-first social networking site and utilities will impact this number in the next 12 months.

Other mobile social media sites to watch are:

• itsmy.mobi (and check out the blog & demo I published back in Feb here)
• bebo.com
• faceparty.com
• friendster (making a come back?)

Interesting enough, Nokia’s own mobile social media site (mosh) did not make the top 10 most visited on any of the countries reported in detail within the report. I guess owning ~40% of the global handset market does not guarantee software or mindshare dominance.

You can read the full report here.

The Globe and Mail reported today that Microsoft is again talking to Yahoo. Get the full article here.

Seen largely as a way to counter any potential Google and Yahoo advertising partnership, a new Microsoft relationship would bolster their rating and access to the market while giving Yahoo shareholder value without raising too many regulatory eyebrows around anti-trust.

The long term play

Although still relatively small compared to the desktop web market, partnering with Yahoo now means Microsoft can also get access to their leading mobile platform.

Within two years mobile advertising in Canada will include inventory for marketers that will reach beyond Carrier on-deck portals. Already we are seeing early versions of mobile search (with proximity capabilities), mobile video, and mobile social networking sites with built-in ad-serving abilities. This market is going to be massive.

It also sets up the possibility of another takeover attempt in the not so distant future.

I’ll be getting on a plane Sunday afternoon to Barecelona, Spain for the 2008 Mobile World Congress - formely known as the 3GSM.

My plan is to blog at least once a day with summaries, points of view and perspective on a variety of mobile related topics including: 

1. How MMS is working as a marketing device in Europe
2. Applications of LBS (location based services) in Asia
3. Bluetooth marketing messaging in Africa
4. Mobile Search
5. Mobile web vs. Mobile widgets
6. Mobile advertising platforms, case studies and trends
7. Mobile Social Networking
8. Demos of 4G technology
9. New devices, or device trends
10. Off-deck content and applications

The plan is to also attend several events related to the conference including the Mobile Monday Peer Awards, Mobile Entertainment forum, Canadian breakfast forum, Mobile Jam session and the GoMo News blender.

Do you have other topics you’d like to hear about while i’m there? Send me an SMS, comment or email me through the contact form on this website.