I’ve been reading a fair bit lately into what many people suspect will be the ‘next big thing’ on the Internet; the final ‘coming of age’ of the mobile Internet.

There are a lot of people doing a lot of things in the mobile web world, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of a whole new world of innovation, but here are my top finds so far.

www.gypsii.com – A social networking tool which is location based. There’s a neat little introduction video which explains it all.
www.mofuse.com – Create a mobile version of your site.

Here’s one vision that I especially like, entitled The Future of Internet Search: Mobile Version, from the PetitInvention blog.

The Future of Internet Search: Mobile Version

But you might ask why this has happened before. People have been talking about the mobile web for ages, but it’s not really caught on… There are a few reasons for this, but many people now believe we’re literally standing on the edge of a precipice of a new cultural revolution where access to mobile web technologies and services will literally change the way we live and organise our lives together.

Buy why now?

i) Web developers are finally embracing the use of good, high quality, semantically rich code. CSS layouts are replacing the bloating table based layouts of the late 90’s and early 00’s.

ii) Mobile phone technology is also finally catching up to the demands placed on it by the content. XHTML is becoming more widely supported in place of the older more basic mobile markup languages such as WML. The iphone is the obvious example of how people are starting to realise they will be able to access fully featured websites via their phones.

iii) It might be a small factor, but a new announcement by the European Commission to support in-flight mobile use by harmonizing the technical and licensing requirements.

iv) Mobile Internet companies are starting to offer the consumer a realistically affordable tarrifs for going online.

v) Firefox on your mobile. – Mobile Firefox prototype browser arrives for eager early adopters to play with.

So the infrastructure is there, the technology is there. The software and applications are fastly becoming available. All that remains now is the slow but inevitable adoption of all this by the average joe on their mobile handset.

If anyone would like to show us some examples of their mobile based services and applications we’d love to see them.