There’s an interesting trend happening here. On one hand, cloud computing allows organizations to rapidly scale up and scale down. This not only allows companies to better handle peak processing loads, it also allows entrepreneurs to more cheaply take a chance on new ventures, such as social networking sites, which may or may not reach critical mass and be successful.

At the same time, mobile devices are becoming more powerful and fun to use.

As a result of these trends, the new mobile devices coming into the market will be lighter weight and more niche targeted. The Microsoft KIN was actually an interesting example of this, even though it was cancelled. It offered data storage in the cloud and was targeted at teens. So there are the scalability and social networking aspects right there. We’re going to see more of that kind of specialization: the opportunity for marrying social networking with mobile computing has not yet been realized, to say the least.

The increased processing power of the newer mobile devices will be dedicated to complex graphics, interactive games, and streaming video. Again, while the scale up/scale down feature of cloud computing will be harnessed by start-ups to create new social networks, users will interact with those networks by way of sexy, powerful, custom applications running on their next-generation mobile devices.

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