14 DAY TRIAL // Not that big of a surprise, but Google says 2011 will be focused almost entirely on the mobile space. CEO Eric Schmidt says that all major projects have to do with mobile and that the year will be a huge one for smartphones, with inexpensive models beginning to roll out on scale and available to the poorer parts of the world.
"As I think about Google's strategic initiatives in 2011, I realize they're all about mobile," Eric Schmidt writes in a piece in Harvard Business Review.
But he believes that there are several areas that need attention in order to expand the mobile market worldwide.
"Google needs to do some serious spadework on three fronts. First, we must focus on developing the underlying fast networks (generally called LTE)," he explained.
The next generation networks, labeled as 4G though not necessarily part of the technical 4G standard, will bring faster connections paving the way for more bandwidth-hungry services.
Video is already a major burden for carriers, yet only a few mobile users watch video on their devices. Their number will grow, and fast.
With more bandwidth, web apps should become increasingly present on mobile phones. So far, local apps have proven very popular since they are generally faster and mostly don't require an internet connection.
"Second, we must attend to the development of mobile money. Phones, as we know, are used as banks in many poorer parts of the world—and modern technology means that their use as financial tools can go much further than that," Schmidt also said.
This is an important aspect in both the developed world as well as in poorer countries. In fact, its the poorer countries that generally have an advantage on this front.
While mobile payments are popular in places like Japan, they're very rare in the US and Europe. Meanwhile, in places like Africa or India, phones are the only electronic device many have and they're only means of paying for services or products other than cash.
"Third, we want to increase the availability of inexpensive smartphones in the poorest parts of the world. We envision literally a billion people getting inexpensive, browser-based touchscreen phones over the next few years," Schmidt added.
This ties in to the previous point. Feature phones are popular in all parts of the world. Many families may not have electricity at their homes, but they will have a phone, partly because they are so cheap. Smartphones on the other hand are prohibitively expensive even for those in the West.
That's changing though, a new wave of cheaper smartphones, powered by Android of course, has been hitting shelves in recent months. They're still not cheap enough for many parts of the world, but the price is definitely going down and there should be a big number of increasingly cheaper phones in the next couple of years.