Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users

THE CAR AT 800 M

The car. Worldwide there are about 800 million registered automobiles. About a hundred years old, this innovation (the gasoline powered car is a vast improvement over its predecessor the steam-powered car) has literally altered landscapes, the way we work and live, and introduced countless huge support industries from the tyre manufacturers to petrol stations to the motel industry to service and repair garages etc.

Movies and TV have idolized the car from muscle cars anywhere from Bullitt to Starsky and Hutch and James Bond's Astons to the cheap cars such as Herbie the Luv Bug (the Beetle) and the Italian Job (Mini). For several generations a car was the ultimate aspirational gadget, what young adults would use to define their identity. It is very rare for a given person to have two or more cars (in active use) - with Hollywood and the ultrarich being the obvious exceptions. Yes, families can have more than one car, but then typically one is the father's car, the other is mother's car, etc. Note that the car also has a lot of vanity features and customization to reflect each personality starting with the vanity license plates.

TELEPHONE 1.3 B

The telephone. And I'm now only talking about the fixed landline, traditional phone. The first home phone connections were sold as serious alert services, such as fire alarms for the wealthy. The original concept of the phone never included an idea that people would use that device for idle chat. Today there are 1.3 billion fixed landline phones in the world. The telephone touched all parts of life, changing just about all of it, from teenagers flirting on the phone, to families connecting to relatives far away, to businesses employing secretaries for busy bosses, to answer their phones.

Gradually phones became customer service tools, so whole traditional commercial areas were drastically altered - going to the bank, now you call them up. Or buying airline tickets, now you call a calling centre. Need to rent a hotel room, car, call up the toll-free phone number. All these were activites we used to have to do in person, in the nearby bank office, or travel agent, etc.

TV 1.5 B

The TV. Invented before the war, but introduced to the mass market in the 1950s, today there are about 1.5 billion TV sets in use in the world. TV changed our home. The living room of today is set around the TV set, and comfortable TV chairs - or suitable reclining parts to couches/sofas are the norm in many a home. The TV transformed the mass media industries soon taking the lead of it, today dominating the media landscape, perhaps nowhere as clearly as the advent of MTV and music video was to music on radio. New industries were born from TV production houses to video rental firms to the whole 35 billion dollar videogaming industry. Old industries transformed like the advertising industry which today is almost driven by the ad spend of given TV campaigns, with the other media almost as optional extras, at least for major acounts.

TV brought aspirations as well, older generations hoped to become TV announcers or presenters at game shows etc. Young generations of today hope to become famous by being on a reality TV show. Originally TVs were intended as family devices, but today it is quite common for a young single person to have two TV sets or more (eg one in the living room, another in the bedroom), so in the industrialized world there are a growing part of the population where TV ownership exceeds given segments of the human population; I believe that shortly (if it hasn't happened already) the USA will become the first country where the absolute count of TV sets in use exceeds the per-capita population.

Televisions at 1.5 billion. Thats a big number. What we also need to understand, is that TV is often shared, especially in Asia where families are also large. So you might easily have 6 or even 10 watching the same TV show. The reach of TV is much beyond the 1.5 billion sets in use.

CREDIT CARDS 1.4 B

Credit cards came along in mostly in the 1970s. Today 1.4 billion people carry at least one card. A dramatic innovation in the use of money, there now are many forecasters in the financial world who suggest there will come a time when traditional cash will disappear totally. Credit cards changed human consumption. Now we don't have to wait to our paycheck on Friday to spend - or have to save several months to be able to afford a new plasma screen TV. We can charge it, and pay it off in installments on our credit card. Plastic money has changed so much of commercial transactions that many businesses now require it. Try renting a car or booking a hotel room with cash only.

