Brij’s One More Idea

 
In another example of how mobile-app-can-wreak-havoc-with-your-business-model, check the usage statistics of Facebook For iPhone.

There are 243,482 daily active users representing 45% of total. These are high numbers. It's fair to say that 243,482 iPhone owners are now using Facebook for their social networking experience.

Now compare the use % for applications which are higher on the leader board -

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High active user number for iPhone application has serious implications for several Facebook developers. Especially Social Media, Lookery . These distributed ad platforms need to come up with a model similar to PinchMedia.

Now iPhone users are affluent (or maybe crazy!), spend more time online, and fall into compelling demographics. Ideal for ad targeting. Challenge lies in developing a new ad serving model which can exist within the constraints of App Store. Eventually acceptable format will show up but in the meantime iPhone will further damage monetizability of social networks.

Also every  user access Facebook from iPhone means one less ad impression on Facebook.com. In Facebook case ad is served by Microsoft. We can generalize this reduction in ad impression across all mobile social network apps.  That cool and  'clean interface' constraint of iPhone app is a natural ad blocker.

Keep an eye on 'active user' count for mobile social networking apps.  It's a leading indicator of how disruptive mobile apps will be.

Never owned Honda cars but always liked their Mr Opportunity campaign. Especially the knocking sound. That knocking sound is getting louder and louder for the Mobile Web.

For any idea to be fully 'invented' it first has to move to Silicon Valley. We finally passed that test for Mobile computing.

After languishing in Nokia and Motorola WAP'ish interface for many years,  Mobile web is finally becoming a reality.  iPhone (and the accompanying baggage of GPS, App Store, SDK, iTunes etc) present once in a decade opportunity to reprogram lot of existing use cases. There is a play here, that's why Kleiner Perkins started $100 million fund. I hope it gets allocated to address broader Mobile Web market. Tim Oreilly echoes that there is a strong startup mindshare working in favor of iPhone.

How to play in this new mobile web is still a challenge. Market is moving fast, time window to declare victory is longer than what contemporary funding circus allows. All that Facebook F8 hype ended up helping top 10 or 20 applications. Rest of the 30,000 odd applications became glorified focus group studies. How to plan scarce development resources so that your iPhone app doesn't end up as a focus group experiment? More questions than answers right?

I think many trends are converging and they present higher abstraction play opportunity. Mobille Web, Voice Web, Smartphone SDKs, etc are evolved enough that they can be addressed from single development environment.
Key is to find horizontal services in this emerging category. Clear visibility into revenue model won't hurt either.