In case you haven’t read the news or ventured out of your house this year, guess what. The mobile web is here. And it’s coming on strong. Very strong!

If the 1950’s were about mainframe computing, the 60’s about mini computing, the 80’s about desktop computing, the 90’s about personal Internet computing, then we are now heading into an era of mobile Internet computing. In contrast to the mainframe or even the PC, the number of devices supporting mobile Internet computing is just staggering. The support includes cellphones, PDAs, smartphones, Kindle and other eBook readers, car electronics (GPS, etc.), games, wireless home appliances, and more.

Mobile Internet adoption is far outpacing its predecessors. According to Mary Meeker, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, the iPhone and iTouch have reached an adoption rate 8X that of AOL after its launch. More than 2 billion iPhone apps have been downloaded to date. Expect the pace of app development and app usage to increase in the coming year.

In the industrialized world there are more mobile phone subscriptions than people. (Think about that!) At 1.6 billion subscriptions, there are 1.3 mobile phone subscriptions for every person in the industrialized world. And in the developing world? Believe it or not, there are already over 3 billion mobile phone subscriptions!

What more needs to be said? If you want to be ahead of the curve in 2010, get mobile. What does this mean for your small business website?

• Make absolutely sure that your website is viewable and usable on an iPhone.
• Make sure it works on other mobile devices as well.
• Explore mobile site options such as m.domainname.com or domainname.mobi. These should be streamlined, slimmed-down, large icon implementations of your website.
• Expect mobile Internet usage to increase. For certain populations like the US Hispanic population, expect more people to rely on their smartphone as their main computer. Start developing for the platform.
• If you have a product or service that could help people in emerging global markets, get mobile. Fast.
• And for testing purposes of your site, purchase a few different mobile devices. If that’s too expensive for your business, at the very least check your site on a number of your friends’ and colleagues’ devices.
• Explore the development of apps. There are already more than 85,000 apps for the iPhone. What unique, value-add app could your business provide to your prospective customers?

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Check out our latest blog posts on StartupNation.com, a site devoted to helping entrepreneurs, startups and small business owners build business and achieve success.

Our four most recent posts cover a range of website topics — from innovation to blog ideas to content strategies to conversion rate optimization:

Using Your Website as an Innovation Platform
(Your website is the perfect platform for driving innovation for your business. Learn how.)

Endless Ideas for Your Blog
(Never run out of ideas for your upcoming blog posts with these idea-generation techniques.)

5 Content Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Website
(If you create any type of content, follow these strategies to get more prospective customers to your website.)

Why You Need to be Obsessed with Your Conversion Rate
(Three important reasons why you need to be deliriously obsessed about your conversion rate in order to maximize your website results.)

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Google Wave was released to a select number of individuals on September 30th, and the buzz is overflowing. But what exactly is Google Wave, you ask? It’s something new, and it’s out to change the way we think and use email as we know it today.

Google Wave is a real-time communication and collaboration platform on the web. It’s an amalgamation of email, wikis, chat, social media, social networking and project management. It contains email, documents, images, videos, maps and more.Think of it as social email.

A few of the major features of Google Wave include:

• It’s real-time. You can see what others are typing as they type.
• It’s open source. Any code developer can add to the innovations.
• It’s on the move. You can embed a wave in your blog or website.
• It’s like a wiki. Anyone can edit any other person’s contributions.
• It’s playback, playback, playback. Anything can be played again, so that you don’t miss a beat of the conversation.

The bottom line is that Google Wave is for communication and collaboration. Think of any group or team environment, and you can probably imagine how Google Wave could be used to enhance planning, project management and getting things done. Think teams at work, or the local PTA or customer support. There’s really no limit.

There have been a wealth of articles and resources posted online in the past few days to help you understand Google Wave more clearly and make better use of the technology.

Want to know all about it? Want to know how it’s different and why it matters?

To that end, check out the list of resources below, all to help you leverage Google Wave for your business and your personal life. That is, as soon as you can get your hands on it. As mentioned, Google released the application to a select number of individuals for beta testing, and because it works better when multiple people in a group share information and data within the environment Google allowed those users to invite others to join. Look for Google to open access to Google Wave to everyone in the future. Stay tuned!

For now, enjoy the Google Wave resources below:

Google Wave Resources

• Google Wave Home Page
• About Google Wave (Google)
• Request an Invitation from Google
• Google Wave Screens and Video
• Google Wave Developer Blog
• How To: Get Started with Google Wave
• Mashable’s Google Wave Guide
• Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web
• Google Wave Starts Rolling: Picks Up Over 100,000 New Riders
• Will Google’s Wave Replace Email – And Facebook

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Looking at trends for the rest of 2009, here are three Website Design Trends to help you increase your site conversion rates.

