What is the next big thing? Are we on the right track? This is one of the subjects that keeps coming up in almost every marketing meeting lately.  
This is a really tough question to answer especially when you are in front of investors. They usually ask this question and you have to justify your answer, no matter what it is.
I used to have a supervisor in the grad school that kept saying: "The only way to predict the future is to build it." and I cannot agree more. However, people's perception is another key factor. If a good number of people believe that a particular product is going to big, then that product would have a higher chance of success. The reason is simple: If I think this product is going to be a hit and everybody is going to use it, I would most probably respect my own opinion and volunteer to use it myself. If a good number of people think the same way about this product, they, too, would use it which means the product would already have many users, i.e. it is successful.
So, we have tried to find out what is going to be the next big thing in people's eyes We started from a very high level question: What is the next step in phone services? We asked from Facebook users in the US. Take a look at what we have gotten so far:

As you can see most people think the next step in phone services would be providing Free Basic Phone Service. This doesn't mean that provider is not making money out of that service, it only means that the costs should be absorbed by somebody other than consumers. For example, one can decide to transfer costs to the business owners who want to play their ads during the phone calls (Google Voice model?!). This shows that users' first priority is to reduce costs of phone services which require a shift in the business model which may also require a change in the technologies that are being used.
There are however some gaps in our assessment/theory. For example, people may not know what is coming up. If a new exciting product is so unexpected that not that many people could have thought about it, that may also become successful. Who would have thought that publishing private messages publicly on the Internet (Facebook Wall) would become this successful. I bet when this had been brought up for the first time, even internally in Facebook, it wasn't something that many people would support as one of the main functionalities of Facebook. Those people would have not liked it because they had not expected such a service and they had not thought about what it could do and how it could be used. 
The same thing could have happened in our poll. Social Phone Services is not only a new category of services but it is also a new business model which could simply provide consumers with free basic phone service which in a way includes the 4th options. TELTUB is the first source on the Internet that has defined social phone services just recently so it is fair to assume that not that many people know what the term means. However, interestingly enough, 12% of people still voted for this option in our poll and we can justify it only by assuming that people used their imagination to guess what social phone services could be and they liked what they saw!

Labels: free phone, Marketing, Social phone services

What is the next big thing in the telephony world?