Jay Small cites an eMarketer item about the low level of Internet access by U.S. mobile phone users.
The article cites a number of reasons for the low usage despite pretty much universal access capability in the installed handset base. (The study says 81% of mobile browsers support XHTML Mobile Profile, the latest standard.)
I think it's much simpler than it's all made out to be: The telcos have simply strangled this new medium.
First of all, the pricing plans are just plain nuts. If you're introducing something new, you need to encourage sampling. But the typical U.S. cellphone provider penalizes the casual experimenter with outrageous fees while offering fairly reasonable pricing to heavy (and even abusive) users. Result: New users are scared away.
Second is the "walled garden" mentality that continues to dominate the scene. Fire up the web browser and where do you go? The telco's own little collection of pages where you can pay to download games and ringtones. The offer is fine, but consumers need a clear path to the richness of the mobile Internet.
There really is a rich mobile Internet developing. It's just hard to find. Google and Yahoo are making some progress on organizing it, but typically the user has to triple-tap his or her way out of the walled garden in order to get to those resources.
As the telcos slowly get over their failed attempts to own/control it all and clean up their pricing mess -- and I think they will -- I believe we're going to see a rapid upswing in mobile Internet usage.
To be part of this growing mobile Internet, we need to not only build pages that are optimized for little screens, but more importantly build services that are optimized for mobile users.
What do I most need to know, or do, while out wandering with my phone in my pocket?
Local directory services would be at high on the list. Restaurants. Movies. Specific categories of classified advertising -- apartments for rent, yard sales, et cetera. Traffic reports if you can get them. Local media ought to be all over this.
The last thing we need to do is jam AP wire stories into the mix. They're already available through a shorter path -- built into the telco's private garden.
Yet I continue to see local newspapers trying to build tiny-format "online newspapers" with the tired old newspaper content mix. I'll confess that I have been on occasion so bored in an airport waiting area that I've browsed through wire stories on my phone, but never on a local newspaper site. There are many, much better sources for world news.
Building these services actually is quite easy. If you have RSS feeds already set up, an afternoon of coding with PHP will create a fairly useful mobile app.
A couple of months ago I put one together for one of our newspapers. It was done in a day. You can find local restaurants and tire shops and barbers -- pretty much anything -- in the Yellow Advantage (powered by Interchange) directory. You can view live traffic cams, take a peek at the latest community blog and photo gallery postings, check the weather forecast or find what's playing at the movies.
The technology is no problem. For the technocurious: It's done with PHP4 and the XML Serializer package, which behaves pretty much like the built-in SimpleXML functions in PHP5. Grab the data and render it in XHTML. The Mobile Profile extension to XHTML adds a couple of handy bits of functionality, such as click-to-call.
The harder part is coming up with an economic justification. At this point you're not going to get enough traffic to be economically valuable. It may feel good to sell a sponsorship, but it's not going to do much for the advertiser. On the other hand, providing a service like this costs next to nothing. The people who do use it really love it, and it's an opportunity to learn what works/what doesn't.
You can experiment in this space easily. Dave Winer, the guy who didn't invent but did breathe life into RSS, has put up a couple of demos: www.nytimesriver.com and www.bbcriver.com, which are simple transformations of RSS feeds already available from the Times and the Beeb. They link through to "printer friendly" versions of the corresponding stories.
It's pretty much the same technique I used on my own example. Don't be scared off by the fact that Winer is a programmer; any community-college intern could do it.