2 mobile internet experiences with 2 opportunities.

At Mobile Internet World 2008, Yankee Group released a new report that declares there is not one mobile internet experience, but two. The report defines one mobile internet experience as providing Anywhere connectivity for big screens and the other as providing optimized connectivity for small screens, and forecasts that the two mobile experiences will diverge, not converge. Service providers must plan for this by segmenting their customer bases and delivering content, value and performance optimized for each category.

This report, Mobile Internet’s Parallel Worlds, sizes both market opportunities and characterizes each segment to help mobile internet vendors better target and profit from them.

Small-screen research highlights: :

* This segment is characterized by consumers, primarily youths, who are heavily influenced by youth culture and their social communities.
* Today’s small-screen mobile internet still disappoints, with usability, price and content discovery as barriers.
* Vendors need to take advantage of the ubiquity, portability and interactive nature of small-screen devices using context-aware services, such as location-based services, to aid service discovery and adapt content.

Consumers will likewise be impacted by changes in the market:

* This segment is characterized by consumers, primarily youths, who are heavily influenced by youth culture and their social communities.
* Today’s small–screen mobile internet still disappoints, with usability, price and content discovery as barriers.
* Vendors need to take advantage of the ubiquity, portability and interactive nature of small–screen devices using context-aware services, such as location-based services, to aid service discovery and adapt content.

Big-screen research highlights:

* This segment is characterized by highly connected mobile business users and Anywhere Consumers who want their big–screen experience to mirror their interactions on the PC and, to a lesser extent, the TV.
* Survey and anecdotal data show an encouraging start of successful mobile internet experiences in this segment, particularly in Europe.
* Users seek usefulness, productivity and reliability from the mobile internet experience, and will pay for that value.

In the long term, both experiences will remain equally important. Declan Lonergan, Yankee Group vice president of research and the report author, explains, “Performance will differentiate big– and small–screen mobile internet experiences; but asking a mobile service provider to compare the performance of the alternative mobile internet experiences it offers is like asking parents to say which of their two children they love the most. There is no right answer. Consumers will decide which services meet their performance expectations and which do not.”

For more information at http://www.yankeegroup.com