What, is Buckley getting cold feet about the rise and rise of mobile? No, not at all – they’re under-estimating the rate of change. I’ll explain my reasoning below, but firstly, congrats to the FT for thinking big and being one of the first publishers to appreciate that there’s a major change going on right now. From a management point of view, there’s no difference between assuming 60% in a few years or 100% – you’re still going to make mobile your Number One Priority.

If you’ve been to one of my speeches or read some of my posts recently, you’ll know that I (and many others) believe that we’re living in exponential times for technology. Exponential simply means that something doubles in a given period.

It was recently announced that the mobile web now accounts for just over 10% of all global web browsing. That has doubled since 2010 – actually, it has more than doubled as it was a mere 3.81% back then. There’s another report here, that confirms pretty much the same thing – mobile web usage has doubled every year since 2009.

If you buy into this theory then (and I do, barring a major catastrophic event), the growth will be something like this:

2012 – 10%
2013 – 20%
2014 – 40%
2015 – 80%

You can do the maths yourself if the real rate is eighteen months – or even two years, but you can see that the FT are being too conservative whatever happens. By 2016 or 2018 at the latest the mobile web will be the platform that matters. It’s not going to be “game over” for PC browsing at that point. There will be some quaint and old-fashioned retroistas. But for most people, most of the time, it’s all going to be about mobile.

For the sceptics among you, I’d suggest you might have felt the same way if I’d written that the mobile web would be this big today. It’s hard to understand exponential trends, as they’re counter-intuitive and we’re hard-wired to understand linear growth, not this ridiculously impossible magic stuff.

If there are any publishers out there yet to make the leap into mobile – you’re rapidly running out of time now.

10 years isn’t very long in overall historical terms, but in technology, it’s a very long time indeed. Especially as we move up the exponential curve and change gets faster and faster. If you were to look back at the last 10 years, as an example, most PCs had floppy discs in 2002 – but they had pretty much disappeared by 2007. Ask a 10 year old today what a floppy disc is and they’ll have no idea. Although, interestingly, the dear old floppy is still very much in evidence – it’s still used pretty much as the universal “save” command icon in computers today.

Here’s some predictions for you to think about. Maybe you have some too, or disagree. In which case, please leave a comment and we’ll compare notes in a decade’s time. Please note that my methodology here is gut-feel forecast, having observed tech trends and a generalist knowledge across many industries. I’m not using “inside knowledge” and in most cases, not even using current trends to forecast them.

So, 10 things that 10 year olds won’t know about or will never do in 2022.

1. Typing

By that, I mean using a physical keyboard to input data using the original technique developed back in the 1860′s. By 2022, the vast majority of devices will be touchscreen – at the very least. However, I actually think that new input methodologies will be mainstream by then, which are easy to learn for 10 year olds and will be widely adopted among young people. My money is on a combination of gesture and voice.

OK, there may well be some quaint and old-fashioned people who steadfastly stick to typing in data, so there will be some uses and indeed, some of these people may well still be using the PC. It’s just not going to make a lot of sense to a 10 year old and that’s what we’re talking about here.

2. Getting Lost

This is already becoming increasingly unlikely in 2012, with navigation built into our mobiles and our cars. Actually, I think this is a bad thing generally as there’s something quite poetic about just wondering around a strange place.

A 10 year old will also completely have lost the ability to navigate by knowledge of say, their home city or via a map, unless they consciously learn an old-fashioned skill – a little like taking up archery today.

3. SMS

Controversial this one, I appreciate. But we’re already seeing the rise and rise of free messaging systems – see Tomi’s blog for more info.

Tomi also points out that there’s not much effect on sms yet, but then, the nature of exponential means that there wouldn’t be – yet. In fact, sms usage would only have to decline by a barely noticeable 0.1% now, in order to disappear completely by 2022. If we see a 1.56% decline by 2016, we know that we’re on track.

I would stress again though, that it’s not going to disappear necessarily. Just be irrelevant for those 10 year olds in 2022.

4. Pain

Pain management will be moving into its golden age within 10 years. Better drugs based on the individual DNA is one reason. But constant health monitoring via our mobile device will mean that the medication arrives before the pain kicks in.

