Why Mobile Will Bring the Next Google or Facebook

Everybody knew it.  Each decade has its own behemoth, coming from nowhere, growing and managing to make the world advance in a leap that nobody envisioned. HP was such a success story; IBM and Microsoft are other examples, while Google and nowadays Facebook are completing the picture.

Each has developed a market, sometimes from scratch, each has managed to control and profit from that market (be it enterprise or personal hardware, operating systems or business software, Internet search and advertising or social-media).  And each is too much rooted in its own business paradigm to be able to reinvent itself as the next-gen behemoth.

Who will be the next Google or Facebook is impossible to say. The industry in which it will arise is, on the other hand, easy to pinpoint: mobile internet.

What qualities will this next behemoth have in order to gain a critical mass allowing it to develop a market from scratch and to raise to the multi-billion dollar valuation everybody longs for?

Well, first it will have to take into account the way people interact with their mobile devices, especially with the iPad-type ones. If people in their thirties went on the web to search information about other people, products or services as a main drive to connect, mobile devices are more about people themselves – and the need to express themselves more. And also to keep contact and communicate with their peers. So the social dimension of the mobile web will be of huge importance to any market-creator.

Next, search will still be a main part of the mobile tablets use, but this time search needs its geographical context. It still can work in an Adsense sort of paid advertising links, but it can be more and more immersive: restaurants nearby can offer discounts, of course, but also a cafe on the next corner can give you a special treat – via an app, a dedicated site or landing page – that will lure you into going there. Interactive advertising on mobile devices will be a main source of revenue – both for the portal(s) offering these services, and for the shop owners themselves, while helping people decide.

Information will be mapped onto the real world and this is where the next Industry Behemoth will most likely come: it will be a portal that will combine perfectly the existing information about people, places and happenings with the geographical world around us, with a social-oriented and individual-oriented approach. Search will be a huge part of it, of course, as it will be entertainment. But the portal in which each person will log in daily to see, search, communicate and express his or her views about the world, while receiving a direct benefit from this communication, will be the one that will change the way we see and interact with the world itself.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are already moving in this direction. Facebook already is such a portal, but without the geographical mapping we’ve talked about. But they are still somewhat distracted by their current main bussiness.

Others, like the Romanians at www.norc.ro, are closer to the target. It will be the one that will discover how to really bring people, their perceptions about the surrounding world and to make them express themselves about it that will begin to grow and to develop into the next Behemoth.

And for interactive agencies, mobile internet will be the most dynamic and challenging medium ever. Bring on the joy!