Investing in the mobile internet boom

There have been many claims of late that the mobile web is the “next big thing” that is expected to explode over the next few years. More and more cell phones are able to surf the web, smart phones are getting smaller, and web developers are finally starting to develop sites that work on a variety of mobile handsets. Unfortunately, the explosion of the mobile web is being seriously hampered by a lack of standards.

When looking for an investment in mobile, I’d like to see some dominant players. Perhaps dominant browsers, dominant content providers, dominant ad providers, or a company that is developing standards for the industry and has found some way to profit. The problem is I don’t see any firmly dominant players.

You can look at the WURFL for example which is a list of mobile devices and their capabilities (browseable list of mobile devices) and you’ll quickly see there are about 10000 different mobile devices out there. That is an issue. You may argue that there are several thousand computer brand/model combinations out there as well, but the major difference here is that each of these mobile devices has their own quirks. Most brands have their own browsers. The browsers are rev’ed constantly to support new features. Each model has different capabilities in regards to languages supported, image formats supported, video capabilities, color depth, etc.

There are some valuable tools out there to make things a bit easier for developers making mobile websites (such as WALL), but it still boils down to an issue of not having very strong mobile standards. Without some dominant players in browser market (such as IE or Firefox for PC), each device often renders web pages differently. Without standards in regards to capability sets, advertisers are unwilling to invest significantly in ad campaigns because the lowest common denominator is text-based ads and they just don’t have the same appeal as the rich media ads that are so prevelant in the web industry today.

There aren’t even dominant mobile handset manufacturers. There are a half dozen largish players in the smart phone industry (think RIM with BlackBerry, Palm with Treo, Nokia, Motorola, and the forthcoming Apple iPhone). Add to that another half dozen or so large cell phone manufacturers (Samsung, LG, AudioVox, Sony, etc) and you don’t even have a very refined list of large manufacturers to target.

The mobile web is exploding, but its exploding in a very fragmented way that prevents dominance and, ultimately, usefulness for the end user. Someone needs to step up and start taking a hard-nosed stance on mobile web standards. Microsoft always gets criticized for developing closed-standards, but they are large enough to get things done. Between Apple, Google and Microsoft, one of these behemoths should be able to step in and start developing some standards and pushing out the commercial devices to use those standards.

I don’t see a lot of clear mobile web investment plays out there right now. There are hundreds of small plays, each individually a bit too risky. Maybe they’ll be a Mobile Web ETF…I’d be up for that.

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