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.
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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’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!
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.
Many of you, no doubt, have heard of the European Union’s European Banking Authority (or EBA) directive called PSD2 (Payment Services Directive). These guidelines were originally published at the end of 2015. By January 2018, all member states were required to implement the regulations.
In late July 2016, there were a significant number of news stories that have “declared the end of 2FA over SMS,” as the US NIST has recommended that the Out-of-Band delivery channel of SMS for 2FA tokens to be deprecated in the next version of their guidelines.
At the 2016 Facebook’s F8 Developer’s conference, a new no-password login solution was announced called Account Kit. Account Kit is designed to be an alternative login facility for people who either don’t want to use a social login such as Facebook or a non-password login. Users are given a choice between either email or their mobile phone number as their “identity.” After providing one or the other, a one-time code is sent via email or SMS to their mobile device. Access to the account is then granted.
Ok, this is definitely a late 2016 predictions article – especially since it is the week after Mobile World Congress 2016. But, in my defense, not THAT much happens until after MWC, so maybe I’m not cheating so much. This is my ninth (yes 9th!) annual prediction blog posting.