5. Communication with New Borns

Every parent gets to learn with a little experience if a baby needs changing, is tired or is hungry. I think there’s a good chance that our mobiles will be able to do that translation for us, providing basic communication between children and adults.

If our 10 year old has a new baby sibling in 2022, that form of parental intuition may no longer be used.

6. Running out of Battery

If the promise of mobile is to be delivered, battery tech has to keep up. In the future, no power means no entering your house, accessing the digital world or being able to pay for anything, as an example.

Maybe it’s going to be as simple as always having two batteries, but it’s likely that there will be a breakthough by then.

7. Digital and Analogue Worlds Combine

Today, we’re pretty definite about when we’re online or in the analogue world, even when in the most immersive online gaming experience.

I think 10 year olds in 2022 will not longer make the same distinction and just regard the whole thing as “living”. Better controls, gear and graphics will partly achieve the result of making digital as realistic as analogue. But the rise of Augmented Reality, accessed by wearable devices such as Google Glasses and later, contact lenses will merge the two realities completely.

8. Cash

Huh? You once carried around bits of paper to pay for stuff?

9. Buying Toys

Most toys and hobbies in 2022 will be downloaded, modified and personalised and then 3D printed from your home printer, or at the very least, your neighbourhood 3D printing shop.

Toys – another industry about to be hugely disrupted. It’s like Blockbuster – 10 years between success and bankruptcy – and they could have been Netflix if they’d understood how fast exponential moves at the end of a cycle.

10. Languages

Our 10 year olds will be able to converse very fluently via their mobile device to anyone in the world, wherever they are. Of course, this doesn’t negate the skill of being fluent in another language, as much of the culture of a society is wrapped up in its language. But for tourism purposes, “please” and “thank you” will be fluent enough, as your phone will do the rest.

There’s lots of other things I could have gone for, such as the ubiquity of cloud computing making “back up” and “upload” redundant – it’ll happen automatically. But I’ve tried to think a little bigger and more outrageously, although I still think that there’s a good chance of all these happening.

When you’re pondering these trends, it’s important to understand the nature of exponential growth. I wrote a little about it here, at Ballpark Ventures new website. But the basic idea is that the majority of the growth comes towards the end and it’s barely noticeable at the beginning. Linear thinking won’t help you much when mulling the medium term future.

It’s too early to get much of an impression – I’m jetlagged and in a hotel in the western suburbs of Shanghai and about half an hour’s drive through mad traffic from the famous Bund and the centre, so will leave that for later in the trip.

However, neither Twitter (nor Facebook nor Google search) work here, so my world is strangely silent. It’s quite incredible how central Twitter has become to my digital life. Maybe I’ll get back into blogging again for a while.

A couple of things I would have tweeted, if I had been able to:

Rkss has launched his first EP Rkss aka my son, Robin Buckley, interning at Berlin based startup Pipe. Have a listen and tell your friends.

I’m enjoying reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It’s a dystopian future, where most people spend their time hooked up to an advanced version of Second Life, escaping reality. A cult develops in this virtual world, focused on searching for clues set by the founder to win his $200 Billion+ fortune. A fun read (especially for gamers and geeks), although not a very hopeful vision of the future, where people live in trailer park stacks (mobile homes stacked in piles of 15 to 20), fuel has run out and lives are bleak.

Apart from the odd mobile phone, the scene may well have taken place at any time in the last 60 years or so.

And yet, things are no longer what they were and every one of those professions are going to be fundamentally disrupted by the time the children will be a few years into their career, after finishing their schooling and studying for more years at University. Those well-meaning parents probably haven’t a clue about what’s about to hit them and as a result, would be totally incapable of describing what it’s going to be like to be Doctor, Soldier or Banker. In fact, those kids couldn’t have been more misled if we’d conspired to systematically lie to them.

Here’s just a few thoughts on how these venerable professions will change as a result of exponentially increasing technology:

Military – Technology takes over. As an example, the Pentagon already has 19,000 drones and Obama has authorised over 3000 strikes, five times as many as Bush. Good article here.

Accounting – realtime reporting and specialist software will reduce most accounting functions to mere oversight, a little like the role of today’s aircraft pilots. Unfortunately, you don’t need that many people to oversee things in case they go wrong.

