Distribution of smartphone platforms are very different between US and Europe.
And same stats but from Nielsen
When you are into something with the purpose of making a difference, take something to the next level and you are idealistically motivated (like me in mobile), it is always great to see presentations like this.
Especially in a business like mobile because mobile is under high pressure of proving that it is possible for stakeholders to make money out of it.
@bmf tells us how.
Communicating it and and executing it is hard, though. Looks like dressing up as a pirate helps, though. 
Wish I thought of that years ago!
InfoQ: Making Apps That Don’t Suck.
Googles EMEA Head of Mobile, Ian Carrington, visited Oslo recently. Unfortunately, I didn’t know so I could not be there when he boldly pointed out that if you company did not have a mobile friendly web presence, you will loose market share. He also predicts that mobile commerce and advertising will grow significantly by 2015.
Here is a translated article on the topic from Kampanje.com.
However, there are a few things that puzzles me here… I totally agree that mobile web is the way to go and that the business as a whole will grow. Maybe by the numbers Carrington says, but I doubt it will have the desired effect for the ones who are spending the money. The reason is search. Mobile search sucks! Even if my estimate suggests that 13500000000 mobile searches are performed pr month on Google the search quality is poor. Generally, search today is a tool for desktop devices with a static context. Even if you get different search results with a mobile, Google need to work on that algorithm, because the relevance is too poor compared to experience one would get on a desktop. Even if 1 in 3 mobile searches has a local intent, and you want to find the closest shoe store, this is not the case for 2 out of 3. Local search is easy, the issue is the other 66%. This article from search engine land, points out a few other issues.
At this stage, it doesn’t look like any search engine out there is built for mobile. Or is it the web sites indexed by Google that need to change? (SEOs have a hell of a job optimizing sites for mobile search!)
So, for mobile commerce and advertising to explode, like everyone says it will, mobile search has to improve, SEOs need to understand and work with mobile and the last missing link: The backend systems need to support mobile as a sales and customer interaction channel (Ebay is probably moving in the right direction, even if they are missing some parts…(try searching for “ebay car” on your phone, and you see what I mean)). I guess this issue is related to the well debated term “One Web“.
As of April 2011, I cant see this happening any time soon. I mean, the three things I mentioned above is what is required to get a real explosion. The numbers Ian Carrington is telling us is really just natural growth when you think about the big numbers we are playing with in the mobile business.
Earlier this year, I wrote a short post comparing the number of downloads in the Apple Appstore to number of searches on the mobile web.
Now, new reports suggests that the number might be 15% (paid search)
If Google then has in the area of 90 bill searches per month, and 15% of these are from mobile, we get 13 500 000 000 (thats 13,5 bill) mobile searches per month performed on Google sites…
If the other search properties (bing, yahoo,baidu etc.) has a similar number of mobile searches, the total number of mobile searches performed per month globally is 21 000 000 000 (if we assume global search per month is ≈ 140bill)
(Would love to find an accurate number on this. Comparing different data sources does not give a true picture, I know.)
On the other hand… Does this really matter since Google search quality on mobile is so poor? Does mobile users search more because they cant find what they are looking for?
Mobile Ajax and the so called “mobile web 2.0″ is a hot issue now adays with the iphone and all… I have done some testing just to learn how much ajax one really can expect on current mobile devices.
Hope your device supports ajax now then… The web browser on newer nokias should support most of the examples below. If you have a SE you’ll need a NetFront 3.4 browser which works like a charm!
Nokia just released this document regarding the >Nokia browsers and Ajax.
Please feel free to give feedback.