Another hot talking point in the wireless industry: Mobile 2.0. Obviously, the phrase was borrowed from the concept of “Web 2.0”, in which the social networking is changing the behavior of the Internet users.  Is this “Yet Another Pointless Meme” (YAPM)? Actually the phrase Mobile 2.0 really seems to capture an important trend:  the convergence of mobile devices and web services creating an entirely new dynamic.  

But Mobile 2.0 is not only an extension of the Web 2.0 style pushed to the mobile devices, which perhaps should be properly called Mobile Web 2.0 or WAP 2.0 or 2.0 Micro etc. Mobile 2.0 is almost as much about the end user as it is about the device or the service whereas Web 2.0 doesn’t exist without the combination of the two. Mobile 2.0 is more about the entirety of the device and its myriad and highly differentiated possibilities for interaction with the end user. In a nutshell, Mobile 2.0 is the superset of life altering functionality conveyed by a functioning mobile phone to that phone’s owner.

According to some people, Mobile 2.0 should not be mobile device dependent. There is no measuring stick of functionality that is a determinant as to whether or not a mobile phone is or is not a Mobile 2.0 device. All functioning phones today should be able to support Mobile 2.0. This definition has the advantage of extensibility - a developing country experiences Mobile 2.0 by virtue of the changing socio economic status of those that own phones. In Japan or Korea Mobile 2.0 can be seen in the development of entirely new forms of entertainment oriented content for display on mobile devices and in the US we can see the birth of Mobile 2.0 in the roll-out of presence enabled services and phone-based navigational services.

Actually mobile phone has substantially all of the computing capabilities desired by a large fraction of the public. It is possible to build all applications on the PC to a mobile phone. It’s also interesting to imagine how content will evolve to fit the mobile platform. How e-commerce should be conducted via a mobile phone…the sky is the limit.