Deploying successful services -January 25th

By Jari Saarhelo
The Mobile Internet is booming and will experience double digit growth during the next few years. This growth is driven by a marked shift towards using services, such as social networking, on Smartphone and other mobile devices as well as on the Desktop. The smartphone has become a service platform, where soon 50% of user activity is not voice nor text related.

Achieving high enough service penetration is one of the key challenges in offering a service globally. Ideally, a service should:

- Be deployable on as many devices as possible
- Deliver WoW user experience
- Be easily updatable a only a couple of clicks
- Be customized to match regional tastes
- Have a low incremental cost to support new devices

In practice, there is a need to balance these factors against each other to find an affordable solution delivering maximum benefits in an acceptable timeframe. Web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML) based service for example are deployable on all the devices supporting a standard web browser, but the user experience will be limited.

Despite the growth of smartphones with webkit support most devices out there still have poor browser support. Going native will enable a huge improvement in the user experience and the ability to create unique experiences, but the development cost will typically be higher and additional skills will be needed. Which way to go will of course be dependent on the focus of the service and the user experience that needs to be delivered. However, which ever path you choose the era on of Mobile Internet services is clearly dawning.

We have recently released a white paper on Advanced Mobile Services (http://www.teleca.com/Home/solutions/end-to-end_solutions.aspx), if you want to read more on this topic.