Volantis: Gaming to be the future driver of mobile Internet

To persuade consumers to use the mobile Internet more frequently, developers should be focusing on refining their gaming and social networking applications, forecasts the mobile Internet firm Volantis.

The company maintains that entertainment content, more than functional services such as GPS and email, are fast becoming priorities for the consumer when it comes to their app consumption.

Mark Watson, CEO of Volantis, said: "Recent research from consulting group Chetan Sharma forecasted that the app market is expected to increase to 50 billion downloads by 2012 with the advent of HTML5. We expect developers to see the demand for gaming-based web services expand exponentially with the introduction of HTML5 on mobile and the freedom for web-based applications that this creates."

According to Watson, the majority of US consumers aged 18-34 said that provisions for either mobile entertainment and gaming (42 per cent) or social networking (55 per cent) would encourage them to use the mobile web more regularly. The trend was repeated in the UK, where 55 per cent said that social networking would encourage them to use the mobile web more, while 17 per cent were keen to access games on their mobiles. Article