The iPhone has finally landed on our shores – more than 1,000 people descended on Singtel Comcentre at midnight yesterday to be among the first official owners of the 3G Apple iPhone in Singapore. Even before Singtel’s launch, though, there were an estimated 10,000 iPhone in use locally – mainly unlocked versions of the original 2G iPhones.

I myself have been using one as my primary mobile phone for the past three months. From my experience, the hype and excitement surrounding the iPhone is justified – mostly. Sure, it is not the most feature-rich of phones currently available: no SMS forwarding; no video capability; no stereo-bluetooth; etc. Overall, though, I must say that it has been the most competent and intuitive smart phone I’ve ever used.

In my opinion, the two areas in which the iPhone excels are accessing the Internet and synchronizing data. The iPhone’s web browser, which is a mobile version of the Apple’s Safari browser, is far superior to those found on any other mobile phone. It is no accident that a far higher percentage of iPhone users access the web regularly compared to any other mobile phone.

Having struggled to keep my personal information synchronized between my PCs and a variety of mobile devices over the past decade, I am also well and truly impressed at how effectively Apple has implemented this potentially frustrating process. Dock your iPhone with your Mac and your email accounts, calendars, contacts, music and photos are synced with minimum fuss – no messing about with complex configuration options or dealing with frustrating sync conflicts.

The iPhone will definitely evolve into a dominant mobile web platform fairly quickly. I believe it is already the best smart phone option for small businesses wishing to make their workforce more mobile and productive.

Dell has unveiled a new range of laptops aimed squarely at digital nomads. Speaking to BBC News, Andy Lark – Dell’s VP for Global Marketing – claims that more than two-thirds of India’s workforce is going to be entirely mobile.

With the majority of people buying their PCs online coming from emerging economies like India, it is no wonder that Dell is focussing on features that are being demanded by the footloose mobile worker. These include things like long battery life, easy connectivity, robust security, reliability and, above all, supreme portability.

Dell is wise to focus on mobility, but whether its revamped laptops are enough to stem its recent loss in market share remains to be seen. All the major PC makes from Apple to Toshiba are continually pushing the envelope on battery life and weights of their laptops.

I believe the real “game-changer” in the mobility space is the maturing of the cloud computing and web services concepts. The true digital nomads of tomorrow are those who do not need to lug their computing hardware around with them, regardless of how light it may be. Instead, their data, applications and processes live on the Web and are accessible practically anywhere through far tinnier devices that are not much larger than smart-phones.

An Economist article – “Nomads at last (April 2008)” – paints a far more compelling picture of how wireless communication can turn us into true nomads, sans most of the hardware.

Market research firm Frost & Sullivan expects to see robust growth in Singapore’s online content market over the next 5 years. Worth over SGD 30-million in 2008, it is expected to grow to over SGD 165-miilion by 2013.

Online gaming dominates the local content market now. Other content services include online music and videos. However, it is online gaming that has taken off significantly here, driven by the popularity of community focussed MMOGs (massively multi-player online games).

Singapore’s planned next-generation National Broadband Network will certainly give the online content market a fillip by making it more feasible to provide bandwidth intensive services such as Video-on-Demand.

However, I personally feel that it is the new mobile devices coming onto the market that will really boost the market. Apple’s iPhone has shown how a truly mobile device can effectively tap into the Web. Some of the 1st-generation applications on its fledgling App Store already demonstrate how ubiquitous, always-on connection to the Internet can be genuinely useful.

Most of the successful mobile apps do not require massive bandwidth or production infrastructure . Instead, the critical factors are to have relevant content and to present it intuitively through well designed user interfaces. Providing such relevant, localized & niche content is a field where you don’t really need to be big to succeed. So, I do expect that small businesses can take a big bite of the SGD 165-miilion online content market come 2013.

… and it’s getting local and becoming mobile.

A survey by WebVisible and Nielsen/NetRatings found that most consumers are becoming increasingly de-tuned from traditional advertising media and are instead relying on search engines and other online sources to find products and services from local businesses.

A majority of consumers apparently associate the trustworthiness of a business with the quality of its website. User-generated reviews, local news sites and social networks are other key influencers of consumer perceptions.

Consumers are also starting to use web-enabled mobile devices to access location- and time- specific product information. Such mobile access looks set to become an important driver for local commerce.

This particular survey was conducted in the USA, but a similar survey in Singapore would likely reveal similar trends. Anecdotal reports from many of our own small business contacts echo the increasingly important role that a strong web presence plays in a firm’s marketing effort.

Click here to download the full WebVisible report from GetEntrepreneurial.com (2.11MB PDF).

According to Forrester research, spending on Web 2.0 applications is set to boom in North America and Europe. Releasing its survey findings at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Forrester believes that traditional enterprises are finally starting to embrace this “fundamental new way” of communicating with employees and customers.

Such traditional consumer giants as General Motors, McDonald’s and Bank of America have already embraced tools like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts and social networking. Analysts estimate that more than 60% of North American and European companies will make Web 2.0 a priority in 2008. It looks like the smart money in the Web 2.0 economy will be on the Enterprise side.

While the big investment focus in the Web 2.0 space remains in North America and Europe, the conditions are ripe for such applications to establish a foothold in Singapore. The promise of island-wide wireless broadband access is slowly becoming a reality, and a host of innovative mobile devices have begun to show up on our shores (although we are still awaiting, with drooling anticipation, the official appearance of the much-desired iPhone here).

The key Web 2.0 categories are: Blogs, Mashups, Podcasting, RSS feeds, social networking, widgets and wikis. Though much of the development in these technologies have been focused on engaging the youth / geek markets, the real winners will be those companies that can leverage these technologies to solve real business needs; thereby taking a bite out of the multi-million-dollar revenues that the traditional business-software industry commands.

LinkedIn has unveiled a mobile version of its social network. Point your mobile browser to http://m.linkedin.com/ to check it out.

Only basic functionality is currently available in the mobile version, but LinkedIn promises that more fully-featured, phone-specific features will be coming online soon. It is also accessible in six languages, including Mandarin.

A video introduction to the mobile LinkedIn app by Branden Duncan (LinkedIn’s director of engineering) is available on YouTube.

LinkedIn, with approximately 20 million members, is far smaller than MySpace or Facebook. However, its focus on the professional networking niche seems to have kept LinkedIn immune from the social networking fatigue that has beset its more popular rivals recently. LinkedIn has nearly tripled its unique visitor statistic over the past year, hitting a high of 3.6 million unique visitors in January 2008.