Medicine – the combination of realtime monitoring via the mobile (or specialist devices) and personalised treatment based on genomics is set to make today’s medicine look like 19th century butchery.

Law – when is some kind soul going to screw up this cartel? Endless duplication of contracts and paperwork and disputes that could be settled instantly based on a dispassionate examination of the facts by software. Like all these examples, there will be some edge cases where real people might be required – certainly in the short term – but a hell of a lot can be eliminated.

Marketing – one of my catch phrases recently has been that marketing has turned from a dark art into a transparent science. Probably the best preparation for marketing these days would be a maths or statistics degree.

Banking – Again, an industry that’s going to be decimated through technology. Already most trading is automated and other jobs are going to follow.

Obviously, I could delve into each of these areas in more detail and the fact that I haven’t doesn’t mean that the case is superficial. I just don’t want to write reams and reams on each argument here. If you disagree, feel free to write a comment after doing some of your own research and thinking about it. Lots of people in these jobs will be in denial, but from my perspective, it’s going to happen unless some other disaster (war, disease, climate change) hits us first.

There’s a few consequences of all this though. Firstly, the middle classes are going to be decimated in the next 20 years. The traditional professions that have maintained such a comfortable way of life for so long are going to largely disappear. Be prepared.

Secondly, what advice should we be giving those kids? I’d say that they should be thinking of a career that can’t be done by a very smart robot. And that’s probably a largely manual job like a waiter or chef on the one hand, or an entrepreneur/wealth creator on the other. These types of jobs will represent the pinnacle of earnings in society and that’s what they should be aiming for.

This might all seem very radical, scary and for many, impossible to believe. But we live in exponential times and the results are going to be change at an increasingly faster rate. The future belongs to the people who understand and embrace that change and that’s the message we should be telling our kids.

Like most of us, my business/social network is way bigger that that. I have around 4,500 Twitter followers, 3,000 or so connections on Linked In and about 5,000 email addresses in my contact book – many of them duplicates, I’m sure. In other words, far more people than I can possibly cope with and many people have far more than this.

I’ve felt a growing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs for a long time. Anyone who knows me well, will confirm that I’m a very active friend, making introductions and sending links that are relevant to them. I enjoy doing this and am not looking for a reward for this, other than the enjoyment itself.

However, like all of us, I’m frequently flummoxed by Dunbar’s Number.

In my case, it goes like this. If I’ve recently had contact with someone, they’re in my 150 – in other words, floating around my brain, so that if I see something relevant, their name will pop up ready for the appropriate action. If they’re the kind of people who send me stuff all the time (presumably, I’m in their Dunbar’s Number) we’ll soon be in a steady stream of mutual benefits. Which is great.

However, there are also people who are important to me (and I’m only talking business relationships here) who I’d like to help, who I just forget about for weeks and months. Maybe that’s the way things should be – if we’re not helping each other, perhaps we’re just not important enough to each other.

But I don’t think that’s quite the case and anyway, I don’t think I have as many as 150 names in my immediate memory. I’d easily recogise them if I bumped into them, remember details of their lives and otherwise display the characteristics of the stable relationship that Dunbar wrote about. But they wouldn’t spring to mind if I saw something that could be relevant to them.

So, I’m going to try a different approach. I’m going to prepare an old sytlee spreadsheet that contains 100 names and 10ish companies that I have close links with. Every week, I’m going to look down the list for 30 minutes and remind myself to keep a look out for my Dunbar Pals.

The list is intended to be dynamic and I expect people to be replaced by new entrants on a regular basis. And of course, I realise that some people who I’d love to be on there won’t make it. But I think that this is better than the alternative, which is to be less effective for everyone.

It’s an experiment at this stage and I’m happy to report back if anyone shows any interest. It could also be a terrible idea and I’m aware that it might be misinterpreted. However, my motivation is actually genuinely relatively selfless, so I hope you’ll be generous in your view.

I’d also add that the list is private and even the people on the list won’t know about it.

Would love to know what you think.

Now, back to my Hot 100….

