10 Mobile Trends for 2011
In its annual mobile technology report, Forrester Research has outlined the trends it expects to see in the coming year. Technologies like 4G and LTE, Near Field Communication (NFC), barcodes and augmented reality will see increasing amounts of hype in 2011 …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is one entry in a now-familiar annual ritual: an analyst house publishing a year-ahead list. ReadWriteMobile is covering Forrester's edition, which lands two years after the firm's own market-share call that Google Android would take 10% of smartphones in 2010, and three years after the BBC ran its comparable list of technologies on the rise in 2008 — so the format itself has a track record readers can grade.
The substance matters too. The same firm flagging 4G/LTE, NFC, barcodes and augmented reality as 2011's hype magnets told major marketers as recently as July 2010 to hold off on Foursquare, judging location-based start-ups too small for their budgets — evidence that Forrester distinguishes between technologies worth hyping and consumer apps it considers premature.
First-order effects
- Marketers and handset makers planning 2011 budgets get Forrester's explicit signal that 4G/LTE, NFC, barcodes and augmented reality will absorb the year's attention — building on LTE groundwork the firm had been tracking since at least mid-2009.
- Location-based services stay on the cautious side of the ledger: Forrester's July 2010 advice to skip Fourscale-scale start-ups implies the 2011 list is about infrastructure technologies, not consumer social apps.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling NFC, barcode and augmented-reality tooling gain analyst validation they can cite in enterprise pitches, while competing consumer-app startups lack equivalent cover given Forrester's stated skepticism about small location players.
- Carriers and device makers with LTE roadmaps get a demand-side narrative — hype forecasts shape which pilots marketers fund, tilting spend toward network-dependent features.
Third-order effects
- If the annual-list pattern holds, analyst houses function as agenda-setters whose year-ahead picks steer marketing budgets toward platform-level bets (networks, payment rails) over individual apps — a structural gatekeeping role in how mobile innovation gets funded.
- The recurring format also creates a public scorecard: each year's predictions become testable against the next year's results, raising accountability pressure on forecast-driven advisory firms.
The trend: Annual analyst trend reports are becoming the mechanism through which marketer attention and pilot budgets are steered toward network-layer mobile technologies like 4G/LTE and NFC rather than consumer applications.