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The rise of the mobile phone and their mass adoption has increasingly come into the lime-light particularly in the past few months. In the UK and other developed countries, there are now more mobile phones than people (Philbin, 2007) and in 2006 the global mobile phone market was worth $115.5 billion from handset sales alone, a rise of 27% from 2005 (Jaques, 2007). This trend of increasing adoption and mobile use is set to continue. This level of adoption is hard to ignore. It puts the mobile phone in poll position as a primary communication tool for the majority of people in the west today and increasingly in developing countries. This huge potential market makes the mobile platform a potential attractive business opportunity on which to extend or create a variety of features and services relating to virtual worlds (VW’s) or communities. It is already impacting and restructuring industries, including the music (Mintel, 2005), photographic (Mintel, 2005b) and social networking industries (MobileYouth, 2007). This indicates the scale of influence mobile phones can have on industry. This is thus undoubtedly an area that needs looking at since it provides new opportunities to become more relevant to the market and may unlock additional audiences and revenue streams.
It is acknowledged here that developing a mobile solution as a result of current interest in its potential and the assumption that simply extending on to mobile or using the technology because it is there is foolhardy. This project aims to avoid taking a technologically deterministic approach, as ultimately there are cultural and moral issues in adopting technology because it is available (Tedre, 2006). There have been various technologies that have ultimately failed when implemented, as the value assumed to come from this technology from the ‘innovator’s point of view was not perceived by the consumer and so adoption failed. This can be seen with the initial launch of WAP (Lewis, 2000), where its spectacular failure in being used by the end consumer, was a result of a lack of perceived value from the consumer perspective because of its clunky use and the limited content on offer at the time. Due to the potential cost of developing a mobile Virtual World of some kind it must be ensured that the end user of the service actually values what is offered and that any solution facilitates and helps the user to meet their core needs by adopting their perspective. It is not enough to consider what technology is available in order to drive the development of VWs. This project is therefore necessary in order to collect consumer centric data that is relevant to the mobile and VW context in order to create a successful solution.
