Telecoms and tech author Tomi T. Ahonen was one of the speakers at Picnic09. I know him as the one who coined term Seventh of the Mass Media to explain why services on mobile need not be copies of internet or TV content. During his Picnic speech, he talked about the short life span of mobile phones and the resulting hand-me-down mobile phones that wind up in the hands of teenager children. Or developing countries. Much to my surprise, he held a plea for development of WAP portals and MMS concepts: "The future of the internet, the next 1.4 billion users (currently there are about 1.4 billion total users of the internet), will be very strongly mobile phone based users. [...] It means the users will be accessing digital content on the three basic technologies that most phones today can support - SMS, WAP and MMS. Those are what you have to consider, not iPhone apps or 3G videos or bluetooth etc. [...]
If you want to deploy games, music, advertising, even social networking, and want it to be a success for the next four billion, then you build it on SMS, WAP and MMS."I remember WAP and MMS as products being pushed into our throats by telcos, who were frustrated they missed the SMS gravy train. I also remember absolutely disliking both WAP and MMS. I used MMS for a while to moblog pictures, but after that I was glad to get rid of it.
But there are some interesting creatives. A typical poster child for MMS advertising is the BMW Winter Tyres case. But will this be enough to stop creatives of focusing on developing iPhone apps "because they are cool" (not because of market share)?
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