Guest columnist Jos White identifies one of European technology’s sweet spots

This is a guest column in the Telegraph’s Tech Start-Up 100 debate series. The Start-Up 100 is supported by Orrick, Silicon Valley Bank and Microsoft BizSpark.

One of the biggest shifts in the last year or so – and something we’ll undoubtedly see more of in 2011 and beyond – is the rise of mobile internet. If CES is anything to go by, smartphones and tablet devices are going to continue sweeping across the market at a terrific pace: starting with consumers, but soon reaching into business, education and government. This huge growth in the market will be further accelerated in 2011 by smartphone prices coming down significantly, by ever-improving mobile networks and by increasingly ubiquitous and free WiFi networks. Research suggest smartphones sales will exceed half a billion during that year, overtaking PC sales for the first time.

European companies have some big advantages over their American counterparts because of the natural head start they have had. Mobile adoption came much faster and much more rapidly in Europe, spurred on in part by the innovations enabled by GSM networks that weren’t available in the US. As a result, our mobile market has matured faster than America’s has. There’s a whole generation of consumers coming through who expect their first point of contact to be through a mobile device.

Europe is producing some very strong online services – think Groupspaces, Huddle, Spotify, Skype, Tradeshift and LOVEFILM – that have a large and growing user base. The next step for them is to truly unlock the power of their service across mobile platforms. The question these companies need to be asking themselves now is not ‘when can we do this?’, but ‘how quickly can we do this and how can we make it an even better experience than it is on a PC?’ That will be of the key challenges that defines 2011 for almost every web-based business.

The businesses that get ahead will be those that take full advantage of mobile, delivering a quality service that exploits the unique characteristics of the platform, in a way that consumers really love – rather than providing something people can put up with until they get back to a PC.

I have a few predictions for 2011 and it struck me that the main theme is a more mobile and more social internet. It used to be that you needed a number of things to have a good internet experience – namely a PC, a broadband connection and a web browser (preferably Explorer). But now with the growth of new smartphone and tablet devices, much improved 3G/4G mobile networks and the amazing array of apps available you don’t need any of these things and truly have the internet everywhere. It’s amazing how quickly the PC/Microsoft/Intel stranglehold on our IT lives has loosened and I think this is good for us, the consumers, as there is now greater competition and more choice than ever before.

With the meteoric rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, who now have over 500M and 100M users respectively, we are now able to find, filter and share content and connections within self-selected networks of people, making the internet a more personal and relevant experience. Increasingly, our on-line experiences are defined first through our social networks and second through the internet itself.

Now more than a third of people are accessing their Facebook and Twitter pages via their mobiles and that’s what gets you to the convergence of a more mobile and social internet that I believe will be the big theme for 2011.

Here are my top 5 predictions:

Smartphone and tablet explosion
2011 will be the year that smartphones and tablets become truly mainstream products and, at the same time, an increasingly important means of accessing the internet which truly rivals the PC. Any internet service that is not optimized for smartphones and tablets will start to struggle in the face of this megatrend.

Social Networking for business
During 2011 business will move from experimenting with social networking to making it an integrated part of their marketing, communications and customer services efforts. This will mean more dedicated resources and budgets being devoted to social media, principally Facebook and Twitter. There are already nearly 100,000 corporate pages on Facebook with more than 5000 fans and this number is thought to be growing by at least 15% a month making it the fastest growing part of the Facebook machine.