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Battle Over Mobile Web Heats Up

Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 24th, 2008 12:32 PM

With the new iPhone set to launch next month, anticipation from consumers is running high and concerns from mobile competitors are also running high. Nokia’s stock is almost 50 percent off of their 52 week highs which the company hit back in November. Analysts are speculating that the new iPhone is going to dominate the smartphone market, putting competing companies on the defensive.

Today’s news that Nokia has acquired Symbian and is opening up the platform for developers is one of those defensive maneuvers. The social web is also getting ready to explode on mobile devices with yesterday’s announcement of Nokia acquiring Plazes, a location based social network. It’s clear that there is now a fierce race to become the dominant player on the mobile social web.

Currently the leading mobile social networks are not the same as the leading web-based social networks, suggesting that this area is still anybody’s game. Yesterday’s acquisition of Plazes by Nokia further highlights this trend ad companies are not holding back in their race to become the dominant force on the mobile social web. It’s an extremely exciting time for mobile and over the next six to twelve months we are going to see an increasing amount of buzz in this area.

It’s time to start placing your bets. Who do you think is going to become the most dominant force on the mobile social web? Who will be the leading mobile social network? Who will become the dominant platform for developers?

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Posted in Mobile
  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    Interesting that this post came up at this moment... I am sitting in the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum as Mark Pesce as he is talking about the explosion of mobile and how it has yet to even begin to sort itself out socially.

    Interesting stat: 15 years ago, 50% of the world's population had never made a single phone call. Now, in only 15 years, 50% of the world population owns a cell phone. That is truly amazing and with half of the world on mobile phones, it is only a matter of time before they demand inter-connectivity. Whoever figures out the best way to do this will have a huge market to tap and it will be amazing to see who does it and how.
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    Unfortunately I'm not sure that Nokia will garner much attention from the developer community, especially compared to Apple or Google. Plus making Plazes a handset specific device automatically means that many people won't use it.

    You can't make the social graph proprietary. Do they think they can buy all our friends?

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