Horizontal Navigation

Ever since iTunes introduced its scrolling horizontal carousels and horizontal, flipping album cover navigation (e.g., their movies, TV shows and music videos pages), horizontal navigation has caught fire.

You can now see horizontal navigation in various modes and presentation styles on a wide range of websites. In addition to iTunes, examples include:

* StellaMcCartney.com

* FedEx.com

* Pepsi.com

The Stella McCartney site is notable in that it integrates video into the horizontal navigation. The FedEx site is notable in that it provides a circular carousel. The Pepsi site is notable in that the horizontal navigation ties together the brand’s family of websites.

Focus on Forms

The bottom line is that if you improve your online forms, you will improve your conversion rates. With this type of direct ROI in mind, expect to see a great deal of focus on form design, layout and conversion techniques this year.

Website Marketing NOW recently wrote about the top 10 tips for improving online form results in “Do Your Online Forms Need a Facelift?“.

The book Web Design for ROI has an entire section devoted solely to online forms. Expect much more coverage of online forms this year.

High Quality Photography

Check out online retailers, and a major trend you will find is their focus on amazing photography. Not only do we now get to see more photos for a single product than ever before, we also get to zoom in and out, turn products around and see multi-angle shots. In certain sites we get to change the color of the products we are viewing with the click of a mouse.

Check out the Martin + Osa website. There, you can see photos not only of the clothing you are interested in, but also of even the stitching and buttons of the apparel. The trend toward this level of quality and granularity is only going to intensify.

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Identifying trends early can help you develop products and services ahead of the competition, empowering you to capture more customers. By staying on top of emerging ideas, you can stimulate your creativity and achieve breakthrough thinking.

Make it a priority in 2009 to spot the trends on which your company can capitalize in growing your business.

Trends take many shapes and sizes. There are market trends, marketing trends, demographic trends, consumer trends, product trends, online trends and many other kinds of trends as well.

So how do you stay ahead of the curve?

Here are 11 sites for you to leverage in methodically generating insights into the future, and in translating such insights into new products and services that build your business:

Trends

* TrendWatching.com

* TrendsSpotting

* Springwise

* Springwise – Marketing & Advertising

* Trend Hunter

Small Business Trends

* Small Business Trends

* Small Business Labs

Search Engine Trends

* Yahoo! Buzz

* Google Trends

Market & Marketing Trends

* eMarketer

* Marketing Charts

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Looking to get a faster return on your website innovations and upgrades?

Try the following:

* Test Using Google AdWords & Website Optimizer
It is relatively easy to setup A/B split tests using Google AdWords to confirm which variations of your web pages work best. For more advanced multivariate testing of web pages, in which you can concurrently test multiple elements on the same web page, try Google’s Website Optimizer. Actively monitor what your target customers like and what they don’t like.

* Prototype Quickly
Keep your innovative new ideas big, but prototype quickly. Test prototypes that may not encompass 100% of your ultimate vision, but that will give you insight into your customers’ interests and preferences.

* Leverage Web Analytics
With any upgrades to your site, actively monitor and analyze the behavioral patterns of your site visitors. Your web analytics data is a potential goldmine of information about your customers. Remember, though, that the important thing here is to act on the data. Looking at the data without any corresponding changes to your website is a lost opportunity for potential business growth.

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In our recent post "Harvesting Ideas Online to Solve Tough Problems," we touched upon the value of crowdsourcing as a mechanism for generating ideas and solving problems for your business.

In the same spirit, we would like to introduce Passenger, an on-demand, online customer collaboration tool. The solution includes the collaboration platform in combination with client service/support. As Passenger is a software as a service (SaaS) model, there’s no need for any IT integration, downloads or add-ons. Simply log on through your web browser.

Passenger can be used to inject the voice of your customer into your product/service development, and more specifically, the company suggests the following potential uses of its collaboration solution:

Market & Customer Insight

* Monitor shifts in perspective
* Identify current and emerging needs
* Discover counter-intuitive opportunities

Customer-Driven Innovation

* Deliver what customers need
* Identify and refine the most salient ideas
* Extend existing strengths and capabilities

Brand Advocacy

* Empower key customers through participation in the process
* Fuel passion for your brand

Website Marketing NOW is a major advocate of customer collaboration to drive your small business forward. Passenger is just one more potential tool for your arsenal to engage with your customers and to leverage their insights in driving innovation for your business growth.

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Barack Obama has the unprecedented opportunity to leverage the Web in solving the US’s major challenges and in strengthening the country. Through the online medium, Obama has the opportunity to tap into a resource filled with millions of curious and thinking minds — the American population.

And he has started to achieve this through the creation of Change.gov, a website that offers the American people an opportunity to share their visions, ideas and suggestions. To register, go to http://www.change.gov/page/s/yourvision.

