8 Questions to… Tomi T. Ahonen

Tomi T. Ahonen is bestselling author of 10 books on mobile, who lives in Hong Kong and lectures at his short courses at Oxford University twice yearly. Tomi is the father of many of the industry’s theories and tools, and has a passion for the innovations and statistics of the industry, about which he writes, speaks, blogs and tweets regularly. For more see www.tomiahonen.com

1. What is your preferred gadget at the moment?

My fave gadget right now is the Samsung Galaxy Beam, the Android-based touch screen smartphone, which is the world’s first to include the pico projector. I am utterly in love with this device!

2. Your currently most loved app, mobile site, mobile service?

I love Angry Birds as the app for its innovations and zanyness; among mobile sites I keep using Google’s search regularly on my phone, cannot imagine life without it; and my favorite mobile service is Flirtomatic, for its continuing inventions on how to monetize a social network on mobile.

3. What are you reading and how (paper, ereader, smartphone, tablet…)?

I love books and can lose all sense of time in any bookstore or library. But I have found that recently I do ever less reading of printed paper based literature, mainly only on the take-off and landing phases of air travel – and almost all work related reading I do online, based increasingly on topics and articles that I find mentioned on Twitter by those that I follow (including Heike on Twitter as @mobilezeitgeist).

4. What’s from your perspective the biggest trend in mobile- The Next Big Thing?

Augmented Reality and mobile money are going mainstream already, so currently I think the next big thing will be 3D displays on phones (that do not need special 3D goggles or glasses). The first such phones were already released in India and Japan.

5. Which hype annoys you? What is overrated today?

There are two which annoy me enormously. The hype about apps is overrated, where I do believe apps will eventually be a significant major part of the industry, it is not that today. Total consumer applications to smartphones, ie ‘app store’ apps on all app stores, will generate less than 1% of all mobile data revenues this year. SMS alone is 50x bigger than app stores and we have enormous innovations happening even in SMS, that generate tons of revenues and profits today.

But the hype that really annoys me is that around ‘Location Based’ services, because that whole concept has been proven to be a myth, and ten yeas after they were launched globally, location-based services have proven the worst-performing of all mobile service areas. The dumb part to me, is that the lessons were already learned early in the past decade – including many such lessons from early location-based services launched in Germany by the way – but the new entrant companies to mobile, mostly USA West Coast based, are oblivious to the lessons of our industry, and are now generating enormous hype around location, without bothering to examine history and learn. It frustrates me, that what I wrote in my second book back in 2002 about location, is 100% accurate today, but many have not bothered to learn the lessons.

6. Who (individual, organisation, company…) will change the mobile world?

The three authors and friends who often collaborate, Tony Fish (My Digital Footprint) (@tonyfish), Alan Moore (Communities Dominate Brands) and Gerd Leonhard (Friction is Fiction) (@gleonhard) are exploring the commercial opportunities now emerging around the ‘digital footprint’ as distinct from the ‘digital identity’ – and our ‘social context of consumption’ – which they have said, more or less collectively, is ‘the new black gold’ for this century. The biggest companies on the planet today are oil companies. What Tony, Alan and Gerd tell us, is that over the next decades, those global giants will be taken over by the newest giants, built around harnessing mobile data – with our explicit permissions obviously, not by abusing us. I think this concept as expressed by these three authors will most change the whole mobile industry over the coming years.

7. Mobile experts one should read, one should follow?

Some of the most insightful deep thinkers in mobile today are Russell Buckley (@RusselBuckley), Ajit Jaokar (@AjitJaokar), Lars Cosh-Ishii (@Wireless_Watch), Chetan Sharma (@chetansharma), Daniel Appelquist (@torgo) and Rudy de Waele (@mtrends). Recently I have been focusing a lot on mobile marketing and advertising, and in that area, I would add Jonathan MacDonald (@jmacdonald), Kim Dushinski (@KimDushinski) and Rory Sutherland (@rorysutherland).

8. Who would you recommend to answer these questions next?

Lars Cosh-Ishii (@Wireless_Watch), at Mobikyo, who runs the Wireless Watch Japan website in English about the bizarre mobile world of Japan, and who also is chairing Mobile Monday Tokyo. I think he’s the most insightful expert in all of mobile in Asia.