It’s no longer about the year of mobile.  The decade of mobile has begun and holds more promise than the interweb did in the early 2000s.

Here are 9 predictions I have for the mobile space in 2012:

As I’ve been saying for years, the mobile web (thanks to HTML5) will overtake any specific App platform. It just makes too much sense to develop once and publish across all platforms – especially since you don’t lose any of the experience you would get in an App environment. Consumers are catching on that many times you actually don’t need an app for that. The mobile web will surpass traffic of the desktop web for the first time Just as QR or 2d bar codes have replaced the need to have an SMS marketing campaign for most marketers, NFC enabled phones will start replacing the need for QR codes.  First you’ll see the two of them together (like we used to see an SMS shortcode and QR code) then very quickly everything you see will be NFC enabled Brands and marketers will realize that the tablet web experience is a different context than their desktop website or mobile website and will start building out HTML5 driven experiences to take advantage of this channel All screens become mobile. It’s no longer just about the size of your smartphone or tablet, very quickly it will become about which screens (taxi cab, your car, TV etc…) you can connect to With the connection of everything to everything all the time, security and privacy will become differentiators for those who can both  make it simple to use and understand Just as the touch experience has revolutionized the way we interact with our electronics,  gesture based interfaces will start to appear and will soon replace touch.  Could this mean the return of the clapper? I first realized the potential of a bendable & scrollable mobile screen when I blogged about it from the Mobile World Congress in 2008.   2012 will be the year when we will first be introduced to mobile devices that either have bendable / flexible screens and / or are scrollable Social media becomes more mobile and more local

Fee free to add your own predictions or rebuff mine with your comments below. Happy New Year!

Last week I had the honour of presenting at the Digital Imaging Association’s AGM and holiday luncheon at the boulevard club in Toronto.

Petros Kondos was way ahead of his time.  Well before smartphones, mobile apps and even the mobile web Petros recognized the potential of mobile phones for not just marketing, but customer relationship management programs. He was effectively one  of the pioneers of location based marketing (LBM).

Using the power of bluetooth for good (permission based) and not evil (what we used to call bluespam) he was an example for the rest of the world to follow.  I first learned about his company in 2007 while in Barcelona for the World Mobile Congress and followed with great interest as he got 50 of the biggest malls in South Africa as well as several banks, automotive dealerships and other retail centers on to his bluetooth marketing system.

We exchanged emails over the years and I had the opportunity to meet him two years ago when he was in Toronto scouting out a possible relocation and partnership with a Canadian bluetooth marketing company.  Since then he has shut down his business and wrote a book about his experience from start to finish. You can find it on Amazon.

I really enjoyed his book and took away a few things: 

1) His marketing instincts led him to create an amazing CRM  product based on Bluetooth – but instead of staying true to his marketing roots he eventually became a Bluetooth company that did marketing and not the other way around. This ultimately held him back from evolving & expanding beyond Bluetooth early enough as he was too heavily invested to abandon it or to invest in other emerging mobile engagement mechanisms.

2) Over the last few years his marketing instincts led him to the development of a revolutionary product that leverages the signals from all Bluetooth devices to more accurately map and track foot traffic in retail – by the minute.  When I learned about this two years ago I was working for a promotional marketing company that specialized in shopper marketing who would have salivated for this type of tool in their tool box.  Before I could more seriously validate and explore an implementation in Toronto I was recruited away to RIM.

3) Mobile marketers today who are only now figuring out location based marketing as part of their marketing mix using mobile Apps that leverage GPS or by leveraging mobile triggers such as QR codes could learn a lot from Petros on how to make it relevant in retail and how it fits into the broader promotional or marketing mix

Although when I think of location based marketing today I mostly think about the gamification of loyalty programs through the likes of foursquare, the future of LBM is exciting. With NFC becoming standard on mobile devices, mass adoption of 2d code readers and even the evolution of the bluetooth standard to leverage and incorporate wifi all point to a future of mobile marketing that goes beyond a banner Ad.

At the recent CMA Mobile Marketing conference I asked to see a show of hands for all those who worked for brands or agencies that had created “mobile marketing” capabilities within their organization. I was impressed that the majority now claimed to have mobile as part of their marketing mix.  This is a significant change from even a year ago. When I followed up that question with how many have mobilized all their marketing activities, I got mostly blank stares.

It’s one thing to hire a mobile “expert” to create messaging campaigns, help you build and app or figure out your mobile web experience, but to harness the true potential of mobile, marketers need to think about mobilizing the entire marketing mix. 

Incorporate mobile to enhance and create engagement with existing print, broadcast, outdoor, PR, social, retail, training and event marketing activities. 

Remember how hard it was to convince Creative to add a URL to that print add or TV commercial a few years ago? Dust off those cognitive dissonance management skills and march back into black turtle neck row armed with your shiny new QR codes, SMS Short codes, mobile friendly URLs, app store and bluetooth logos and your quick reference sheet on mobile adoption in North America and get ready for round two.

Just as marketers and brands are finally figuring out their mobile web strategy, it’s time to add the tablet web to the mix.  The tablet web is not just a new screen, it’s an entirely new channel.

Here are five good reasons why:

Want to see a great example of a tablet web optimized experience? Check out http://blackberry.com on your tablet browser today. Feel free to share links to other outstanding tablet specific pages in response to this post.

For those who missed this video last week (shame on you) – here’s a great comparison between the mobile web experience on the iPad next to the Blackberry PlayBook.

Why do we care about the mobile web experience? Consider the following:

I know what you are thinking – here’s my first post since being hired by RIM and I’m already drinking the Kool-Aid! One of the reasons I was so excited to join RIM was that both our c0-CEO’s have been very pro mobile web vs. the more closed App as the future of mobile. This is a point of view I’ve been advocating for the last two years.

With over 600k Samsung Galaxy tablets already sold since launch, I know this market is going to explode next year as the PlayBook and several other entrants join the market to take back their “fair share” of the tablet market.