Mobile is not an iterative step for the web, but a complete revolution. So instead of asking ourselves how we can adapt web-based stores to our smartphones, we should be asking how we can use unlimited access to information to help us when we are in actual stores. The full potential of the mobile revolution won’t be realized until we build the tools that make every moment of our lives better.

The internet squeezed onto mobile devices

It’s understandable that we use the web as the baseline for measuring mobile, especially since many of our most widely used apps and services originated online – email, text, maps, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and so on. The comparison has worked until now because we’ve spent our first years with smartphones reformatting the desktop experience of the web to fit into our pockets.

Today the web itself  is the product of decades of adapting the real world onto the connected desktop. First we ported over letters (email) and posters (websites). Then we moved what we could of traditional businesses online to the large screen perched on our desks: Bookstores and record stores became (literally) Amazon.com and iTunes; travel agents became Kayak.com and Yelp.com.

Since smartphones have brought computing power and an internet connection to our pockets, naturally we want those tools everywhere we go. But porting these advancements to our phones is only a pre-game to the real mobile revolution: when connectivity reshapes our minute-by-minute lives.

The offline opportunity

Opportunity is everywhere: The offline world is filled with friction, inefficiency, incomplete information, tedium and excess capacity. We feel it all the time. Waiting for elevators. Waiting for delivery drivers. Going across town only to find an empty bar. Forgetting the name of the person you just met.

These problems are so frequent and inherently human we are often blind to them. But for almost every problem we encounter, relief will be found in the same place: The device we carry with us. We don’t need to log in. Sensors minimize the information input. Smart assistants and voice recognition allow hand’s-free use and allow the least technically capable among us to use their deepest, richest features.

Last year saw the first mass implementations of phones making what used to be our offline lives better with companies like Uber and HotelTonight, but 2013 will be the year in which we start looking to our devices to scratch our every itch – for companionship, entertainment and much more.

Why now?

A number of these ideas have been around for a long time, but 2013 will be our first chance to build many of these new companies.

When Amazon.com started in 1994, less than 10 percent of U.S. adults were online. But even though that small segment of the population was spread around the country, everyone used the product in the same way whether the user was in Dubuque, Detroit or Dallas. Everyone hit the same website, bought the same things and was plugged into the same distribution network. In its infancy, Amazon only needed a tiny fraction of the country to use its services.

The comparison today with Uber, the real-time limo service, almost makes itself. Uber instantly pairs available drivers and cars with demand for rides. Crucially, Uber needs a critical mass of both supply and demand on its platform in the same geographical area, down to the same neighborhoods and streets, and needs to be able to update and match them in real time based on their current locations – a task nearly impossible to accomplish at scale on desktops or laptops. There are several forces beyond raw adoption numbers though that enable Uber’s success:

• Smartphones free us from our desks. When we have problems, questions or desires, we don’t need to return to our homes or offices to satiate them; we can address them on the spot.
• Touchscreens, Android and iOS are amazingly simple to use. Not only do people have the technology readily available to them, but even the least technically savvy can (and do) use it.
• Apps are simple, elegant problem solvers. Small, beautiful, and easy-to-use, the best apps are easily understood in seconds.

This is the year these trends will reach critical mass in almost every major market in the US. The result will be that more great companies will be started, gain meaningful traction and drive investment. More startups will get more tries at solving problems, and a virtuous cycle will accelerate the trends.

Bringing the offline world online poses unique hurdles and rewards

While some problems are easy to identify they may be difficult to solve. Unlike many of the first internet companies, the real world has legacy industries with entrenched lobbies, distribution providers or regulations. Many require real infrastructure that needs to be acquired, integrated with or leased. In the offline world, scale is often much harder than simply spinning up additional servers.

On the other hand, many of these new companies will become natural monopolies – difficult to overthrow once they achieve scale, lock up resources within their systems and start generating significant cash. Many are adaptations or improvements of current businesses, but given the inability of incumbents to design, develop and deploy revolutionary software, we can expect many to be upset by startups.

Looking to the future

Unlike any technology we have ever seen, mobile has the opportunity to improve our minute-by-minute lives, wherever we are. While there are unique perils to the offline world, the significant rewards to those that build these new companies more than offset the risk.

