You ain’t heard the last of it, yet.

“…Juniper Research this week predicted that mobile music revenues will hit almost $18bn by 2012, largely led by consumer demand for subscription services. The market for these ‘rental’ services alone will hit $3.3bn in that timeframe, says Juniper, as they ’surge in popularity’. Alongside this surge, full track downloads will enjoy greatly improved uptake as 3G services are deployed in emerging markets. Juniper expects downloads on the Indian subcontinent to grow from two million in 2007 to 480 million in 2012.”

[via Telecoms.com]

See also here for more thoughts on mobile content strategy.

Orexin A is a promising candidate to become a “sleep replacement” drug. For decades, stimulants have been used to combat sleepiness, but they can be addictive and often have side effects, including raising blood pressure or causing mood swings. […]

The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired.

The study, published in the The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys’ cognitive abilities but made their brains look “awake” in PET scans. [via Wired]

There will be obvious and valuable uses for a drug like this: doctors, soldiers, pilots, intelligence agents and other key personnel who are occasionally called upon to perform under suboptimal rest conditions. There will also be lots of people who want to use this drug (if it comes to market) to avoid “wasting” time sleeping, or to cure jetlag, or to get a day’s work in after a night up with the baby.

Would you take this drug (or another like it — it’s not the first; there are others already in use for night shift workers, for example)? Would you worry about long-term (or even short-term) physical effects of tricking the body out of its physical needs? Do you love to be up, or love to get your shuteye?

What effect will drugs like this one have on cultural expectations of stamina? Of neediness? Of being “always on” in a 24/7 world?

The changes are already happening, although they are subtler: expectations generated by the ubiquity of laptop computers, cell phones, and Blackberry PDAs. Executives report setting their Blackberry alarms to wake them in the middle of the night just to shoot off an email to a colleague, in order to “prove” that they work around the clock. Still, saying “I got your email first thing this morning” is still an acceptable excuse for an eight-hour delay. Will that change?

Alternatively, will the backlash finally trigger a situation in which people start being more aggressive about drawing lines between their personal and working lives?

Stay tuned. Don’t fall asleep.

Finnish vendor Nokia announced an extension of its mobile music platform on Tuesday, with the unveiling of a subscription service that allows users to keep their music.

At its annual investor day in the Netherlands, Nokia announced its ‘Comes With Music’ platform, that enables people to buy a Nokia device with a year of unlimited access to millions of tracks.

Once the year is complete, customers can keep all their music without having to worry about it disappearing when their subscription is over. [see telecoms.com for the full story]

This is very similar to Nokia’s purchase and inclusion of mapping software on high-end devices (something we discussed in the Mobile Marketing panel at the MoMo Summit). The buzz is that “it’s all about content” — that future revenues are going to be driven primarily by content.

Take a look at how Apple’s iTunes fits into its strategy: revenues are huge at 36%, but the importance is in the content’s role in driving sales of the iPod and computer hardware lines. That lesson hasn’t been lost on others. Think Amazon and Kindle, Nokia and Ovi, Sony and their upcoming revamped music store.

But is the buzz true as a trend?

What do these activities say about company strategy? Where are these players expecting their future revenues growth to come from?

1. Hardware sales? The device is the money maker, with higher prices/differentiation justified by including free content — sales of devices driven by consumer desire for the “free” (or premium) content included; or
2. Content sales? The hardware is a one-off sale, but the ongoing revenues from online content and subscription sales are the real money-maker; or
3. Something else entirely?

It’s clear that the future of computing in general — the big future — is in mobile. Desktop computers, home media centers, and laptops will be nice CE moneymaking appliances, like microwaves and large-screen TVs. Sure, they’re more necessary than luxuries like designer espresso machines, but you can live without them, for example, if you are struggling to pay off student loans.

Mobiles will be like refrigerators or washing machines. You just can’t manage without them. That’s already true now, but at the moment it’s more of a psychological need to not miss anything. As mobile email improves, flat data plans roll out, web browsing becomes usable, phone memory grows to accommodate video and audio entertainment realistically, downloading becomes easier rather than sideloading… as those things happen, the mobile device will be completely embedded as the primary computing device in fact, not just in theory. As the N95 ads say, “it’s what the computer has become” and it’s true (but not of the N95, I’m afraid).

The “content driving sales of content” model: Amazon’s Kindle appears to seek its profits not on device sales, but on opening the market to ebook sales. Is this how they intend to compete with Google’s devaluing of books… by making books affordable through non-printing? Cutting out of the loop the paper, the printing, the ink, the distributor, the store? Making it palatable by including the cellular connection? (Worthy of note: O’Reilly Radar)

The “content driving sales of hardware” model: This appears to be Nokia’s: rolling the cost of the content into the hardware, and keeping the content free by owning it themselves and amortizing the cost over tens of millions of hardware units.

The “content driving sales of advertising” model: Google. The evolution of the tried-and-true broadcast television model. It certainly works for Google. Will we see the day when Google struggles to maintain its advertising value as broadcast networks have? Surely a company is incubating somewhere that will eventually grow to challenge Google’s dominance… then what?

