Bangalore: Chetan Sharma, founder of Chetan Sharma Consulting, is a renowned analyst who provides a thorough annual investigation into the trends that shape the future of technology. This year, he interviewed professionals in the mobile industry to forecast the mobile trends that would shape 2012 and impact the years to come later.

ReadWriteMobile, a channel of ReadWriteWeb that is dedicated to allowing its users better understand business and technical implications of developing mobile applications, came up with a number of graphs that represented the statistics predicted by Chetan’s survey.

The rise and domination of Android over other mobile platforms was ranked first as the most newsworthy mobile story of 2011, followed by Steve Jobs’ death at second place, and Amazon’s Kindle Fire at the third place. Intellectual property battles and other categories such as regulatory tussles took up the next positions on the list.

Google ranked as the most open player in the mobile market with respect to the second query, with just a little under 70 percent of the survey’s participants voting for it. One notable aspect is that none of the other players on the list, (which included Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, the carriers, OEMs and Amazon) got more than 10 percent of the votes. Another thing to be noted is that users of Google’s Android platform, are not free to do what they want with it unless they are developers.

The breakthrough category for 2012 was topped by Mobile payments that raked in almost 60 percent of the votes. Mobile Commerce ranked next bagging 40 percent of votes, though with a huge difference between the first and second rankers. The fields of mobile health, and mobile enterprises closely followed mobile commerce.  
Moreover, the survey predicted that mobile payment sector would be most used by the financial sector. The other competitors in this space consisted of cellular operators, Google, and startups, but none of them got more than 20 percent of the votes.

Mobile insiders, according to the survey, expect Microsoft to make the biggest mobile acquisition of the year, by either taking Nokia or RIM. Google, having made news with its acquisitions in the past, comes second, followed by operators and other players such as Amazon.

27 percent of the people who took the survey expect Enterprise solutions to help the cloud on mobile gain importance. Media and Storage come second, each with 20 percent of the votes, and Apps won 19 percent. The rest of the votes went to games and data processing (5 and 9 percent respectively).

Mobile web and cloud computing is expected to become more relevant than apps by around 40 percent of the respondents.

Although all of the answers in the survey predicted potential facts, the most surprising entry was Angry Birds being the third most influential mobile person of the year, after Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO).

One can expect Chetan’s survey to be accurate in its predictions, according to ReadWriteMobile. This would mean we can expect to hear more of mobile Web and cloud, and tussles amongst the big fries in a quest to dominate the market, while the rest of the players turn out to be parts of the food chain.