Over the last few months, ChatGPT has dominated the AI headlines as well as mainstream headlines. As ChatGPT put it when I asked how it might play a role in the mobile industry: “As a language model developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT itself is not directly involved in the mobile industry. However, its technology and capabilities have the potential to contribute to the development of new applications and services in the mobile industry.” That said, I think ChatGPT (and Google’s Bard) may actually help enhance engagement through mobile devices. With Google Bard, consider that this could play a role in RCS-based chatbots, through an API to enhance interactions. Generative AI is getting very good; however, it does have limitations and I think the noisy hype will decline by the 2nd half of 2023, but also look for the beginning of some interesting integrations into useful applications through mobile apps and even messaging.
Category Archive: Predictions
As we’ve done for the past years, I am happy to offer my 2022 mobile industry predictions along with a somewhat objective (or subjective in that I wrote them!) assessment of the previous years’ projections for this dynamic industry. Here we are once again. This year will be my 15th consecutive year of predictions and assessments.
Once again, it’s prediction time again. But this post is about how we did last year. As has been my standard, we look back at last year’s predictions to see how accurate they were. For 2019, I was 86% correct, which improved on my 2018 forecasts, which were 81.5% correct.
It is once again time for my annual (14th consecutive to be specific) predictions for the mobile industry. When I wrote last year’s predictions, I (and really no one) could have foreseen the momentous events that 2020 brought the world. From the global COVID-19 pandemic to the significant Black Lives Matter protests, and actions, climate-related events, to the US presidential election, its aftermath and more. All have impacted the wireless / mobile industry, but in many ways, the mobile industry has responded well to the pandemic, which has been the overriding issue for the planet in 2020.
It’s the first year of a new decade. It’s an election year during a volatile time. There’s a lot of pending decisions and growing technologies. It’s going to be exciting!
At the beginning of 2019, we were in an extended government shutdown, but that blip is now ancient history. Since then, so much has happened – much of it good, but some of it not so good. 5G became a commercial reality; IoT flourished, but both also managed to disappoint in some areas. In our messaging world, rich communication services (RCS) gained ground, but mobile operators lagged, despite many actions from Google. Still, gains were made in all of these key areas.
Normally, each year in the dead of winter, I publish a predictions article about the coming year. Earlier this year, we published my 12th consecutive predictions for the mobile industry. However, today, I would like to dust off the crystal ball and push it a little bit further into the future to look at how the messaging industry might evolve over the coming five to 10 years.
Here we go again. This is the 12th consecutive edition of my mobile industry predictions, originally published in January of 2008. While we try to cover most major aspects of the mobile industry, we do tend to emphasize messaging-related topics as well as consumer engagement. But we also focus on key industry trends such as devices, mobile payments, and blockchain. If a trend begins to fall out of favor, then it may disappear from subsequent predictions. You can get a detailed review and accounting of my 2018 predictions here.
In the mobile industry, 2018 certainly did not disappoint in terms of trending activity. The T-Mobile acquisition of Sprint (still pending as of this writing), 5G, IoT, rich communications services (RCS), and network neutrality were dominant themes throughout the year.
I published my first set of mobile predictions in January 2008. This is my tenth installment. My blog has had several iterations since it was initially part of the Sybase company blog space (we were known as Sybase 365, back then). When SAP acquired Sybase, most of my postings were migrated to the original SCN for Mobile area and now to the “new” SAP Community Network blogs. Some of the very old postings (before February 2011) are unfortunately no longer available in existing SAP archives.
Mobility, Messaging, and More 