Global Trends in Mobile

Abstract

This chapter aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the mobile landscape. It bridges the global trends affecting the mobile industry as a whole, with the creation and distribution of contents, emphasizing the new patterns of production and distribution. It shed light on the drivers of the changes taking place. The first part of this chapter identifies and sums up the main trends in a global landscape, namely the role of mobile communications (devices, networks) combined with the rise of the “app economy”, the spread of “Big Data”, and the move toward a multiscreen / cross-media paradigm. It provides a synthesis of available data. The first section tracks the evolution of the global market and the emerging geography with the rise of Asia as a leading player in the mobile world. The second section analyses the smartphone phenomenon. The third section deals with the rise of the “app economy”. The fourth section reviews the new modes of data driven management, stemming from “Big Data”. The fifth section follows the move a multi-screen world. The second part investigates some of the impacts of this fast evolving environment on the production of an array of mobile contents (portable movies, video, video games…) tracking the way content industries, while standing at the nexus of technology and content, are rapidly changing. The section documents the way mobile industry is indeed an innovation platform for new services. The section delineates the growing role of the consumer in a mobile world, its various modes of involvement in the production and distribution of digital content. We conclude with some elements about the new challenges brought by these trends, by the entry of new players in both the content and the mobile field.