There are some aspirational dimensions to the credit card, as for the young it is a kind of right of passage - most countries it is illegal for under 18 year olds to have credit cards - and American Express (with its Gold and Platinum etc cards) has pushed these aspirations further. There are then the affinity cards from Manchester United and NY Yankees onto the World Wildlife Foundation. Typical users of credit cards tend to have a few, so if you get one (and use it), very soon you apply for another one and may have Visa, MasterCard and American Express all, plus maybe a couple of specialist cards like one for the petrol station or your favourite department store, etc.

PC 850 M

The personal computer turned from a garage geek's gadget into a mass market device with Apple, about 1980. A lot of computers have been sold, but they also become obsolete very fast - the typical replacement cycle is now three and a half years. So the actual installed base of personal computers in use is well under the famous "billion users of the internet", at about 850 million PCs (because some of the billion internet users access via mobile phone, PDA, or via a cybercafe or campus computer at the university etc). Perhaps surprisingly to many reading our blog, the majority of those are still desktop PCs, it was only last year that worldwide more laptops were sold than desktop PCs worldwide. Still, 850 million PCs. A big number, sure, just passing past the amount of automobiles last year, but still far from say fixed landline telephones.

With the desktop PC while there is the ability for a lot of customization, there is not much identification or affinity to it; with laptops its the opposite. Not perhaps much we can really do to customize the internal (hardware) configuration of the laptop, but often - especially for younger users - the covers of the laptop get plastered with stickers etc. Ferrari even has some laptops authorized to its red colour schemes etc. Very many PC users have more than one PC, but that is because the older ones are obsolete, we tend to use only one, unless one is a work (employer) computer and the other is our personal home computer.

INTERNET 1.1 B

And while the Arpanet was developed by the US military for decades, the internet emerged into the mainstream in 1994 when it was on the covers of Business Week and Time. Very rapid growth resulted and today 1.1 billion people around the world access the internet. The internet "changed everything" according to the mantra, and truly its reach is enormous from investment banking to retail to travel to education to farms and forestry management (forest managers in Finland track every individual tree for example).

You might be tempted to think those access via a personal computer, yet already in China, Japan and South Korea the majority of internet access is via mobile phone. In total over 750 million people access internet content via a mobile phone today - most of those also have a personal computer, obviously - and yes, still today, most of these people put more of their traffic to the web via their PC than their phone, although this is changing fast. And still today, slightly more, about the total PC population or about 850 million people, access the web via a computer.

During 2007 the first cross-over will happen, with more users accessing via phone than PC. Fascinating data coming on that usage as well, the Japanese regulator reports that those who access the web via mobile phone do so more frequently than those who access via a PC. Similar data now coming from several converged (broadband and mobile phone) web services like Flirtomatic in the UK. Its no wonder Google's new CEO Eric Schmidt, says the future of the internet is mobile.

THE MINNOWS, PDA, PS2, iPOD, TiVo, DIGICAM

Then lets mention the minnows. There is a wide range of recent gadgets that are very popular with the press, but are actually minnows in the big pond of life. I am talking about the PDA, Playstation and other gaming consoles, the iPod, the TiVo box (PVR ie Sky+ box), the digital camera, and the camcorder. Adding all of these populations together will not reach a billion, so these really are small potatoes. Yes, these are fascinating, but they are trivial to the big picture in life. They do not support whole industries and while their users can be fanatical about them (the uncle who videotapes everything, or the gaming teenager).

Lets understand their scale. The total shipped PDA population is about 85 million, most which are replacements. iPod is reaching 85 million shipped (and many, probably not the majority) going as replacements so the installed base is smaller. PVRs are now appearing on many high-end DVD recorders and in digital TV boxes, but still total PVR shipments don't break 100 million. The same is true of camcorders, under 100 million total shipped (many as replacements). Gaming consoles have shipped near 200 million units, out of which 150 million are second generation (PS2/Xbox) or newer. The (stand-alone) digital camera has achieved shipments of near 300 million, quite impressive but not in the billion unit (or near) volumes of the big technologies in this blog and yes, those too, in many cases are replacements of earlier digital cameras so the total user population is much less than 300 million.

