What's going to be big in the 'tens'?

The developments that shaped the last two decades in technology and beyond – namely the arrival of the web in the 90s and the rise of Google in the ‘noughties’ – began life in the previous decades. The upcoming celebration of the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners Lee’s proposal for the web (13th March 1989) illustrates the existence of the idea before the immense impact it had in the following decade and, likewise, Google’s incorporation as a company in late 1998 before its introduction of Adwords in 2000 and subsequent massive growth.

So, as we head towards the end of this decade is the technology and/or organisation that will define the ‘tens’ (or whatever else they may become known as) already in its infancy ready to burst forward or is it something that is already in wide use that takes on greater significance.

My first bet is very much on ‘the mobile web’ as really starting to define the next decade.

In contrast to the growth of the web and Google, this one has been a relatively long time in coming and there are still some barriers in place to ubiquitous adoption. But the pieces are now slotting into place – from relatively seamless mobile access via 3G and wifi to inspiring mobile devices like the iphone.

As I know well from my time at NTL Broadcast and Lucent, the infrastructure to build out networks capable of delivering the mobile web as an engaging experience was never going to happen overnight and it wasn’t anything as comparatively simple as finding faster ways to push data along the copper cables that the majority of our homes had anyway.

The network operators have had staggering costs to recoup – not least from the enormous licencing cost for 3rd Generation networks - so none of them was going to rush to offer low or no cost mobile web access.

Likewise, unless you are used to paying high monthly contract charges to mobile operators, I would suggest that consumers themselves aren’t going to rush to pay a lot extra to access web content on the go unless it is obviously compelling and useful and until recently the limitations of devices themselves have been a big barrier to adoption.

I was interested the other day for instance to read some of the reaction to Google’s recently launched UK Streetview. There were respondents on one blog describing how they were using it on mobile phones to help them navigate places unfamiliar to them and it was clear that being able to see landmarks and surroundings from eye level perspective as opposed to a 10,000 foot view is a compelling experience.

But up until the arrival of a truly responsive and navigatable mobile interface like the iphone, coupled with high speed mobile data access I can't have imagined mobile phone users making such comments.

Right now, I’m personally not prepared to pay more than 30p per day to access the mobile web. This is the PAYG Sim based deal I am getting from Virgin Media/Mobile on an sim-free 3G phone (translates to £9/month for 750MB). This is a low cost way and controllable way to access many types of sites and content but as soon as you venture into any higher bandwidth service – flickr, youtube, internet radio etc then the daily cap of 25 MB is swallowed up rapidly and you can very quickly find you’re paying a whole monthly contract equivalent for less than an hour’s online entertainment. I know that other network providers are offering higher data limits on rolling monthly contracts but I personally don't want to either pay for something that I don't then use or get into a scenario of cancelling and restarting contracts.

It was low or no cost unlimited web access that saw the wired web become a ubiquitous resource and demonstrated to people how useful the web could be - even at dial-up speeds. We were hooked and the operators were subsequently able to recoup the losses on this with the arrival of broadband and our willingness to pay more for a better web experience. Virgin Media knows this as it had massive experience in opening up wired web access under the NTL brand but I'm not sure the main mobile network operators are really learning lessons from history here and are still trying to earn revenue from misguided 'walled gardens of content' and access charges that are actually holding them back now from potentially much bigger future revenue opportunities.

I think this will change quickly now and the age of the true mobile web and all the innovation it will bring will be upon us at last.