“This is the time for us, now is the time for us to get behind this. … We understand that the new rule is mobile first.”

Alan Moore explains how profound this statement is on his blog Communities Dominate Brands where he explains how this impacts “… your business, project, team, budget – or even your personal career”. Moore makes the point that the largest Internet companies in Japan already have a mobile first approach. He offers some very compelling rationale for why mobile first is a no-brainer, including this paragraph:

Its because Google are a very smart company and they know the numbers. Mobile has already overaken the internet in total users. And in total revenues. And in total profits. Not just overtaking the internet, mobile has passed the PC industry, and passed the fixed landline phone industry. Get this, the mobile industry alone, is about as big as the global worldwide PC/IT industry, plus the internet industry, and the landline phone business – all rolled into one! In 2008 mobile became one of only a handful of industries on the planet that generates a Trillion dollars of revenues annually. Thats almost three times what the televsision industry earns. More than twice what the advertising industry makes in a year. About twice the size of the total worldwide print industry (before the economic crash) ie all newspapers, all books and all magazines. Trillion dollar sized industries are things like cars, the food industry, construction, and armaments. And mobile telecoms.

We recommend reading the entire post as it is well organised and provides several key takeaways such as “Mobile is also bigger than any other mass media channel by reach - far bigger than TV or newspapers or cinema or radios even”. The section on mobile payment alone will probably eye-opening to many.

“Along with the surge in cell phones, demand for mobile access to the Internet has skyrocketed. The ITU expects the number of mobile broadband subscriptions to surpass 1 billion around the world this year, a leap from 600 million at the end of 2009. The organization predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers.”

We have noted many reports containing hard data on mobile Internet use and predictions for rapid growth in the future, but the Morgan Stanley report is important for its comprehensiveness and its prediction that we are entering the mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in the last 50 years of material wealth creation and destruction.  This means that as much as the Internet has shaped the last 10 years mobile Internet will shape the next 10 years and that there will be winners and losers in this process.

Mobile Internet use is growing faster than Internet use and Morgan Stanley predicts that in 5 years the mobile Internet will surpass desktop Internet with the emergence and convergence of:

• 3G adoption
• Social networking
• Video
• VoIP
• Impressive mobile devices

You can find the Mobile Internet Report and support presentations on moganstanley.com

The Mobile Internet Report Setup

The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes

The Mobile Internet Report

TwitCritics has been called the Rotten Tomatoes of Twitter and many people like their how easy it is to see if a movie is a hit or not. Like Rotten Tomatoes a movie’s rating is based on the percentage of positive reviews. The site works by examining tweets about a movie and then determines if the review is positive or negative. For example “The Men Who Stare at Goats was awfully bland and boring. Tons of light music is not enough to create comedy. Felt like eating wet clay.” was categorised as negative while “Men who stare at goats….such a good movie” was categorised as positive. The site is still in beta and sometimes tweets are categorised incorrectly, but it is accurate enough to give you an idea about what the twitterverse thinks about a film. Twitcritics is a great tool to have access to at any time from the convenience of your phone. It may save you from sitting through two hours of a bad movie and help you enjoy two hours of a good one.