Companies like Uber and HotelTonight are just the tip of the iceberg. Square isn’t just revolutionizing payments, but the experience of paying for things in real life. A company like Highlight will eventually be a real-time, in-person LinkedIn that gives us context, history and information for all of our encounters.

Mobile isn’t a portal to the internet we know today, but a gateway to build world-changing companies that will upend entrenched incumbents and exponentially recast even the most bullish of mobile expectations.

Edward Aten is a designer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of CopThis and previously founded Swift.fm. Follow him on Twitter at @aten.

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The company will end the year with a total of 17 international cities, following the additions of hotels in the U.K., Netherlands and Canada earlier this year. The HotelTonight app is now translated, for the first time, into a handful of new languages: French, German, Italian and Spanish.

In addition to the other Tuesday announcements, Hotel Tonight is also adding gift certificates for the first time, in $25, $50, $100 and $250 increments.

The international expansion of HotelTonight caps off a pretty impressive year for the San Francisco startup, which also saw its first acquisition. In 2012 it has grown from offering hotel rooms in 28 cities to 72. It also grew from just under a million downloads of its apps to 3.7 million, and almost tripled its headcount, which is now at 90 employees. The app only launched on the iPhone in early 2011.
“We’ve been successful in the U.S., and the rest of the world should be more amenable to the HotelTonight value proposition. There are a lot more independent hotels,” CEO Sam Shank told me. Plus travelers in other countries generally are allotted more vacation than their U.S. counterparts, so “they have more flexible schedules to be spontaneous,” he noted.

It also helps that both iOS and Android — HotelTonight’s only platforms — are the two fastest-growing mobile platforms almost everywhere. Besides the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France and Canada are all in the top 10 countries in the world with the most Android and iOS device activations.

Despite the rapidly expanding list of cities, a new office in London, and the acquisition this year, HotelTonight has no plans to slow down in 2013.

“We’ll be expanding very aggressively in continental Europe, Mexico and other countries,” Shank said, declining to get specific about its next target.

A good guess? It would be rather odd to translate your app into Italian without planning a presence there.

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CEO Sam Shank said Tuesday that the company has secured $23 million as part of a Series C round of funding led by U.S. Venture Partners, which includes participation from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. As part of the deal, Rick Lewis, a USVP general partner, to Hotel Tonight’s board of directors. Shank said Hotel Tonight was looking forward to taking advantage of Lewis’ expertise in e-commerce.

The round brings the company’s total funding to $35.85 million.

“The key is international expansion,” Shank told me in an interview. “We see a big opportunity for taking the HotelTonight model and what we’ve learned operationally to international markets.” He also plans to use the money to add to their current team of 45 people set up in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.

It’s a small team that’s going to need extra man power as it attempts to take on a huge, entrenched industry of online hotel booking with big-name competitors like Expedia, Priceline, TripAdvisor, and Orbitz, or as Shank put it, “We operate in a uniquely competitive environment, going up against $100 billion in market cap in established companies.”

But the company has expanded quickly nonetheless. Hotel Tonight launched in early 2011 and has 2 million downloads of its mobile app. It announced in April that its app for booking a hotel the day you need it was coming to two international cities, Vancouver and Toronto, but the company clearly has its eyes on Europe: it recently set up an office in London.

But this won’t mean Hotel Tonight is done with the domestic market, where it is already available in 40 U.S. cities.

Shank promises to continue to expand here at home too. As to where, he won’t say, adding only that the company will be going about the process in its usual data-driven way: ”We go where demand is. One of the cool things we can do is we can see where people are turning on the app and see where they’re basically voting for the app. We don’t have to put a finger in the wind…we can be more scientific around it and map out those locations.”

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Cars	Drive the next always-on gadget Katie Fehrenbacher	Work	Work is no longer a place Jessica Stillman
Stuff	Access trumps ownership Katie Fehrenbacher	Data	Data is the new digital currency Derrick Harris
Media	We are all media now Mathew Ingram	Identity	Identity is an industry Mathew Ingram
Body	Your doctor is a chip Stacey Higginbotham	Travel	Go anywhere, instantly Colleen Taylor
Web	The future web is alive Om Malik	Location	Where is the new who Ryan Kim

Images courtesy of Tesla Motors, DaveBleasdale, Petteri Sulonen, KatBPhotography, Urban Aquarium Video and Light, xurde, guiguis, kowitz, Marc_Smith, Aperturismo.

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