Mobile email not for everyone?

I want to use this blog as an opportunity to share my thoughts on a mobile connected world. I thought I would start with a topic near and dear to me and those that I work with. With over 2 billion people worldwide using mobile phones the search for the killer mass application (other than voice) is still on. Another interesting statistic is that there are over 1.5 billion email accounts out there. E-mail and web surfing turned out to be what drove the fixed Internet. So why are less than 10% of people able to access email on their phones today?

At the moment mobile email is a very lucrative niche market place. What barriers exist to create a mass-market opportunity? From some of the research we have done as a company to understand this issue more closely, we have identified three key challenges. Device cost, service cost and simplicity of configuration. With our meemo mobile email solution we have attempted to tackle these issues to create an opportunity for everyone to be able to include their email as part of their mobile communications in addition to text messaging and making phone calls. Why do we think mobile email is important?

The rise of social networking is a natural evolution of pervasive connectivity via the Internet. As we are all connected to each other and being social creatures (well most of us :)) we want to share with each other and the Internet makes that ever easier to do in an increasingly rich way. The explosion of MySpace, facebook, twitter and many other services are popular because they have done a really good job of making it easy to stay connected with friends and family as well as discover others with similar interests or tastes. We share our thoughts, our photos and videos, what we are doing (sometimes by the second for the Twitter fanatics). The mobile device is a perfect addition to enhance that social lifestyle. We have the opportunity to stay in touch and be social no matter where we are.

Text messaging has been a huge success globally as people have taken advantage of the capability to communicate with others on the go. It is predominantly a one-to-one communication mechanism and limits the nature of communication to short terse exchanges. As much as we text, we still email. Some have questioned whether email will die with Instant Messaging and text messaging becoming more common. All indications though point to the opposite effect. E-Mail is an inherently richer medium. We can be as descriptive and as verbose as we would like in an e-mail and include attachments like photos, video or other documents to enhance the communication. In a socially networked world, that richness of communication becomes ever more important. For those that can afford smart phones or PDA’s we have seen that there is already a strong desire to be able to receive and send emails as we go about our day.

As I mentioned earlier it’s not just the hard core business user who wants mobile email. It’s barely the tip of the iceberg. If the experience on the mobile phone is good and the price is within reach, we will see a rapid increase in the amount of mobile email use because of all of the reasons I have highlighted above. The key we feel is allowing people to use the device they already have (no new expensive devices to purchase), keep the cost low and make it simple to use. If you want to see what meemo is all about and how we have tackled these issues, please go checkout www.meemo.com.