After the recent presidential election, Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research commented on his blog that just as Obama expertly connected with real people through websites such as my.barackobama.com, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube during his campaign, he has a similar opportunity to energize people and leverage their passion in solving today’s incredibly difficult challenges as a component of his presidency.

The solution?

The crowdsourcing of ideas.

After the election Bernoff wrote in his blog, "Barack Obama faces perhaps the most complex set of problems to face a president in the last fifty years, from terrorism to a teetering economy to a deficit that scares the crap of out me for my children’s future. He has the power to inspire people behind the solutions he may come up with. He’s clearly intelligent. But does he have the humility to gather those solutions from the popular groundswell that elected him?"

Bernoff continued, "I call on president-elect Obama to create a community of committed Americans to discuss the solutions to the problems that face us. I call on him to designate a US Community Manager, with a small staff, to moderate and harvest those discussions to solve the country’s problems. Forget polls. With a few million people in my.america.gov, Obama will be able to tap into the world’s largest focus group. Communities are cheap, compared to most of what the government does. Create a space for the brightest people you know; use them to attract the best ideas. And better yet, use this energized community to sell those ideas to America."

What a fantastic idea. It’s an idea that companies are already tapping into through crowdsourcing. Starbucks looks to improve its store experience by tapping into the insights of its customers at MyStarbucksIdea.com. Dell taps its customers’ insights at IdeaStorm.com. Crowdsourcing platforms like Kluster put innovation in the hands of the crowd for just about any company, regardless of size. The overarching idea is to tap into the power of the people to help solve problems and create positive change.

Of course it would be silly to think that Obama could rely exclusively on this type of input. However, by leveraging crowdsourcing he is going to gain insights from intelligent people around the country on an ongoing basis throughout his presidency. It’s difficult enough for a president to hear the true voices of the American people. This is one way that he will stay connected with real people, and see things from an endless variety of perspectives.

As Bernoff points out in a later blog entry, the change.gov website is a good start. However, it’s not yet a transparent social model, in that previously submitted ideas are not shared among site visitors and therefore are obviously not voted on among participants. Taking it to that level of community would certainly be the next step in the process. By empowering people to vote on all ideas submitted, the Obama team will be able to quickly and efficiently see ideas that resonate with great numbers of the American populace, ideas that they may not have come across in the sometimes insular world of Washington D.C.

How about your company?

There’s nothing stopping you, as well, from taking this approach. Regardless if you are a 100 person firm with a long history or a solo entrepreneur in a home-based startup, you can extend your brainpower, problem-solving capabilities as well as ability to capitalize on new opportunities by building your team exponentially through crowdsourcing.

Why not try it today? Go to a crowdsourcing site such as kluster and start a brainstorm around a single idea. See what happens. By starting small, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain if the test is successful. And then all of a sudden, you are no longer a company limited by the number of employees on your payroll. Instead, you have transformed your company into a creativity lab filled with hundreds, thousands or even millions of ideas.

Not bad for any small company looking to drive revenue growth and beat larger competitors.

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Looking to jumpstart your small business? Inject some innovation into what you do and what you offer your customers. Here are three ways to get you started in injecting new, fresh life into your small business:

Think!

Stop! Stop what you are doing right now, put all your paperwork away, and take a full day to brainstorm ideas for your business. Brainstorm new products and services. Brainstorm ways to help your customers better. Brainstorm ways to become more efficient. When was the last time you spent a good 8 – 10 hours just on quality thinking time for your business?

Become Your Customer

Spend a day as your customer. Literally, take the time to put yourself into your customer’s shoes and see life from this alternative perspective. As you move through the day, what objectives arise? What challenges arise? What surprises arise? What is it that becomes critical to your day, in order to make it successful?

Solve Problems

Spend a full hour outlining every potential frustration and problem that your customers face. Go through the entire process that your customers progress through in getting their work done. Break up the process into individual components. Identify frustrations with each component. Figure out better ways to get tasks done at each component level.

Further reading to keep your mind innovative and creative:

–Lateral Action

–Creative Think

–Fast Company * Innovation

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MayMyFitness, LLC has launched a suite of cool and useful websites for the fitness crowd. The sites include:

–MapMyFitness.com

–MapMyRun.com

–MapMyWalk.com

–MapMyHike.com

–MapMyTri.com

The websites essentially merge mapping with community for runners, riders, hikers, walkers and triathletes. The site helps the site visitor to create, publish and share routes (running routes, for example), find routes others have created, and track your training, including pace and calories burned.

You can join local groups and online groups, participate in online forums, share photos and check out upcoming events. There are a number of interactive tools, including a training plan generator and a high blood pressure health risk calculator.

The MapMyFitness suite of sites is yet one more example in a recent trend towards personalization, discussed in the recent post Website Trends: Personalization.

Leveraging learnings from the MapMyFitness suite of sites and looking at your own website, how can you empower your customers with personalization tools and community?

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