My session is about mCommerce – no surprises there. But I think we often lose sight of what mCommerce is as it embraces two areas of retail sales, one of which is much more unique to mobile. mCommerce is:

1. Like eCommerce (or PC-based commerce) but on mobile. So you buy stuff from Amazon or ASOS, or from more traditional retailers like Tesco or M&S, both of whom have thriving online businesses, and the stuff gets delivered to you shortly afterwards.

2. Mobile enabled commerce. This is where you use the mobile to enhance shopping in physical stores. So, you might allow people to use their mobiles to compare prices, navigate the store, get more product information or watch video on their mobile. Or in my frame of reference these days, you might give them a coupon that can be digitally redeemed to drive purchases in shops.

The first area is much more easily understood and gets most attention. However, if you are a multi-channel retailer, the second part is much more important. Why? Because 90%+ or more of your sales are going to be via your stores.

This might sound a little surprising as whenever reports are written about this kind of area, the emphasis is on the triumph of online, the double digit growth of eCommerce or mCommerce and how physical stores are on their last legs. The reality is very different. Sure, online is a great big fat success story. But it’s still dwarfed by old fashioned people-going-shopping. Forrester, for example, claims that just 8% of shopping is done online today.

If you’re a retailer, you obviously know this – you’ll have your own stats to refer to. So while it’s clearly important that you look at mobile to sell your goods and services online, the bigger potential leverage point is to use mobile to support the store sales.

We’ll be seeing a whole lot more of these types of mobile-enabled commerce initiatives and perhaps it’s time we had a name for it to distinguish it from classic mCommerce. sCommerce (for store-based commerce) perhaps. If you have an idea for it, leave a comment and I’ll launch it at The Guardian, naturally giving you full credit!

But in the meantime, note that the world is going to change again for retailing, just as everyone thought they were getting the hang of it.

Until this point, the existence of Gen MO has been largely speculation. But now we have actual evidence and the surprise is that there’s many more Gen MO than you might reasonably expect – certainly in emerging markets, but also in developed markets like the US and UK.

On Device Research is a new kid on the block, founded by Alistair Hill, latterly of research giant, M:Metrics and my old pal and mobile veteran Pamir Gelenbe. As its name suggests, it conducts research and panels via mobiles and it’s getting some great insights that simply weren’t available before.

The latest survey shows that mobile-only usage is as high as 70% in Egypt and 59% in India, with the Big Four Asian markets (India, China, Indonesia, Thailand) coming in at an average of 43% and the Big Five African ones (South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya) even higher at 56%.

But the really big surprise for me is how many MOs we have in the US (25%) and the UK (22%).

Clearly, the case for mobile advertising is already proven beyond all possible doubt. But if you’re still not using mobile to reach your potential customers, there’s clearly a bunch of people you’re just not going to reach.

As a market, these MOs are someone we should all be studying closely. Not only will they give us clues about how they use mobile today, but will provide a really important insight into how we will all be behaving in the future and the tools we need to develop to enable the Post-PC world that we’ve been writing about for a long time now at MobHappy.

I’m sure that we’ve all come across companies in our careers who we certainly would never want to do business with again and who we wouldn’t recommend to our worst enemies. Whether it’s a question of unscrupulousness or incompetence, some people just are best avoided in the future, if we’ve been unlucky enough to come across them in the first place.

However, I remember thinking about this concept about 10 years ago – and I can certainly remember which company started the train of thought and would never trust them again, even though most of the employees at the time have probably long since left. I’ve even blogged some thoughts about Reputation Management over the years, including here.

But there are a number of issues about this kind of idea:

1. Justice is very often about who has the deepest pockets. If I write that Mr Bastard is not to be trusted and Mr Bastard sues me, if Mr Bastard is determined and very rich, I’m likely to back off when our combined legal costs reach a point that makes me no longer able to sleep at night. Of course, that’s an entirely fictitious Mr Bastard and I’m not suggesting for a moment that if you are actually named Mr Bastard that you’re anything but a wonderful human being and all round good egg.

The brave, Mr Adeo Ressi, the man behind the blacklist, has selected a legal firm as the first company to be featured. So we’ll quickly see how this aspect plays out, I suspect.

