By Chetan Sharma (@chetansharma), President and Founder, Chetan Sharma Consulting
In 2014, revenues from mobile will exceed 1.8 trillion dollars representing approximately 2.5% of the global GDP. As has been the case in mobile for a number of years, each year takes the industry forward with advances in networks, devices, applications and new services. Over the past couple of years, mobile has also started to impact other industries and verticals, thus transforming the respective value chains and revenue streams.
At the end of each year, we conduct a survey of folks working in the mobile industry to get their perspective on how things will shape up for the coming year. It helps us understand where the industry focus, investment, and attention is going to be in the New Year.
For 2014, we asked our panelists which segments would be most impacted by mobile. The results from the survey are illustrated in the figure below:
Two of the top three areas are related to health. Mobile and health are made for each other. While mobile in the long run can transform the health industry as we know it, the low hanging fruit is the “wellness and fitness” category as it doesn’t have to suffer through the challenges of bureaucracy and regulations. It is also easy to understand and correlate the data without any physician. As such, the wellness and fitness wearables category has just taken off!
The fitness data, the network connectivity, and analytics enables consumers to have access to real-time data about their activity throughout the day, helping them manage their exercise and eating habits better.
.Of course, management of the privacy and security of the data will very important to gain wide consumer acceptance.
In the future, these wearables will turn into implantables where they carry out sophisticated tasks such as alerts before someone is going to have a heart attack, providing real-time chemical analysis of food intake and analytics on fat and blood stream that will help us lead healthier lives. All this will not only lead to a healthier population but also has the potential of lowering the global healthcare costs significantly.
So, here is to a healthy 2014.
Chetan’s previous post on the Hub:
The transformation of mobile operators into Digital Lifestyle Solution Providers