W@P Asks: The Wireless Web

The Mobile Machine

November 03, 2009 - Jordan Willms

The Iphone has been a great catalyst for surging forward the relevance and importance of mobile devices in North America. Until its release, other phones "could" surf the web, but the quality was very sub-par. In short, they sucked. Now all mobile vendors are packing their devices with rich browsers, making web on mobile an agreeable and almost pleasant experience. And so the dawn of the mobile web is upon us, where consumers nomadically interact with the web, truly experiencing your brand when and where they want. This new expansion into the capabilities introduces a number of critical questions, which are raised by Jacques Bughin in his article called "What shape will the wireless Web take?". As a conversation starter, he asks: "Will most of the content, interactions, and organizing principles of the wired Web simply migrate to the wireless world?" When the commercial web began back in the 90s, companies during the initial goldrush threw up what were effectively online marketing brochures, thinking that what worked in print would also work for the web. And here we are again, roughly 15 years later, faced with another large change. Mobile ad companies are popping up left and right. Mobile service developers are flooding app stores with lots of 99 cent pleasures. Money is pouring into mobile and app startups. Thus, our question to you is:

Just as websites circa 2000 were replicas of existing marketing brochures, are today's mobile websites and apps simply going to be a scaled down version of the existing websites?