8 Questions to… Tomi T. Ahonen

Heike Scholz (4. Januar 2011)

In:	Interviews Schlagwörter:8Fragen, 8questions

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Tomi T. Ahonen is bestselling author of 10 books on mobile, who lives in Hong Kong and lectures at his short courses at Oxford University twice yearly. Tomi is the father of many of the industry’s theories and tools, and has a passion for the innovations and statistics of the industry, about which he writes, speaks, blogs and tweets regularly. For more see www.tomiahonen.com

1. What is your preferred gadget at the moment?

My fave gadget right now is the Samsung Galaxy Beam, the Android-based touch screen smartphone, which is the world’s first to include the pico projector. I am utterly in love with this device!

2. Your currently most loved app, mobile site, mobile service?

I love Angry Birds as the app for its innovations and zanyness; among mobile sites I keep using Google’s search regularly on my phone, cannot imagine life without it; and my favorite mobile service is Flirtomatic, for its continuing inventions on how to monetize a social network on mobile.

3. What are you reading and how (paper, ereader, smartphone, tablet…)?

I love books and can lose all sense of time in any bookstore or library. But I have found that recently I do ever less reading of printed paper based literature, mainly only on the take-off and landing phases of air travel – and almost all work related reading I do online, based increasingly on topics and articles that I find mentioned on Twitter by those that I follow (including Heike on Twitter as @mobilezeitgeist).

4. What’s from your perspective the biggest trend in mobile- The Next Big Thing?

Augmented Reality and mobile money are going mainstream already, so currently I think the next big thing will be 3D displays on phones (that do not need special 3D goggles or glasses). The first such phones were already released in India and Japan.

5. Which hype annoys you? What is overrated today?

There are two which annoy me enormously. The hype about apps is overrated, where I do believe apps will eventually be a significant major part of the industry, it is not that today. Total consumer applications to smartphones, ie ‘app store’ apps on all app stores, will generate less than 1% of all mobile data revenues this year. SMS alone is 50x bigger than app stores and we have enormous innovations happening even in SMS, that generate tons of revenues and profits today.

But the hype that really annoys me is that around ‘Location Based’ services, because that whole concept has been proven to be a myth, and ten yeas after they were launched globally, location-based services have proven the worst-performing of all mobile service areas. The dumb part to me, is that the lessons were already learned early in the past decade – including many such lessons from early location-based services launched in Germany by the way – but the new entrant companies to mobile, mostly USA West Coast based, are oblivious to the lessons of our industry, and are now generating enormous hype around location, without bothering to examine history and learn. It frustrates me, that what I wrote in my second book back in 2002 about location, is 100% accurate today, but many have not bothered to learn the lessons.

6. Who (individual, organisation, company…) will change the mobile world?

The three authors and friends who often collaborate, Tony Fish (My Digital Footprint) (@tonyfish), Alan Moore (Communities Dominate Brands) and Gerd Leonhard (Friction is Fiction) (@gleonhard) are exploring the commercial opportunities now emerging around the ‘digital footprint’ as distinct from the ‘digital identity’ – and our ‘social context of consumption’ – which they have said, more or less collectively, is ‘the new black gold’ for this century. The biggest companies on the planet today are oil companies. What Tony, Alan and Gerd tell us, is that over the next decades, those global giants will be taken over by the newest giants, built around harnessing mobile data – with our explicit permissions obviously, not by abusing us. I think this concept as expressed by these three authors will most change the whole mobile industry over the coming years.

7. Mobile experts one should read, one should follow?

Some of the most insightful deep thinkers in mobile today are Russell Buckley (@RusselBuckley), Ajit Jaokar (@AjitJaokar), Lars Cosh-Ishii (@Wireless_Watch), Chetan Sharma (@chetansharma), Daniel Appelquist (@torgo) and Rudy de Waele (@mtrends). Recently I have been focusing a lot on mobile marketing and advertising, and in that area, I would add Jonathan MacDonald (@jmacdonald), Kim Dushinski (@KimDushinski) and Rory Sutherland (@rorysutherland).

8. Who would you recommend to answer these questions next?

Lars Cosh-Ishii (@Wireless_Watch), at Mobikyo, who runs the Wireless Watch Japan website in English about the bizarre mobile world of Japan, and who also is chairing Mobile Monday Tokyo. I think he’s the most insightful expert in all of mobile in Asia.