THE GOLIATH, MOBILE PHONES 2.7 B

Now we have context. 800 million cars, 850 million personal computers, 1.3 B fixed landline phones, 1.4 billion credit cards, 1.5 billion TV sets. How many mobile phones in use today? In use today, yes, 2.7 billion (technically 2.7 billion in January, not December). They sold 950 million phones last year and the total worldwide mobile subscriber base grew from 2.1 billion to 2.7 billion. Three times as many mobile phones as automobiles or personal computers. About twice as many mobile phone owners as those of fixed landline phones or credit cards. And almost twice as many mobile phones in use as TV sets.

Phones are very aspirational. We project our personalities via the interchangeable covers, various decorations, stickers, and the massive industry of ringing tones. We customize our phone services further with ringback (waiting) tones, welcoming tones and background tones. Young people assign the same kinds of value to their emerging personality, their own perceived coolness etc, through their mobile phone, like older generations did with their first car.

Phones are replaced every 18 months (and this is still shrinking). America, USA and Canada are dead last in the industrialized world, with much of the developing world passing them in phone penetration, yet even USA reached 75% penetration. That is per capita, not per household penetration as used for fixed landlines and TV sets for example. And yes, per capita means counting all babies and deaf great-grandparents, not only the adult population. The Western European average per capita penetration is already 110%, leading countries like Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Israel have penetration rates at about 140% (yes this is per capita). And yes, over 100% penetration rate means that some in the population have more than one phone (and are charged for using both/all)

In the industrialized world, everybody who can talk and knows numbers, and can still hear and remember numbers - has a mobile phone. A recent story from Los Angeles tells us that a homeless person was accidentially dumped into a garbage truck, and faced being crushed. He used his cellphone - I kid you not - to call the emergency number and was rescued. When the homeless carry this technology, everybody has it.

And the non-industrialized world? Catching up really fast. China adds 6 million phones every month, India adds 7 million phones every month. Bear in mind that the total phone population in countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark and Portugal - each countries with 120% or more penetration rates - is less than 6 million units total. China and India both add that amount every month.

Africa is in a hurry to increase phone penetration after the OECD study found that increasing mobile phone penetration results in the greatest benefit to the GDP of an emerging country. Better benefit than providing computers, electricity, roads etc. You don't need a literate population to have benefits from phones, but you do need literacy for personal computers. You can use phones without electricity as the many hand-cranked battery rechargers in use in Afghanistan for example will testify.

CONTRAST THEM TO THE PHONE

But wait. The phone can't actually transport us like a car can (although all car owners around the world now have a phone in the car with them as they drive) but consider all of the other technologies mentioned. Computers? The phone is a small computer. Nokia has started to call its top-end N-Series smartphones as mobile computers, not mobile phones. In fact a typical high-end smartphone can match the performance of mid-range laptop computer only five years ago. 

Internet. I already mentioned that already three countries have seen the tipping point, more people now access the web via mobile phone than via PC in China, Japan and South Korea - and obviously all internet content in those countries is formated for the small screen rather than the PC screen. This is an inevitable trend and the future of the web is definitely on mobile.

MESSAGING IS BIGGEST DATA APP ON PLANET

Consider the biggest application, messaging. On the internet there are about 1.5 billion e-mail boxes, maintained by about 800 million people. But two thirds of mobile phone users are active users of SMS text messaging. Thats 1.8 billion people texting. More than twice as many people are active users of SMS as are active users of e-mail. Even Americans are catching this - proven to be addictive - service. Last year over 42% of Americans were active in SMS already. Meanwhile a British survey found that SMS is preferred over voice calls. Not among the youth, among the whole population.

