Mobile is a One Way Street

I'm back in the US. a few months now and I'm amazed at how crazed everyone is with mobile. For years Europe was far ahead of the US., but the iPhone and apps have changed everything.

Its on everyone's radar, and its not just about creating an app, but making it part of an overall strategy. It feels like the Internet of the mid-late '90s, everyone wants to get on board. But its more mature and the mobile is bigger, a much bigger opportunity.

If you look at some of the numbers, you'll see its a one way street. The world's population is about 7 billion people: 2 billion people are connected to the Internet, 6 billion have cell phone and about 1.2 billion have a smartphone.

• China and India account for 30% of this growth.
• About 800,000 apps are available in IOS and Android app stores.
• Google earns $2.5 billion in mobile ad revenue annually.
• Mobile devices account for 8.5% of global website hits.

The first thing most people do when they wake up in the morning is check their phones. We check our phones about 150 times a day, spending about 2.7 hours per day on our phones. We do so many things with our phones, for example half of all local searches are from mobile devices.

This growth is going to continue to be strong. In the next two years, more people will access the Internet through their cell phones, instead of their desktops.

Mobile is clearly the right thing, but to compete companies will have to redefine how they serve their content and how they offer their services and products. Mobile is not about apps. Its about creating content and commerce opportunities that are relevant and geo-targeted. Its about engaging people in real-time, while they are on the move.

As desktops, smartphones and tablets merge, we'll see a convergence, because of technologies like HTML5, on how we design user experiences. The process of how we think about websites will change, becoming mobile, consistent and coherent across devices.