I had dinner with one of my best friends and fellow entrepreneurs this evening.  He is one of the smartest guys on the planet  and I call him the mad scientist because of the way he views the world.  During the course of dinner, he opened my eyes into the “real” world of the iPhone - an area that I had never explored before because of my own ignorance.

For those of you who know me or have heard me talk about mobile marketing and such, I’m fairly bearish.  If we were in Europe or Asia, it would be a different story, but here in the USA, traditionally, it’s always been hard to pull off a mobile marketing campaign to a mass amount of people because of the current infrastructure that we utilize here.  It’s not to say that in the future, the infrastructure will change, but today…. it’s very tough.  Also, let me preface this by saying that quite a few brands are experimenting in the mobile space today and because of that, tons of startups are being funded… but I’m still bearish.  I’m also scared of penetrating one of the most personal devices… the mobile phone.  I know I don’t let people touch my phone and I only want information that I request on it.

Andrew showed me the world of iPhone apps and bookmarks.  Essentially, creating a bookmark on the iPhone screen that links right back to a webpage.  Genius.  I know this isn’t rocket science at all and I’m potentially one of the last people on Earth to find this out, but it just turned my prepackaged iPhone into a custom product….  my new computer.  Something else he showed was a Yelp application that tied directly into a database to find restaurants within a certain geographic location.  The restaurant tied into the Maps function on the iPhone to get immediate directions and it worked seamlessly.  The Internet tied into the Maps and it then tied into the Phone if you wanted to call the restaurant for reservations.

The future of mobile is that of leveraging the web from anywhere.  The iPhone won’t be the end all and be-all, but it will certainly pave the path for the future.  Mobile marketing isn’t as much as text messaging (spam?) or creating WAP sites, but rather tying a mobile component of your current content (as a product/service) and making it accessible via the new phones emerging such as the iPhone.

I’m starting to not be as bearish on mobile…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Advertising & Marketing, Internet & Web X.0, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.