Whether you are an early adopter or a Luddite, the iPhone and its competitors matter to you. They are opening a vast frontier on the mobile web – and an opportunity for you to stake a claim on this new platform before it gets too crowded.

A few weeks ago, my aging cell phone mysteriously stopped working. Finally, I thought, I had an excuse to take the plunge and buy an iPhone. The old phone started working again as mysteriously as it stopped, but by then I was inside the AT&T store, beyond the point of no return.

I had owned a Palm Pilot phone years ago when I was traveling regularly between Philadelphia and Houston. Having my calendar and all my contact information with me at all times simplified my life greatly. But when I tried to download my email, the phone had a nervous breakdown. I never tried email on it again. Then I dropped it one too many times and the screen cracked.

In the several years since – with a job that required less travel — I’ve made do just fine with a series of ordinary cell phones. But now that I am traveling every week between Washington, DC (where I work) and Bethlehem, PA (where I am helping to shepherd my twin 17-year-old daughters through their final year of high school) returning to a smartphone made sense.

The new iPhone 3G handles email easily, even multiple email accounts. But that’s just one of the things I’ve done on this gadget that I couldn’t do before. Here are a few others:
• In Barnes & Noble, searching for a novel my daughter needed for her English class, I was able to Google the author and find the book myself rather than wait for an overworked salesperson to access the store database.
• On my Thursday night drive to Pennsylvania, I used the GPS and Google Maps to reroute myself past a traffic jam on the Baltimore beltway.
• I’ve made my seven-hour DC-PA roundtrip more productive by listening to podcasts of sessions from this summer’s New Media Expo (more about that later).
• At a bar for a local band’s CD release party, I kept tabs on the National League pennant race – and watched video highlights of a victory by my beloved Phillies — thanks to a $4.99 iPhone App from MLB.com.

• On my daily commute in DC, I could watch an episode of The Wire and not care if the bus was late or the Metro was too crowded to open a newspaper. Or I could listen to my custom “station” on Pandora when I tired of the songs in my iTunes.
• I read the latest on the presidential race on NYTimes.com while waiting to renew my driver’s license at the Maryland DMV.
• Since my daughters rarely return my calls, I’ve even started text-messaging.

There’s no question: with the faster web access the 3G affords, the new iPhone is a game changer. The introduction of iPhone imitators from Sprint and Verizon, and the open-source Google Android phone, ensure this is just the beginning of the innovation cycle.

Even if you feel no need to be connected to the web at all times, this matters to you. Why? The mobile web represents a huge frontier: there are 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, versus 1.5 billion TVs and 1.1 billion personal computers. (Source: Omniture White Paper: Mobilize Your Marketing.) You have an opportunity to stake a claim on this platform before it gets too crowded with content creators.

Think about how previous technological changes have affected news habits. Newspapers stopped printing Extra! editions when radio and television provided a quicker means for delivering breaking news. And while old media brands like the New York Times and CNN have huge online readerships, millions of people choose to go get their news from Google and Yahoo! Meanwhile, newspapers – the creators of most of that content — have generally struggled to make use of the interactivity and multimedia capabilities of the web.

Formatting pages for the small screen is just one of the adjustments the mobile web will require. The big opportunity for newcomers is to create content that not only can be displayed on the small screen but also can take advantage of the way people uses these devices.

For example, iWant uses the iPhone’s location-sensing technology to give you the closest drug stores, gas stations, banks, cafes, restaurants, movie show times and more. G-Park uses GPS to mark where your car is parked. And the Android-powered T-Mobile G1 phone has an inner compass.

Worldwide smartphone sales were 124 million in 2007, the year of the iPhone’s introduction. By 2012, those numbers are expected to nearly triple to 363 million. 3G subscribers are expected to increase seven-fold over the same period. (Sources: IDC, Worldwide Converged Mobile Device Forecast, June 2008; Juniper Research, Mobile Games: Subscription & Download 2007-2012, Nov. 2007)

Marketers are falling in love with mobile marketing because of campaign response rates that have reached as high as 15% — versus less than 1% for traditional direct marketing. Mobile internet banner campaigns are reporting click-through rates three to four times that of the fixed internet (though that is due in part, no doubt, to how easy it is to hit the wrong hyperlink on a small screen). In five years, it is projected that more than half of all brands will spend 5% to 25% of their marketing budgets on mobile. So there will be a growing audience for your mobile web content, and advertisers willing to support it. (Source: Omniture White Paper: Mobilize Your Marketing.)

Whether you’re talking about web video, the mobile web or podcasts, it’s still early in the game. Edison Media Research reports that 60% of the U.S. doesn’t know anything about podcasts. The number of podcast listeners, now 18 million, is projected to grow to 65 million in 5 years. And the tools available now make it easier than ever to do. “You’re not too late,” podcast producer Mark Linder told the fourth annual New Media Expo in Las Vegas this August. “You’re right on time.”

But you have to start learning now. That’s why I spent $149 to buy the recordings from the Expo. Now, $149 is a lot of money, but it’s far cheaper than it would have cost me to attend in person (though I plan to be there next year). And it was a bargain for what I received. The audio recordings — 47 hour-long sessions — are a crash course in the cutting edge of new media production techniques, best practices and business models.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be sharing with you some of what I’ve learned (and perhaps publishing interviews with some of the best speakers).

In the meantime, I encourage you to begin your education today. Start by signing up for our upcoming class: Launch Your Website the Easy Way with WordPress. You’ve still got a week to take advantage of the discounted pricing.

It may be early in the game, but the other players won’t wait for you to catch up.

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