2. Anyone who has had any dealings with the law will find that what seems on the surface is a black-and-white case, turns out to be at best a “grey area”. Every dispute has two sides and it’s often very hard to judge where the fault lay. Company A certainly might not have delivered the website they promised. But perhaps it was because Client B failed to specify what was required, kept changing the spec and was generally very slow about giving approvals expediently.

I note that the submissions process doesn’t say anything about accused companies rights to appeal – that doesn’t mean that this process isn’t in place. But assuming that they do want to be fair, the workload involved in running such a service with any degree of scrupulousness will quickly prove to be very challenging if done properly – and worthless if not.

3. I’ve long suspected that the smart answer to this involves some kind of peer-sourced justice (crowd sourcing spreads the net too wide). This would be where the original submissions was reviewed by a small team of proven business people, who have no vested interest in the outcome – perhaps easier said than done, in reality. They can invite the blacklistee to appeal and at that stage, come up with a judgment. This wouldn’t avoid any subsequent litigation, but would share the workload and provide more transparency. But then the peers would need some kind of reassurance that they wouldn’t be embroiled in the subsequent legal penalties.

I certainly praise Adeo Ressi for his bravery and desire to level the playing field and bring justice for his mentees. And maybe the best result we can hope for out of this is that it inspires someone to stand on his shoulders and elegantly solve problems that exist in the Version 1.0.

Keep an eye on the field of Reputation Management – big prizes available for those who get it right.

Like many others though, I raised an inquisitorial eyebrow in surprise when Tomi forecast that MMS is going to be the next big success story to take a place on the mobile podium. Quick as a flash, Tomi wrote a follow up post specifically addressing this, pointing out it was already huge and was about to get even huger.

I’m no MMS sceptic – I was so excited at the start of it all that I wrote a book about it, along with Open Gardens’s Ajit Jaokar. You can see a copy here, though I’m not sure I would recommend it any more as it’s more than a little out of date.

MMS today is apparently a $30 Billion business already. By way of comparison, all global digital advertising is worth about $60 Billion, so this is not a trivial business. And Tomi’s main rationale for future growth is that while P2P is growing very nicely indeed, it’s MMS’s potential to deliver content, marketing and media that will see the hockey-stick growth.

I’ve long held the belief that MMS is being held back for P2P use by being hard to use to its true potential. Sure, it’s pretty easy to snap a photo and send it to a pal, especially these days – and that is indeed how it’s mainly being used. But it can do so much more, such as audio and video, as well as well laid out text and images. Think of it like a mini-slide show and you get the picture. No pun intended.

However, in the P2P world, building a slide show is not an easy thing to do in MMS and requires investment in both thinking about it and creation. It’s like HTML email, which is widely used by businesses to add impact to their email, but hardly ever used by consumers except for very rudimentary cut+paste or to create email sig templates.

So, first job on the P2P front to encourage more use would be to take a look at that whole UI and create some fun and easy-to-use templates that make MMS great to use, other than sending pics. I’ve been saying that for 8 years now and has anyone listened?

On the Business-to-Consumer front, I absolutely agree that MMS is potentially a very powerful tool for media and marketing. But the real challenge for explosive growth is about Reach and Cost and until these areas are addressed, it will still fail to achieve what it might do. That’s not to say it won’t continue to do well, but that dollars will be left on the table in comparison.

Let’s look at Reach first. If a business is going to start sending people MMSs, either on a one-off basis, or as part of an ongoing media communication (such as news) or marketing campaign, best practice (and the law in many markets) dictates that you need to get their permission first. It’s perhaps a little surprising that I still feel the need to write this today, but it’s equally surprising that many marketers haven’t got this message yet.

However, getting people to opt-in isn’t as easy as it sounds, even if you’re offering free stuff, let alone if you’ll be charging them for the service, as say, a newspaper might be tempted to do. This means that you’ll probably only get relatively small numbers on board. If you’re a Brand Manager and looking to create ongoing dialogue, many would turn down the opportunity to communicate with just 1% or 2% of their customer base. I’m not suggesting that this is a sensible approach, but simply reporting on how the world is. You can either accept that or try and change the way the world works – but that’s not so easy.