The “hardware driving sales of hardware AND content” model: Although you might argue that people purchase iPods because they want to use iTunes Music Store for price and ease of use… I wouldn’t buy that argument. I would believe that after the hardware sale, the content is a huge follow-on market.

If Nokia is trying to emulate Apple’s model, why are they including all this free content? It erodes the follow-on possibilities. On the other hand, follow-on content sales for mobile devices have been anemic all along (ringtones, music, video, mapping, whatever). So… is Nokia taking for granted that follow-on sales are not that valuable for some reason on this platform? Or are they betting that by getting people to use the content, later on (say, in two years) they’ll be unwilling to give it up, and will pay for subscriptions, and that that will be worthwhile?

I’m not a believer in educating the market. You see, once people become accustomed to not paying for content (eg, television programming), it’s hard to get them to pay for that same delivery later on. What you CAN get people to pay for is previously free content in a more convenient delivery (think buying a song via iTunes for “only” $0.99 rather than hassling to load a CD that’s down in the basement).

What do these models all have in common? With the exception possibly of Apple’s hardware business*, everyone is trying to figure out how to harness desire for content as a driver for sales of whatever it is they sell. Or how to change what they sell in order to make it driveable by content desire.

Why does content desire matter so much? Content is what you experience when you use the device. It is what brings you back again and again to use the device — you want to talk to someone, you reach for the phone. You want to hear a song — you reach for the iPod. You want to watch a movie — you reach for the TV remote. Only now, you can just reach for the mobile phone to do any of those things. It’s the mobile-able content that matters most, because it’s wherever you are.

* You could make a decent case that Apple’s “hardware” sales are actually sales of experience: combined hardware and operating system. Consumers pay more for Apple’s products not because they are beautiful, although they are, but because they want the usable, beautiful, stable operating system and applications. Which are themselves content, in a way.

If you don’t pick up when I call, please call me back. And don’t tell me why you didn’t pick up. It’s perfectly legitimate for you not to interrupt what you’re doing every time I ring, but the odds are good that I’ll just feel offended that [fill in reason here] was more important to you than I was. So, just be classy, call back when you can, acknowledge that you saw that I called, and let’s get on with things.

[This is why I so prefer email and SMS to phone calls most of the time. Ah, the perils of synchronous communication.]

Ricky at SMS Text News has posted on the realities of the U.S. cell phone market, as seen in the trenches. No mind-blowing news here, but if you have anything to do with mobile hardware, software, services or sales, you’d better check it out: you do need to know this.

It’s scary how many people make decisions knowing so very little about how people react to them.

“3. SMS/Data is bad because it only runs up your bill. The carriers really botched this one a few years ago when they first launched data services. By activating pay-per-use as the default, most consumers have had the unpleasant experience of the ’surprise bill’, which left a bad taste in their mouths. Add to that the fact that every handset has at least one shortcut key to the internet, and you can imagine that consumers dislike mobile data. 8 out of 10 people, when asked, “Would you like to go ahead and add a data package, as well?” reply “No, actually, I want you to disable everything but calling. Don’t want any surprise bills…” I wish the carriers would have offered people their first month free and unlimited, to give the customer a better idea of what their usage would be and offer customers a pleasant way to experience the mobile web and all it can do.”

An informed post on Google Phone’s Android Community blog, summarizing my MEX article, published earlier this week. (Android is Google’s recently announced new open-source platform).

[Note that Power2B is a technology company, not an interface design company. We study interface needs and future trends, and then innovate to enable those dreams to become reality.]

“As the many thousands of people who have Google as their homepage already know, search can be as simple as a box on a page.  Mobile search, however, requires something of a paradigm shift; no matter how glossy the UI, tactile the interface or clever the design, emulating desktop search on a cellphone is a frustrating, scroll-heavy experience.  Sarah…, of interface design company Power2B, discusses the demands for a semantically-linked, three-dimensional mobile search environment in an article for MEX today, resolving in what she calls “mesh connectivity vs. linearity” — where search navigation is guided one step at a time through a series of clarifying options.”

You can find a presentation of my thoughts on using patterns in nature to inform interaction models in today’s issue of the MEX Newsletter (the PDF version is posted here). Many thanks to Marek Pawlowski of PMN for the invitation to contribute to MEX’s ongoing user experience education. Preliminary work on this theme was first presented at MobileMonday Helsinki in June 2007.

Sarah is co-founder and director of research and development at Power2B. In this special article for the MEX newsletter ‘Search Patterns in Nature: Informing Computer Search Interfaces’, she discusses how natural phenomena provide a blueprint for a more efficient mobile search mechanism. The technique utilises an ‘always forward’ methodology, combining semantic information with a new method of presenting and navigating results to reduce cognitive load and help users reach their desired result more quickly.

I’ve been using WidSets on my cell phone for quite a while now, and enjoy them. One reason the widgets work for me is that my phone (E65) has WiFi capability, so I can have the phone update the WidSet feeds while I’m at work or at home, without incurring high cellular data charges. I read the feeds when I’m in a taxi, or waiting for someone.

Here’s the link to the Really Sarah Syndication WidSets widget, if you’d like to get the RSS feed to your phone.