Month: November 2006

I've inserted some commentary under MB

FORTUNE MAGAZINE — Nov 7 — In early October, at Fortune's annual Most Powerful Women Summit, blog queen Arianna Huffington led a panel called Understanding the Internet's Future, with Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior, and Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience.

WARRIOR: The Internet is still in phase two. Phase three will be about making it pervasive, where everybody in the world has access to it. To do that, there's going to be a different kind of device. [She holds up a cell phone.] At Motorola we call this "the device formerly known as the cellphone." In the next ten years the Internet will follow you. It'll be in your pocket, in your purse, on you.

MB: Mobile dating will grow to be bigger than online dating, simply because people will eventually interface with the internet on mobile device more often th on laptop or PCs.  Mobile dating and matchmaking + webcam + location based services, will be at the heart of future dating company success stories. 

MEEKER: The first computing experience for the majority of the world in the next two or three years will be on a mobile device. In 2006, 25 percent of the two billion mobile phones in use will be either 2.5g or 3g phones, broadband-enabled. The mobile market is kind of where the broadband market was two or three years ago. If we look at data-services global revenue for the mobile market today, it's a $70 billion market. Just the personalized ringtone, Screensaver, music part of the business, that's a $20 billion business globally – equal in size to the online global advertising market. That's equal in size to Yahoo plus Google plus MSN plus iVillage.

China has become the largest user of technology products and services in the world based on number of users. India will be the third-largest market some time in the next five years.

MB: Services like Baihe.com, eHarmony's equivalent in China, are getting massive user-ship. BharatMatrimony, Shaadi and Jeevansathi, along with Orkut lead the way in India.  Mobile services are also springing up and experiencing massive growth, especially amongst the younger set.

WARRIOR: We made $2 billion providing ringtones to service providers. It's interesting that people will pay $2 now to get two lines of a song to play when their phone rings, but they resist paying 99 cents for a full song on their PC or MP3 player. Why? Because it's personalizing the device. It makes a statement about who you are. Think about how to do that with video.

MB: Webdate has the best platform for webcam based internet dating. The problem with webcam based dating is that it's impossible for sites to police, and can turn XXX quickly. Still, it's the future. Voice and video are essential offerings for future online personals leaders.

WARRIOR: We just launched a device in China, where text messaging isn't possible because there are 3,000 Chinese characters. So we invented finger-writing recognition. With your finger you can write any Chinese character, and the device recognizes it. It's the fastest-selling device in China.

In India we're adding five million subscribers – like connecting all of Denmark every month – with a new low-cost device. Most people cannot read and write, so we went to an icon-based browser. As for the thumb typing, it depends on the generation. I have a 13-year-old son who types faster with his two thumbs than with his fingers on a PC. One of the things he said to me was, "Mom, why do you watch TV? It doesn't do anything with you. It just sits there." That generation thinks very differently than we do.

In China mobile romance is a huge business. People pay $2 a day for online dating on a mobile device. You put your profile on the Web, and you get an alert when somebody who matches your profile is near you at a party. You can text-message them. The statistics say that one in every six messages results in a date. They're bringing on 250,000 subscribers a month on this service.  There's something called text flirtation going on at parties.

WARRIOR: We have to think very differently about the next ten years. Today about 2.5 billion people are connected on a mobile service. There are four billion people waiting to be connected.  About a quarter of them are in India and China. About half of them are in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

MB: In ten years time, game over internet dating.  Mobile dating will have cleared the table. 

The full article was originally published at Fortune Magazine, but is no longer available.