This is the tenth post in our mobile blog series. Throughout the month of April we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "What's happening in mobile right now? What's coming soon?” This post is by Steffan Berelowitz. Steffan is CEO of Bluetrain Mobile, a software platform that helps businesses create custom mobile websites. He’s a serial entrepreneur, web consultant, and now train conductor. In the past 19 years, Steffan has founded 3 companies in online technology, and all are in business today.

From time to time, when I was growing up, I would see the occasional photograph of someone floating in the Dead Sea. Inevitably, this iconic image would feature someone lying back and holding up a newspaper. For anyone who has seen these pictures, you know exactly what is supposed to happen when you put down your towel, take off your sandals, and stroll into the Dead Sea water – you float.

This is the fifth post in our mobile blog series. Throughout the month of April we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "What's happening in mobile right now? What's coming soon?” This post is by Andrew Paradise, CEO and founder of AisleBuyer, the Boston-based provider of mobile checkout solutions. AisleBuyer’s mobile commerce platform not only provides a revolutionary in-store experience for consumers, but also delivers unprecedented in-store customer analytics to retailers, brand and restaurants.

We can all agree that smartphones aren’t a passing fad. According to comScore, there are more than 100 million smartphone subscribers in the United States. With this proliferation has come a boom in innovation. Who could have envisioned the Apple App Store, with more than half a million apps that have been downloaded upwards of 25 million times, a few years ago?

This is the second post in our mobile blog series. Throughout the month of April we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "What's happening in mobile right now? What's coming soon?” This post is by John Caron, SVP, Marketing, Modiv Media. John is a tech industry veteran, with over 20 years of entrepreneurial and leadership experience in media, retail and commerce technology and services. A frequent industry speaker and contributor, he can be found speaking at many conferences. Follow him or Modiv on Twitter: @jcaron2 or @modiv.

$1 Trillion. Yes, with a “T.” Yankee Group estimates mobile transactions will grow to that number by 2015 (sounds like a demand from Dr. Evil!). eBay and PayPal forecast $8B in mcommerce revenue and $7B in mpayments for 2012. Starbucks has processed over 26 million mobile payments. And, we’re just getting started. So, it’s clear that mcommerce is happening. What’s not clear is what the @#%! mcommerce actually is. Google “mcommerce stats” and you’ll read that we already buy BILLIONS of dollars of stuff via mcommerce. I, however, disagree.

Guest post by Brian Cavoli, Marketing Director at BzzAgent. Follow Brian on Twitter! This is one of several guest posts in the MITX 2011 Perspectives Blog Series. Stay tuned for more posts by Boston's most influential thought leaders.

Marketing in 2011 is about the power of the group. If there is one thing we learned in 2010, it was that the collective power of people connecting in social media can drive some serious sales. In the coming year, the social media practices of motivating consumers to get their friends, family, and followers to organize around a purchase activity will be the most effective way for companies to sell online. This won’t be driven by marketers looking for another way to push messages or hoping their viral videos take off -- it will be driven by Social Media’s ability to provide unique group experiences and shared value. The message may come from the marketer, but the marketing comes from the people.

The perfect example of this is the group buying phenomenon Groupon. Everyone’s been talking about them this year - and for good reason. Forbes referred to them as fastest growing company in history. It is always fascinating when a hot company turns down billons from Google, but what makes the Groupon story so important is how it has transformed social marketing and connected the web to massive retail store sales.  

Group buying certainly isn’t new. (Remember Mercata?) Some of the earliest and most well-funded ecommerce sites on the web were attracting like-minded shoppers to get better deals in bulk. The problem was they weren’t social. The deals didn’t get people excited, and unexcited people tend not to share things too much.

The world is different now. The Internet has become a social marketplace. Groupon has cracked the local ad market and spawned countless numbers of imitators, but the next year will bring the expansion of this concept to a wide variety of new industries. Consumers are already sharing their latest purchases with each other for everything from scented soaps to Cisco servers. The companies that can reach a targeted audience with valuable, exclusive offers can turn that buzzing into buying.

Plenty has been written about Groupon clones and high-profile sale sites like Rue La La and Gilt Groupe. But the underlying trend is spreading fast. eBay is bringing group buying to gift giving with GroupGifts, GotGroupBuy.com is offering all types of electronics, and brides can join forces for great deals on jewelry and honeymoons on a new Knot.com site. In China, Mercedes sold 205 Smart cars in 204 minutes on a group buying site. I predict this kind of innovation will crop up in whole new verticals like insurance, financial services, and even health care, to improve the customer buying process. Look for companies to break down the walls around how groups coordinate to buy these products in 2011.

