Just listening to Megan Fox, Web & Electronic Resources Librarian, Simmons College Library, on a Educiation Institute web conference. The size of the mobile market is huge and will grow fast over the next few years:
- currently 1 billion PCs, 1.2 billion internet users, 3 billions mobile phones
- US mobile phone market penetration: 84% by the end of 2007, growing more than 100% by 2013
- 115 billion smartphones shipped; 410 by 2012
The mobile web is growing with lots of content being born mobile which you can find in .mobi sites — there are now a million .mobi domain names including the Fremont Library. Ball State Universities has pages they have developeed from scratch for mobiles. Many library vendors are creating new interfaces for access on mobile device, one now has 90 libraries using their mobile product. SirsiDynix has PocketCirc which is for the use of circulation staff to assist in their work with inventories and statistics. Ready reference to go is popular these days with sites like answers.com which have a mobile interface. You can also take ebooks with you on your mobile deveice. There are many more Web 2.0 services like Facebook, YouTube, etc. available for mobile devices.
Mobile search is now big especially for newspapers as well as answers and facts. Google (www.google.com/m), Yahoo (m.yahoo.com), AOL mobile, m.live.com, and 4Info are being used for targetted answers and facts (information search) like stock prices and local search (ATMS, hotels, etc.). Many of these sites are calling themselves answer engines rather than search engines.
A new business for translating web pages on the fly to mobile small screen format is hot and called transcoding with organizations such as Skweezer , and www. google.com/gwt/n.
Multimedia on the phone is expanding with TV sessions, chapters of new books (either as text message or audio file), and audio tours for museums or the Library of Congress (which you can call from your own phone). Our world is changing and becoming even more mobile! Good luck!