Telecommunications Predictions 2010 - Deloitte
Every year for the past 8 years, the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Global Technology, Media & Telecommunications Industry Group publishes their predictions for the technology, media and telecommunications sectors. 2010 is their 9th years in publishing these predictions.
In their telecommunications predictions for 2010 they listed seven items:
- The smartphone becomes a search phone
- Mobile VoIP becomes a social network
- Telecom technology helps decongest the mobile network
- Carriers change data pricing and make regulators happy
- Reliability redifined and reassessed
- Long-term solutions shorten and multiply
- The line goes leaner and greener.
For information on these and other predictions please refer to www.tmtpredictions.ca
We thought the smartphone prediction was quite revealing by what it didn't include. More on that in a minute. What exactly is meant that the smartphone will become a search phone and why does Deloitte feel so strong as to add this to their telecomunications predictions?
...the impulsive, spontaneous nature of many searches, combined with good-enough mobile search on smartphones, should cause aggregate searches to rise in much the sa,e way that early mobile phones caused the total number of phone calls to increase. We expect that users with both fixed and mobile Internet devices are likely to perform 10 percent more searches than fixed-only Internet users.
Fair enough. However, how important will social games like Foursquare be to making the smartphone a search phone? It's true that Deloitte feels that app stores will carry more search-related apps but they fail to recognize the popularity of social games. Social games, rather than stand alone search apps, are more likely to help the smartphone become a seach phone.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Deloitte's assessment? How important are social games to mobile search?
