As the World recession continues, Ewan at AllAboutSymbian asks "will there be any innovation in the mobile market in the near future?". He gives the example that "at at Tech Crunch 50, the number of start-ups built around a mobile concept was minimal". Ewan asks "Where does the next big thing come from, or is innovation in the mobile market going to take a break for a year or two?"

As a freelance mobile developer I am one of the first people to see changes in mobile development trends. From my point of view there are about the same number of companies and individuals anticipating mobile development. Here’s how I have seen things change over the last 6 months…

• More people outside mobile and/or IT are entering the market with new ideas
• Many ideas are privately funded
• Most projects are cross mobile platforms
• BlackBerry is much more frequently requested
• People are investigating Android but not yet committing to application development until phones ship
• I am seeing more ‘complete’ projects that include server/web development as opposed to isolated mobile development
• There are lots of ‘me too’ mobile social projects that aren’t that innovative
• Most people are under estimating the costs of mobile development

Yes, very few companies are getting VC funding at the moment. As well as the current World economic problems, VCs have realised that many of their investments over recent years haven’t delivered profits. However, it could be argued that now is a great time to start new mobile projects. Resources such as people, software, hardware and services are inexpensive at the moment. As with stocks, some of the best times to invest can be the times when other people have given up.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Mobile. Both comments and pings are currently closed.