Perhaps more relevantly, if you’re trying to build a list or channel for use by third parties – essentially the approach employed by Blyk – you run into an even bigger issue over Reach. If brand managers can be picky about small numbers (even if incredibly well targeted), ad agencies who typically buy these campaigns are even more into the Reach thing. When any business fails to gain traction, there can be any numbers of reasons for it. But simplistically, Blyk gave up in the UK as it claimed to get great results, but could only offer contact with a relatively small number of people. Advertisers buy Reach, then Targeting, not vice versa.

But as Tomi points out, if the service offers enough value, you can overcome the Reach argument in certain markets like China. Though I’d be sceptical if you could replicate this particular model in more developed markets for lots of reasons, not the least is access to free news via other media.

So then we’re back to the cost. It still costs about 25p (US 35 cents) in the UK to send a P2P MMS, but I believe you could get a bulk wholesale price for 15p. That’s just the delivery cost and before you charge the consumer anything, if that’s your planned model. If you’re a newspaper, as an example, that’s a very significant cost in comparison to other digital channels such as PC (free), mobile web (free) or mobile apps (free). So, why would you bother? And if you do plan to charge for subscription, you’ll be back to relatively small numbers again.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have marketing campaigns and again, MMS is very expensive. 15p equates to £150 CPM (Cost Per Thousand), or an unheard of $215 CPM. Or certainly unheard of in digital marketing terms – old skool paper and phone Direct Marketing is more expensive for sure in terms of delivery and production, so maybe the hope lies in that direction. But when mobile web advertising costs £20 CPM maximum, MMS is expensive.

If traditional Direct Marketing spenders are the core target market for advertisers, even this market is switching to more cost-efficient forms of digital marketing these days. Furthermore, it considerably narrows the possible sectors which might consider, let alone trial, MMS.

So, yes, I agree with Tomi. MMS has humungous potential, just as it always had and has managed impressive results despite its handicaps. But I would predict that unless these shackles are removed (especially the cost element), it’s always going to be a case of being able to be sooo much better.

One of the interesting aspects of the region is the huge success of Blackberry over and above other mobiles. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but one of the important anecdotal causes seems to be driven by societal mores.

Firstly, like many parts of the world, sms usage really exploded historically. So when a mobile comes with a great keyboard for inputting text, it’s interesting. More interesting though is the free messaging system it comes with, which is radically going to reduce your sms spending. And as more and more of your friends get their own Blackberry and can use BiM, the proposition gets very compelling indeed. It’s the first-fax syndrome. In the early days, a fax machine is pretty useless as you can’t send a fax as there’s no one you can send one to. Equally, there’s no one available of putting you in danger of receiving one. But as more and more companies and individuals own one, the stronger the argument for getting one becomes. Until you get to the stage where you can’t operate without one (even though today there are other options).

I think we can certainly credit RIM with a deliberate strategy up to this point – that BiM was a thought-through product and that in the longer term, it would explode as network effects clicked in. But what happens next is a great example of the law of unintended consequences.

While different countries in the Middle East have varying norms when it comes to mixing between the genders, we can generalise and say that things are stricter than we’re used to in the West. In a country like Saudi Arabia, as an example, this segregation is so strict that it’s actually enforced by a religious policeforce. Indeed, only last month a prominent cleric called for those who oppose segregation to be executed, so it’s not a trivial issue.

Initially, people wishing to circumvent these laws led to an explosion of Bluetooth messaging and sms. But the problem with these communication platforms are that the authorities can (and do) trace them back to the phone and thus, the person.

When you purchase a Blackberry however, it comes with your own PIN. But the thing is, the PIN isn’t linked to your phone in any way. Making it the perfect clandestine messaging platform and thus ideal for some illicit flirting or arranging meet-ups for those so inclined.

Another unintended consequence is the little business it’s generated for dealers in Blackberries – or their opportunistic staff. The PIN is an eight number code and it’s therefore logical that a super-memorable PIN, such as 11111111 is going to be more useful that a random one like 74293661. As Blackerry ownership has taken off, useful PINs morphed into cool PINs and thus a highly lucrative premium market has developed, generating significant profits in the grey market.

So RIM are certainly to be congratulated for their long term vision behind the BiM. But I’m sure they could never have anticipated being helped so significantly by such an unexpected following wind.