Mobile is really taking off at the moment. We sometimes help different venture capitalists and business angels assess new media concepts, products and services. Furthermore we often meet with entrepreneurs, mentoring and discussing business models and plans. It’s always a very interesting and fruitful experience. Not only do we get to meet brilliant and passionate people, we also see what’s going on at the forefront of new media innovation.

Right now mobile is gaining ground. A year ago it was all about web applications and communities, now it’s mobile applications and mobile social networking. It makes sense. Not only is the global penetration of mobile phones extreme (4 bn mobile users by the end of 2008), but the interfaces (ie. the iPhone and the HTC), operating systems (iPhone OS and Astroid) and content distribution platforms (iPhone App Store) are getting functional and user friendly. One of the emerging killer apps that’s all the rage at the moment is location based services (LBS). The iPhone alone has more than 300 applications using location look-ups.

If you want a glimpse of the future of mobile, here are three links or signposts I can recommend:

A new mobile language

Finnish Teemu Arina has blogged an insightful essay about how mobile technologies are changing society. One of his points is that we cannot comprehend the difference it makes, because we’re right in the middle of the development. He says we need a new language to design for the mobile development:

“The mobile is like the horse wagon. If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses”. It’s the language and our experience of the past that limits our understanding of the future of “mobile”. We need to drop the word and come up with new metaphors to open our eyes. We need new telescopes, binoculars and cleaner eye glasses.”

Digital urban living

Another visionary thinker in the field of social technologies and the future of mobile is the head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia Adam Greenfield. His upcoming book is called The City and is about how we increasingly live our lives connected with digital and ubiquitous technologies interwoven with our urban surroundings. That’s what he talked about at Nokia Open Labs some months ago. Check out the first part of his keynote here. It’s important stuff for everyone designing for and thinking about the future:

Digital Geography Manifesto

The third signpost I’ll point you at is the online magazine Receiver, published by Vodafone. It’s always a great read and is a dynamic track list of some of the most influential researchers, thinker and doers in the intersection between mobile, technology and culture. This edition’s theme is “Space is the place!” If you should read only one article I’d pick Jonathan Raper’s Digital Geography Manifesto about “some of the challenges that we faced in designing and implementing a new generation of “egocentric” mobile applications that will bring the power of location technology to mobile devices everywhere.”