Living in a mobile world

August 15th, 2004

During much of the 1990s mobile phones were gadgets for techno-geeks. It was only at the end of the decade that the number of mobile phones started to accelerate past all others. But any annual statistics are reported in the following year. Thus until the Spring of 2004, you could not find stats on mobile phone usage that were more current than those from 2002. And up to that year all radically new mobile phone innovations appeared in remote countries like Finland, Korea and the Philippines. It is no wonder you were never told of this revolution.
The numbers for mobile have suddenly passed all "sanity checks". For 100 years the only gadget man would carry every day was the wristwatch. Not only has the mobile phone succeeded to repeat that globally, but now younger users in advanced countries are abandoning the wristwatch in favour of the mobile phone.

The growth of SMS text messaging is breathtaking with 1.5 billion SMS messages sent globally every day. To put it in context, after you remove spam, there are about 15 billion e-mail messages sent every day around the world. Think about that for a moment. E-mail has been around for over 30 years and
all of e-mail is free. SMS has been around of 12 years and each text message costs on average 12 cents (8 pence). What is more, most of SMS users have access to e-mail, yet they choose to send short messages from their mobile phones.
Of course you, as CEO, encounter "disruptive" technologies in every issue of Business Week, the Economist etc. How can you decipher Wi-Fi from I-Pod from TiVo, etc. Let me put the emerging technologies into perspective. Blackberry is an exciting wireless e-mail solution. It has less than 1.3 million users worldwide. The i-Pod just passed 2 million users. Personal Digital Recorders like TiVo total about 3.5 million. While Wi-Fi (aka W-LAN, aka 802.11) has about 60 million deployed devices, most of those never leave the home, office or campus. Only 3 million Wi-Fi users take their laptops and PDAs to hotspots like Starbucks or a hotel. Talking about PDAs, there are 60 million of them.

IM Instant Messaging has 140 million users. Notebook PCs number about 150 million. Total PC population of notebooks and desktops is 600 million globally. Now contrast them with the dominant digital device. Worldwide there are 1.4 Billion mobile phones and over 500 million new ones are sold every year. One in seven humans on the planet can be reached by SMS, in fact every economically viable person in the Western World can be contacted via SMS – but only about half of that population has access to the internet.
Many digital delivery solutions are significant, PDAs, I-Pods, PDCs, Blackberrys, notebook PCs etc., But only one statistic is seismic, and that is the population of mobile phones. At 1.4 billion users, this is your digital platform. You have to understand it to survive in the world where it dominates.
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