As dawn breaks on 2008 it’s a good time to think back over the past year, reflect on what has, hasn’t and might have been, and tally up the hits and misses of the predictions I made at the beginning of 2007 (which you can read here). Feel free to disagree with me—most of the predictions are subjective, and this is a self-scored test…

Mobile broadcast TV did launch in a number of markets in 2007, even if there were few follow-on stories about how successful it had gone. According to DVB-H.org there are 8 commercial DVB-H networks in operation, which outstrips all the other formats. However, MediaFLO did not get a launch outside the United States, although it did line up a few trials.
Result: Accurate

Thanks to AT&T pushing back the launch of its MediaFLO service into 2008 the service only had one launch with large carriers. Modeo didn’t get a launch with a large carrier, spoke about offering services and then finally collapsed. And as I predicted, the prices were set pretty high.
Result: Accurate

My third prediction is a little hard to score: “Full track downloads to mobile will take off…and never be seen again.” How do you rate that? There have been more full-track services launched, none have really set the world on fire. Admittedly, the bigger brand ones (like Nokia’s effort and Sony Ericsson’s effort) haven’t really had time to get going, and I definitely missed the move of handset manufacturers into the market. The second part, that the ringtone market will fall, has definitely come true—only a couple of days ago there was yet another story about it.
Result: Semi-Accurate

Whether Apple sold enough iPhones to “avoid being considered a failure, but not enough to be a runaway success” is a matter of opinion, I suppose, but by the end of its financial year it had sold roughly 1.67 million. Respectable.
Result: Accurate

The number of mobile social networks did increase in 2007, but not by nearly as much as I expected. While there are some that can definitely be termed successful, there’s no real equivalent to MySpace and Facebook out there.
Result: Semi-Inaccurate

I then predicted that someone would figure out a location-based service that would gain wide adoption—that didn’t happen. Some services have done pretty well for themselves, especially navigation services, but none have really moved out of the niche market.
Result: Inaccurate

My next prediction was so true it isn’t funny: “Mobile advertising will continue to be in the news and large numbers will continue to be thrown about, although there will be disagreement over whether that’s hype or not.” That’s exactly what happened, and people still don’t agree as to whether mobile advertising/marketing “took off” in 2007.
Result: Accurate

Mobile games continued to grow steadily and continued to get largely ignored in the media for other forms of content, bearing out my prediction on this. The biggest news bits were about ad-funded mobile game services.
Result: Accurate

I went on to predict that more and more companies would release “digital” products and services without differentiating between online and mobile. The improvement of the mobile web certainly helped this, and although I don’t have any firm figures anecdotal evidence from myself indicates an increasing number of times when it is hard to work out if something is “mobile content” or not.
Result: Accurate

Finally, I predicted that Chinese authorities would say they would issue 3G licenses, but wouldn’t. Bingo.
Result: Accurate

Related Stories

• The Official MocoNews Predictions For 2007
• 2006: A Look-Back At My Predictions
• 2005: The Predictions That Were And Weren’t