The VisionMobile website, and our blog in particular, has seen a lot of action in 2009: 59,000 unique visitors from 176 countries, with blog articles each reaching into 10s of thousands of views. We also made it into the Top 100 Analyst Blogs and are eagerly pushing towards the top-10!
What is it that makes the VisionMobile blog tick? Our blog motto is ‘Distilling market noise into market sense’; delivering high quality, informative and substantiated articles, with passion and attention to detail, that help clarify the competitive market landscape in telecoms.
10 most influential blog articles for 2009 For this end-of-year article, we‘ve analysed the top-10 most influential articles that appeared on the VisionMobile blog in 2009, based on the visitor views, tweets and comments. Here’s the top-10 finalists:
1. The 100 million club: some surprising facts about mobile software The H2 2008 update to the watch list of software products with more than 100 million cumulative shipments (most viewed article with 13,500+ views, 16 tweets and 6 comments).
2. Why the LiMo Foundation needs to go back to the drawing board A long, hard look into the LiMo Foundation and the need for re-positioning (10,000+ views, 11 tweets and 6 comments)
3. The Amazon Kindle: More revolutionary for the mobile telecoms industry than the iPhone ever was The Kindle model – the shape of revenue models to come? (10,000+ views, 31 tweets and 8 comments)
4. Will Legacy Smartphone Platforms Keep-up with iPhone and Android? How do Legacy Smartphone platforms fare against the much-hyped giants? (7,000+ views, 54 tweets, 22 comments)
5. Mobile App Stores: The Next Two Years An overview of the app stores market, complete with profiles of major players and the two-year outlook for app stores (most tweeted with 91 tweets and most commented with 29 comments. 7,000+ views)
6. Mobile widgets: market review and commercial reality The what, where, who and how of mobile widgets, complete with comparative research for 8 vendors (6,500+ views, 12 tweets, 13 comments)
7. Open is the New Closed The divergence between open source licenses and governance models (6,300+ views, 48 tweets and 6 comments)
8.NaaS: Network as a Service, a new business model for network operators An analysis of the emerging Network-as-a-Service market (5,900+ views, 10 tweets, 11 comments)
9. Mobile Megatrends 2009 The annual megatrends report looks at the overarching trends of mobile for 2009 (5,500+ views, 22 tweets, 8 comments)
10. Feature phones and the RTOS – the ignored 85% of the market An important analysis on how feature phones and RTOSes comprise the vast majority of the market (5,300+ views, 24 tweets, 9 comments)
5 most influential guest articles in 2009 The VisionMobile blog is a space where industry insiders exchange views on the fast-changing mobile market and the trends that define the future direction of telecoms. This year we hosted articles by 11 industry insiders, who contributed their vast knowledge and experience in the mobile ecosystem.
The top 5 guest articles for 2009, rated in terms of views, comments and tweets, are presented below.
1. Stefan Constantinescu: The Amazon Kindle: More revolutionary for the mobile telecoms industry than the iPhone ever was The Kindle model – the shape of revenue models to come? (10,000+ views, 31 tweets and 8 comments)
2. Michael Vakulenko: Will Legacy Smartphone Platforms Keep-up with iPhone and Android? How do Legacy Smartphone platforms fare against the much-hyped giants? (7,000+ views, 54 tweets, 22 comments)
3. Ben Hookway: Feature phones and the RTOS – the ignored 85% of the market An important analysis on how feature phones and RTOSes comprise the vast majority of the market (5,300+ views, 24 tweets, 9 comments)
4. Florent Stroppa: Socializing the mobile address book: market overview and trends A detailed analysis of the market of social address book services (4,400+ views, 31 tweets, 10 comments)
5. Gabor Torok: Android and the threat of fragmentation How much fragmentation is there in Android and how does it impact developers? (4,200+ views, 20 tweets, 3 comments)
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our guest bloggers for 2009: Andy V. O’ Lay, Antony Edwards, Ben Hookway, Elad Granot, Florent Stroppa, Gabor Torok, Michael Vakulenko, Raj Singh, Stefan Constantinescu, Thomas Menguy and Wouter Deelman.
We’ve already lined up several guest blog articles for 2010, and are open to more submissions. If you have an original thesis or analysis and wish to share it with our 2,000+ industry insider readers, drop us a line.
Most influential article for 2009 The Mobile App Stores: The Next Two Years article is clearly the most influential for 2009 with 91 tweets, 29 user comments and 6,923 views. The article examines the fast-emerging mobile app store market and profiles the five most prominent app stores today in terms of distribution model, installed base, downloads, applications and revenues. Also, those looking for insights will find within an analysis of the five key elements of an app store and their predicted evolution over the next two years.
Behind the blog scenes We ‘ve embarked on several pioneering research projects in 2009; recommendation engines, mobile widgets, app stores evolution, open source economics and many more projects we can’t talk about 😉 We also hit the headlines with four products in 2009:
Mobile Industry Atlas (wallchart).The Industry Atlas (2nd edition) is a visual who’s who of the mobile industry covering more than 800 companies in 47 market sectors. Be sure to check the vastly expanded 3rd edition of the Atlas coming out early 2010, with more than 1,200 companies across 70 categories! (check out this video intro to the Atlas wallchart)
100 million club (watch list). 2009 saw the release of two updates to our ‘100 million club’, the watch list of all mobile software products that have been embedded in more than 100 million devices. Our latest report includes product shipments up to H1 2009 and market penetration figures for the 30 most successful software products, developed by 24 companies (download report here).
Mobile Megatrends 2009 (presentation). Our annual megatrends report looks at the overarching trends of mobile in 2009; 8 Centres of Gravity, Mass Consolidation in the Software Industry, Understanding Revenue Model Innovation, why Open is the New Closed, the recipes behind Application Stores, Network as a Service and Mobile Service Analytics. See also Cybercom’s upcoming seminar on Mobile Megatrends 2010, held in Malmö, Sweden, where VisionMobile’s Reseach Director, Andreas Constantinou, will be presenting our latest edition of Megatrends (view presentation here)
Active Idle Screen 2009-2011 (report). The active idle screen is the most premium real-estate on the handset for service delivery and promotion. In this report we review the solutions which offer zero-click access to services, information and promotion on the handset idle screen. We also examine the market trends and opportunities that will determine the billion-unit question: who will own the screen? (download report here)
What’s coming in 2010? Lots of planning has gone into 2010 already; we ‘re working a reinvention of one of our existing products that is bound to pick your interest and prove an invaluable research tool. We are also embarking on a major benchmark project that will prove seminal for many future reports across the mobile ecosystem. But we ‘re getting ahead of ourselves 🙂
For now, and within this last post of 2009, we’d like to wish everyone a happy holiday season!
– Matos