Sites like these are not about advertising. They use a promotional approach to create the kind of buzz that gets a group of people talking and buying. It takes much more than just a great deal. Here are 4 keys for “we-commerce” success in 2011:

Guest post by Emily Nagle Green, Chairman of the Board, Yankee Group, and MITX board member. Follow Emily on Twitter! This is one of several guest posts in the MITX 2011 Perspectives Blog Series. Stay tuned for many more posts by Boston's most influential thought leaders.

Are you enjoying all these prognostications from your friends at MITX? Time for an industry analyst to weigh in. I want to talk about the next technology disruption heading towards us; one which will take the full decade to fully unfold, but which is gathering steam now. It's called 4G, shorthand for fourth-generation mobile networks.

"Oh no," you sigh. "I don't have the energy to digest a big wave of hype right now," you think to yourself. Hang on -- I'm not here to tell you that 4G is going to change our world in the coming year. Far from it. In fact, 2011 is likely to be the year of mostly pain and confusion around 4G, particularly in the U.S. But you still need to know.

Why pain and confusion? Almost all big revolutions in technology start with someone -- and I'm not sure if there were industry analysts back in Alexander Graham Bell's day, but I guarantee that someone played that role -- looking at some tech breakthrough and suddenly seeing, with great clarity, what will inevitably transpire in the world as a result. But those same experts can rarely predict correctly the twists and turns that a complex ecosystem will experience in the near term as it lurches towards large-scale adoption of a revolutionary new technology platform.

Here's what I think you need to know about 4G for 2011:

There are lots of sources for info on what 4G technology is; suffice it to say here that 4G networks are faster and higher capacity than current cellular systems. That means better experiences on mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, cars (yes), and many more yet to emerge. Importantly for mobile network operators,  once the conversion has been made, 4G networks promise to be much cheaper to operate on an on-going basis than current mobile network technologies, and will let them more easily offer new kinds of mobile services to consumers and businesses. That likely improvement in the efficiency of operating a mobile network that will be in high demand by all of us and our gizmos is one of the factors Yankee Group believes will propel adoption of the technology by the network operators.

And in fact, fourth-generation mobile communications networks are en route, or may have already arrived in your neighborhood. That is, if you agree with various network operators' appropriation of the term "4G" to what they're beginning to offer. In fact, that's the first point of confusion in 2011: there isn't broad agreement on which of several new technologies really qualify to use the term. Using the term broadly, in the US there are already 4G network offerings emerging from T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless.

Uptake won't be terribly fast in this first full year of multiple 4G networks; that's the second point of confusion, as businesses try to calculate how much time and effort to invest in supporting the industry's move to 4G in these early days. Yankee Group predicts less than a third of one percent of mobile users will be using a 4G network by the end of 2011. Part of the problem will be the need for our mobile devices to support the technology; another problem will be confusion in users' minds about what 4G is. Our surveys suggest that less then 25% of the US population today knows what it is and why they'd want it. (Within enterprises, among buyers of mobile services, awareness is higher but still challenging for mobile network marketers to sell into.)

But beyond 2011, growing numbers of users of 4G networks will each spend more time on the mobile internet. Result: similar to the impact that the introduction of the iPhone had on mobile apps -- unleashing users who said, "Oh, now I get it!" to the idea of using the Internet on a mobile device -- there will be a wave of even greater engagement with the mobile web. Mobile app revenue will continue to rise.

So the reason you need to know now, despite all the confusion ahead for 2011: Companies that begin to invest now in mobile web site improvements and media-rich mobile experiences for their customers, employees, and partners will benefit. The mobile web is here to stay, even if its evolution to a faster, more economical, and more satisfying infrastructure will be a bit of a bumpy road for a while.

Here's to a confused, but faster, 2011!

Did you just discover this series? Don't worry! You can check out our last post, by Mike Afergan, here!

Guest post by Dean Whitney. Dean runs a social media ad agency, is a sought after speaker, blogger and has worked with many of the world’s most recognized brands and collaborated with top agencies. Follow him on Twitter, and check out his blog! This is one of several guest posts in the MITX 2011 Perspectives Blog Series. Stay tuned for more posts by Boston's most influential thought leaders.

For brands that are going to be successful, 2011 will be more focused on building awareness. The job of marketers has always been to reach customers at the point where they are most influenced to purchase products. That’s why P&G in the early years decided to produce TV shows to target housewives - hence the term "soap opera." Social media has changed fundamentally how consumers purchase products and services.

Guest post by Nitzan Shaer, Managing Partner of High Start Group. Follow Nitzan on Twitter! This is one of several guest posts in the MITX 2011 Perspectives Blog Series. Stay tuned for many more posts by Boston's most influential thought leaders.