Access to mobile content is one of the biggest issues in the industry, and naturally the focus of one of the panels at CES. Muzibul Khan, vice president of product management and engineering at Samsung Telecommunications America said that “If to discover content you have to type in a URL, it’s never going to happen” and voice controls are the way of the future, but was contradicted by Intrinsyc CEO Glenda Dorchak who claimed that even voice command technology is based on the paradigm of web searching for PCs, and “In the future, a context-aware, server-driven system will emerge, where the network will forward relevant and useful content to users. The type of content that users will get will depend on their location and other preferences that they’ve set” reports PC World.
The problem I have with these statements is that they assume behavior on the part of the consumer and, more importantly, assume that all people are the same and therefore there will be a single, dominant method of accessing the mobile web. A recent survey found that a third of Japanese mobile users will type in a URL to access a mobile web site, and while you can’t take one market and extrapolate it to the rest of the world it does indicate that as people get used to using their mobiles they become more comfortable typing web addresses in. The best way to ensure people can get to your site is to offer lots of different ways in: Tell them the URL, do the voice system, QR codes, SMS requests and so on. I agree with Dorchak that some content will be in the push-form that she describes, but I disagree with the idea that this will be the only way people will get content (admittedly that was inferred from a short sentence of hers).
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