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Heike Scholz

Heike Scholz ist Gründerin von mobile zeitgeist, Mobile Consultant, gefragte Rednerin, Interviewpartnerin und Workshop-Leiterin.

3 Kommentare

1. Ric Ferraro

Hi Tomi,nnThanks for you response -I appreciate the exchange of views on this.nnAnd yes, of course, you are right in that LBS has been over-hyped and has under-delivered in the last decade but, and here lies the rub, I don’t believe LBS as a sector of mobile exists anymore today.nnTake Groupon, for example. Billed the fastest growing company in the US in 2010, with over $500m in revenues for that year, Groupon has built a global success story based on offering localized offers and discounts via e-coupons. And, last but not least, it became profitable after six months.nnGiven that Groupon is a location-based service with a full suite of location-aware applications, we could argue that it is a LBS (and a very successful one at that). But location is not the service it offers, it is merely a feature of its service (location awareness allows nearby offers to be delivered more easily).nnThis is not simply a question of semantics. The point is that location has allowed Groupon to unlock a great deal of value for its service by being embedded within it. In a similiar fashion, location awareness is allowing and will allow a great deal of businesses to create value within their mobile service.nnAre location-aware services over-hyped today? I don’t think so. On the contrary, I think most companies are only just beginning to realize the huge potential of embedding location (and accurate location, at that) within their mobile offer or service. nnWe can safely close the door on the world of LBS (it was a hell of a ride) and say hello to the world of ‘location-everywhere’ with location-awareness increasingly embedded as a feature on the majority of newly launched mobile services.nnRicnnwww.mobverge.blogspot.comnTwitter: ricferr_mobile

2. Tomi T Ahonen

Hi Ric and readers of Mobile ZeitgeistnnGood comment and there is some (very modest) ‘good news’ about location. So here is the big picture. Paid premium mobile data services were invented in 1998 (12 years of age). Mobile premium (non-messaging) data is worth about 100 Billion dollars in 2010. Location-based services were worth – 560 million dollars in 2010 said ABI Research. So over a ten year period, LBS has been that poorly-performing, it now accounts for literally half of one percent of all mobile premium service revenues. So ringing tones. Silly stupid simple ringing tones alone are 10x bigger in revenues (5 Billion dollars in value said Portio in 2009). Every single mobile data or service concept that is measured, that has existed for more than 5 years as a commercial service – is performing better than LBS. Every single one of them. Even such new concepts as the App Store smartphone apps (the second worst-performing category) was worth over 2 Billion dollars in 2010 (four times bigger than LBS). Mobile advertising, what so many hate, was worth about 4 Billion dollars. Anything you can think of performs better than LBS. And this has nothing to do with GPS on the iPhone. Japan’s EZ-Navi had GPS on it in 2001. I am not saying you cannot make money with LBS. I hate the hype around it, because it has been proven to be the single worst-performing category of mobile data services. That is what annoys me. Does that make sense?nnTomi T Ahonen nwww.tomiahonen.com

3. Ric Ferraro

Hi Tomi,nnI like some of your insights and enjoyed reading your article, though I disagree on what you refer to as the “hype” of location based services. nnAs you will have no doubt noticed, Twitter and Facebook mobile apps now famously include location…this is no ‘myth’ (as you call it) or accident. Location is there because consumers want it.nnWhere there is still, sadly a great deal of misunderstanding is in the use of the term ‘location based services’. This term is now outdated-services that simply provide location and nothing else are a thing of the the last decade.nnWe now should refer to these as ‘Location-Aware applications’ or location-aware services..Why? Because location is a feature not a service in its own right. As such, location is being embedded everywhere, because it is phenomenally useful on mobile devices. nnAs an aside, I personally enjoy augmented reality apps and the whole concept behind them enormously. However, they are not only far from being mainstream today. They are also massively over-hyped and are currently only scratching the surface of the possibilities that lie ahead. nnIt is also interesting to look to Japan and South Korea as global leaders in mobile applications and deployments. These countries are 5-10 years ahead of the development curve we have in Europe, for example. What is going on there in terms of Augmented Reality? Not much. Is it mainstream there? No. nnMaybe we can learn a lesson from that too….