Mobile services innovation - where is it heading to?

Recently I was reading a blog by the CEO of Fjord Oy about the direction in which Mobile services innovation is going. He argues that Mobile based services (MMS, PTT, Video calling etc.) launched in recent years have not yielded up to the expectation. Reason - they were neither designed carefully, nor they they could sustain the poor infrastructure of the service providers. Services innovation was a big talk at Nokia when I was there at their headquarters during pre-recession era, not long back though. It was rumoured that Nokia is going to entirely focus its business to services from device by 2010. This does not, however, seem to happen this year. Though, less bandwidth savvy applications and services have found success in recent times (such as mobile email apps), the apps which demand high bandwidth have miserably failed to draw the attention of customers. Most of the services offered by mobile service providers are still running on SMS.

The reason why internet infrastructure took lesser number of years to grow than mobile infrastructure is basic. The network standards across the world for internet is same, while for mobile they are too many. It is simply hard to replicate the mobile network from country to another. Besides this , there are too many stakeholders. This made the process of innovation in mobile services really slow. The new iPad and other slate devices expected to come this year in market, are all bound to succeed only if they could please their customers in performance. These devices boast to bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops, but still the network backbone provider for iPad, Verizon is finding it difficult to cope with the increased bandwidth requirements of the machine.

The mobile services needs some breakthrough innovations, as it happened with the internet (Skype-in voice and video calling, Google - in searching, Y! - in web chatting and numerous others). These innovations are expected to come from smaller and innovative players rather than big device makers and service providers.