services

Most successful companies on the web today from Amazon to Dropbox to Google to Twitter expose some kind of API to their users to write their own applications and interact with their application programmatically. They expose an even deeper API for their internal teams.

Even Dries recognizes the importance of being able to output data in different formats and now Drupal has an awesome
Web Services and Context Core Initiative

Mobile web consumption is on the rise.

In 2010, global mobile data traffic tripled for the third year in a row. Between 2010 and 2015 Cisco predicts that there will be approximately 7.1 billion mobile devices connected to the web (roughly one per person on this planet)
Cisco

By 2014, mobile internet usage is expected to overtake desktop internet usage.