Gary Sheynkman dot com

I love that post big conference period when keynotes and studies hit the web. Mobile World Congress  in Barcelona is starting this week and is looking like a riot. New devices, further web integration, and a decrease in bulging pockets are all welcome. Most importantly though, I am interested in what 2009 will hold for mobile marketing.

I will definitely follow up the conference with some thoughts, but here are two predictions that I look to hearing most about:

1. Light rich content is going to step up hard. Mobile bandwidth is not free (sorry, State-side readers) in most parts of the world and as more phones ship with powerful web browsers there will be a need for a 3rd kind of mobile site. Currently we can zoom and pan around full sites with Xed out media, plow through text on a WAP site, or buy an iPhone and hope that the site has an optimized interface for the iphone. With Nokia, Samsung, and Palm pushing hard into the connect multimedia phone space it will be interesting to see how developers optimize mobile experience for those users. I have more thoughts on this that I’ll write in detail about later (really, I will!).
2. SMS will reign supreme. Yes, some of us can now email, chat, tweet, stream, and listen to music from our phones. That great and all, but most users can’t and SMS will remain as a cheap, fast, and convenient way of reaching people. SMS is also the least complicated and most reliable system. When my BlackBerry shows “GSM” on the top right… I can still text a few friends what my plans are. As such, I see further innovation with opt in direct marketing using short codes. I was a notorious Google Text user when I lived in the States and I believe that these capabilities will trickle down to smaller sized businesses.

I would say #2 is for sure, #1 is a toss up with how much progress has occurred that we don’t know about already.

For those who are attending, I am hugely jealous. Barcelona is amazing. Enjoy.