What will be the biggest stories in the mobile marketing world this year? SnapTell discussed the next 365 days with industry experts, its customers and partners, and came up with these 10 predictions:
1. Support for MMS shortcodes by major carriers will launch in the first half of 2008. Consumers can then quickly and easily “text” a picture to a shortcode.
2. Launch of Google’s Android handsets by carriers will foster real openness and innovation by independent software vendors and service providers alike.
3. Apple’s February release of a developer’s kit for the iPhone will bang the last nail into the coffin of closed systems.4. Carrier agnostic applications and solutions will be the big winners in this brave new open mobile world.
5. OpenID will be broadly adopted on mobile platforms first, but not until late 2008.
6. Privacy concerns regarding mobile marketing will be front and center in the news this year; campaigns that are not strictly opt-in will risk being seen as phone spam.
7. Mobile web usage will soar in North America in 2008. (The rest of the world is already wondering what took us so long).
8. Consumers’ interest in ringtones, screen images, games and other options will wane; carriers will turn to mobile advertising to replace this revenue.
9. Web 3.0 will appear on smart phones first.
10. Location capabilities will be a key area to watch in the mobile market as more phones come equipped with GPS. Providing information that consumers want, when they want it, is the key to mobile marketing success in 2008 and into the future.

 – posted by Giselle Abramovich

Rumor has it that Google will be unveiling 1 or several Android-based Google phones at  Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona this February.

The Google-ites are already hard at work, tinkering at the Googleplex on prototypes made of refurbished pieces of HTC phones. The current devices are not the sexiest, but of course these are just developer-ready models. I would imagine whatever Google debuts at MWC will make the iPhone want to run and hide in a closet - if an iPhone had legs that is.

Anecdotally, if an iPhone did have legs Google would be aiming to sweep the rug from underneath it with its rumored debut. Hell, ad-supported (subsidized) Google phones may just have the whole cellular manufacturing industry on the run - in more ways than one - to keep pace with Google. This is true even if the devices don’t offer much new in terms of functionality - unless of course you consider advertisements, however cleverly they are masked, to be new functionality.

The point is these Google phones will eventually be as cool as the coolest phones available and they may be much, much cheaper, therefore highly prevalent in the near future. If they do end up being ad-supported that is.

None but the Google-ites know for sure.

But if we know Google, whatever happens will be just what we did not expect.

A demo of Android posted on YouTube’s Android Developer Channel shows the top level UI menu, in which the user scrolls horizontally through a carousel of icons to launch the relevant application. However, later iterations could spawn limited sub-menus, so that a generic mail icon could contains the selections for email and SMS/MMS messaging, or a ‘chat’ icon could include SMS/MMS plus the instant message client.

We’re waiting, Google.