Bango was founded in 1999 to enable people with content and services to benefit from the roll-out of the internet / web to mobile phones. Ever since then, a hot question in our investors’ minds has been “when will mobile web take off?”.
We are preparing the powerpoint slides and narrative for our preliminary results announcement on 10th June, and for the meetings with investors after that. In doing so we have been surveying the market to see who, that our investors might respect, shares our view that take-off is underway.
I came across this interesting interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last week. (its at http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/108584 ) He predicts that: “The mobile internet would be the next major advertising platform. ” and “In a few years, mobile advertising will generate more revenue than advertising on the normal web.” Quite remarkable indicators that Google believes in Mobile web going mainstream.
A mixture of technology, commercial, operator political, consumer and business model issues have slowed the uptake of the mobile web – until very recently. There is a lot of evidence that internet is now reaching a wider group of mobile users, and that teh mainstream is only a few quarters away.