Mark Bridge writes:

At this time of year it’s something of a tradition – certainly within the mobile industry – to make predictions for the year ahead. It’s a trend we’ve followed with The Fonecast… and we’ve done reasonably well over the last few years.

We’ll be making this year’s predictions for 2010 in our programme on 23rd December. Ahead of that, I’ve been listening to our last show of 2008 to see what we thought 2009 would hold for us.

James said he expected mobile payment trials to become more public and more widespread in 2009 ahead of commercial launches in 2010. That’s certainly happened here in the UK as well as abroad. We’ve seen Square launch in the USA, investment in mobile money from Nokia and the world’s first commercial NFC mobile payment system in Malaysia. In the UK we heard about a partnership between Orange & Barclaycard and saw O2 launch the O2 Money debit card.

I decided not to choose the commercial launch of femtocells – a pity, because Vodafone’s Access Gateway arrived in July – and instead went for the safer option of location-based services becoming one of 2009’s biggest growth areas.

Sure enough, Google launched its Latitude location-sharing service, GyPSii introduced real-time location sharing on social networks, Twitter introduced the option of geo-located ‘tweets’ and the location-specific advertising returned to the headlines through O2 and Vodafone.

But it’s Iain who really hit the jackpot this year. He predicted a year of consolidation – and, my goodness, we’ve seen plenty of that. Orange and T-Mobile was the biggest news for the UK, although we also had The Carphone Warehouse taking over Tiscali, Google buying AdMob plus assorted purchases by Nokia, 2ergo and many others.

So – our 2009 predictions turned out well. (Rather better than 2008, to be honest!)  Now it’s time for us to start thinking about 2010…