2008 will go down as the year of mobility: Intel exec

By Dan Butcher

October 23, 2008

Intel's Atom microprocessor

BOSTON - Mobility has reached a tipping point and 2008 will go down as the year of mobility, according to an Intel executive.

During his presentation "Enabling the Best Internet Experience in Your Pocket" at Mobile Internet World, the Intel exec went on to address his vision of the future of the mobile space, predicting rapid growth fueled by broad mobile access to the full Internet. He also predicted the widespread integration of multi-touch and speech recognition to improve the mobile user interface.

"There's a ton of change that's been taking place in mobility, and the usage model is now very different from what's been delivered in the past, due in large part to companies like Apple and Google enabling access to the full, real Internet on handheld devices," said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president/general manager of the ultra mobility group for Intel, Santa Clara, CA.

"In five years down the road, we'll say that 2008 was the year of mobility, the year when we laid the foundation for what's to come," he said.

The Intel Corp. has announced a record third-quarter revenue of $10.2 billion, along with an operating income of $3.1 billion and a net income of $2 billion.

The conference was hosted by the Yankee Group

Mr. Chandrasekher said that he's detected a "substantial shift" towards open-source Linux operating systems, given Google launch of the open-source Android platform and Nokia's acquisition of Symbian and its current move to an open-source model.

He touted the launch of Intel's Atom microprocessor, which the company hopes with do for mobile what the Intel Centrino processor did for laptops.

Intel invested in the ballpark of $300 million in Centrino advertising, and a similar marketing push is expected for Atom, which became available to system manufacturers this year.

One competitor in the space is Nvidia's line of Tegra processors.

Many analysts and industry insiders expect the mobile industry's growth trajectory to mirror that of the Internet.

First-time unique hits to the Internet in the month of June alone were 1 billion, while all hits, new and old, totaled 43 billion, which is six times the world's total population.

"Those numbers are staggering, and the majority of those hits came through tethered PC Internet connections, so think of the opportunity for mobile," Mr. Chandrasekher said. "The PC Internet's growth has continued unabated -- with huge volumes -- and there are more mobile devices in the world than PCs and TVs combined."

He went on to examine current trends and speculate as to what might happen five years or so down the road.

"Look at what people are doing on the Internet and you'll see that it's changing constantly," Mr. Chandrasekher said. "The top 10 Web sites were very different five years ago, and it's still changing at a very fast pace.

"If you look at social networking, this trend is growing dramatically," he said. "25 percent of all Internet traffic is currently from social networking."

For example, in June 2007 Facebook had 52 million unique visitors, while in June of this year it received 132 million unique visitors.

User-generated content is also exploding.

YouTube went from zero to 1 billion hits in 9 months and currently has 300 million unique global visitors and 84 percent year-to-year growth.

"YouTube is moving to HD content, and other huge changes are on the way," Mr. Chandrasekher said.

Location-based services are also on the rise.

"When you add location to the equation, the things you can do go up by several orders of magnitude," Mr. Chandrasekher said. "These trends will dramatically change how we use mobile and what we can do with these devices, which will ultimately be life enriching."

He cited a Forrester study that people prefer access to the full Internet on their mobile device rather than a mobile-specific subset by a ratio of two-to-one.

"People are dissatisfied with the Internet browsing experience they're getting on their handset," Mr. Chandrasekher said. "They want the full experience.

"The software spiral in mobile becomes the Internet spiral, from text to pictures to video to social networking," he said. "There are mash-ups, and the mobile Internet is a very rich environment that's constantly changing, not static, and what you see today will be much richer and dramatically different in five years."

There are 1.5 billion mobile users currently, and Intel sees that increasing exponentially.

"The growth of the mobile industry will be fueled by the mobile Internet," Mr. Chandrasekher said. "When mobile access the full Internet is unleashed to consumers, rapid growth will continue and provide further opportunities to monetize the mobile space."

Mr. Chandrasekher listed four essential elements to ensure this bright future.

"We have to have broadband wireless, we need software compatibility so that developers can run once across the whole range of environments and not have to tune each app for each device, we need Internet compatibility available with all of the latest technologies, and handsets must have the level of performance to run the Internet at ultra-low power, assuming the network gets unconstrained," he said.

Before July 2, 1921, when the Carpentier vs. Dempsey boxing match became the first radio broadcast of a sporting event, radio had been viewed largely as a news and information device.

Radio sales doubled the next year and again the year after that. When radio was also viewed as an entertainment medium, it drove the sales of huge volumes of radios.

Mr. Chandrasekher drew the parallel from the growth rate of the radio to the mobile industry.

"The next phase in the growth of wireless devices will be to add computing, which will unleash another wave, mobile computing, which is extremely exciting," he said. "Similar thing will happen when you start integrating computing with mobile, it will dramatically change how people use these devices and that will usher in dramatic growth."

Comments on "2008 will go down as the year of mobility: Intel exec"

1. Dan Flanegan says:

   October 23, 2008 at 10:12pm

   Can we take a break and just have a year that does not "go down as the year of mobile"