Since the start of the year, the team at Mobile Messaging 2.0 has been dropping in their predictions for the year ahead in the mobile smart phone world. And while everyone has zeroed in on their own specialties, it’s interesting to see the common threads that have popped up again and again in our minds.

If you want the quick one liner takeaway from all our predictions, here it is.

Follow… The… Money…

The impact of mobile advertising was picked up by most of us. Now that our smartphones are becoming connected to the internet more frequently, it feels a natural avenue for advertisers to deliver a highly personalized message to users, with up to 8% of advertising budget being ring-fenced for mobile advertising in some US companies.

But I think it is wrong to think that the mobile internet is going to develop in the same way that the PC based internet did. While ‘all you can eat’ data-plans are starting to become more readily available, they are not the norm. When users are paying for every bit coming down their pipe, there is going to be a big resistance to all but the most subtle of advertising messages. When you’re paying for it, you’re not going to want pop ups, flash banners and audio messages kicking in while looking up times for an airline flight.

The best time, at least on the PC based internet, to give someone a nudge to a site is in search – that’s where Google’s AdSense makes a significant portion of their revenue. But mobile search is radically different to regular search. Where people are happy to get hundreds of answers on a Google PC search, they’re only going to want one or two when they’re on a smaller screen. If one of those slots is a paid for slot that other result better both be super accurate, and ready for a small screened browser to display accurately.

Nobody’s cracked mobile search yet, not even Google. As they say, past performance is not a guide to future earnings.

And, like any good blogger, this post brings in yet another term when discussing the future of the internet on phones – the PC Based Internet. The terminology is bad enough for us technology commentators, so who knows what the consumer thinks. Mobile Web, Mobile 2.0, Web 2.0, Mobile Internet, Web on the Go… until terminology is agreed on, we’re not going to be able to join the dots in the minds of consumers.

The mobile world is still a huge number of islands, connected by rickety rope bridges. While it’s a given that there will be consolidation in a number of areas (and one key area might be in the adoption of MMS (multi media messaging service) to the same level of inter-operability we expect of SMS. This would open up new features on the phones, from high quality megapixel images, video messages and packaging up bundles of data for whatever the social networks websites think will be usable.

The key is going to be the cost to the user. Flat rate data opens up access to the internet, and either megabundles or flat rates for texting (SMS and MMS) will be needed to open the floodgates. The competitive nature in al the markets should see this happen, my guess is in late Q3, in time for a marketing push for the festive period.

Consolidation in the products and services associated with mobile is a given, especially if the hints of a recession this month continue in the markets (can we all say Silicon Valley Bubble 2.0?). The chatter behind Twitter always wonders who is going to buy the service – one suggestion is AOL – but I think we’re going to see Twitter used as a vector to deliver those advertising messages before it gets swallowed up. Other services are going to look for the tie-up. Expect some of the more switched on network providers (I’m thinking T-Mobile and Vodafone in Europe) to buy these services, both to push themselves as content providers and to act as incentives to switch to their networks.

The underlying predictions though are simple. More money coming into the ecosystem, with a combination of even more users, advertising spend, and the idea of mobile payments, probably driven by Europe and Asia. But in terms of the global markets, the USA will make some big leaps to get much closer to the other major territories, both in terms of handsets but in contracts and network services.

In manager speak, the mobile space has been through the forming, and while there’s a lot of [brain] storming still going on, 2008 looks to be the year we settle down, start norming, and use the tools we have for change to their maximum effect.

Our Predictions in Full…
Russell Shaw, Debi Jones, Ewan Spence, Paul Ruppert