Think about that for a moment, and then re-evaluate your plans to communicate via e-mail, whether you do it for commercial reasons, advertising reasons, personal communications or business contacts. E-mail is opened in 24 hours and replied to in 48 hours. SMS is read within 15 minutes on average and responded within 60 minutes. 65% of e-mail is spam, less than 10% of SMS is spam. E-mail is so last year (or last decade actually). If this seems wild to you, remember something our bosses used to swear by, called fax? Nobody communicates by fax anymore. Soon e-mail will face the same fate, an outmoded form of slow and tedious communication that reaches so few. Voicemail? Stop using it and get with the times. The Finnish Prime Minister for example has a voicemail greeting saying he doesn't listen to voicemail, send him a text message instead.

Credit cards? Many mobile operators offer full branded credit card functionality on their phones from South Korea to Norway; in South Korea five separate credit card services are available on the three mobile networks. The biggest advantage that mobile banking and credit on phones have over credit cards, is that there is no age limit to having a phone. So a youngster may be ineligible for an actual credit card, but will usually be allowed to sign up to a pay-monthly (postpay) phone account. This functions as short-term credit, if you can pay for example at McDonald's by mobile phone as you can at all McDonald's restaurants in Slovenia for example. Eat your burger today, pay for it next month when the phone bill comes in. With credit transfers between subscribers (sending money to your phone) as invented in the Philippines six years ago, young people today have their first access to consumer credit and digital money via their mobile phone.

Imagine the near future. It exists in South Korea of course. Visa in South Korea will ask its Korean customers do they want the optional free plastic card mailed to them as well; this in case the Korean credit card user expects to travel abroad where they might need the old-fashioned plastic card for credit. In South Korea almost 100% of credit card based point-of-purchase sites accept payment via mobile phone credit (and charge) cards. Thus the locals no longer carry the plastic. Oh, and your phone can replace your keys as well, in Japan they're already building apartment buildings where door locks are operated by mobile phone.

TV? Last year was the big launch of various TV broadcast services direct to mobile phones. Yes we've had streaming and video clip download TV services for mobile for five years, but the true cable TV digital set-top boxes, inbuilt into the mobile phone - as well as video quality recording (in-built TiVo or Sky+) - into the mobile phone were introduced. Again South Korea leads. Two years from launch almost 10% of South Korean phone users watch digital broadcast TV on their phones. Meanwhile TV broadcasters and producers are discovering the mobile phone and interactivity. While Pop Idol (American Idol etc) formats have typically been the top-watched TV shows from Australia to Norway, and thus commanded top dollar in advertising revenues, the Pop Idol formats have earned a windfall of over 700 million dollars out of text messaging votes.

2.7 billion users. Every one of those can be reached via SMS text messaging. Imagine the reach of your blogsite or website. You can reach a maximum of 1.1 billion people if you use the web. But using SMS, you can reach two and a half times more people. Not to mention that SMS reaches them immediately, while they might not access the web until next week.

Oh, lets not forget the minnows. PDA? All smartphones have at least basic PDA functionalities while top smartphones like the Communicator are the most expensive PDAs on the market totally thrashing lesser PDAs in their range of full ability. Gaming consoles are converging to mobile units, from the playstation side PSP and from the phone makers starting with the now-discontinued Nokia N-Gage. The world's most played videogame? Snake. iPod? Last year sold under 45 million iPods. But last year sold over 300 million musicphones. I will return to this topic when Apple release its final numbers for the Christmas season, in about a week, but yes, that battle is totally over, with musicphones outselling iPods at more than 7 to one. And yes, many many surveys find that people are using their musicphones to listen to MP3 songs and to buy music directly to their musicphones. But yes, more of that in a separate blog soon.

The TiVo box ie PVR/DVR/HDD (Personal Video Recorder/Digital Video Recorder/Hard Disk Drive videorecorder) like Sky+. First phones appeared last year in South Korea with built-in PVR functionality and now are becoming a standard feature on TV-phones. The digicam? My new Nokia N-93 has Carl Zeiss optics and optical zoom, better than many mid-range snapshot stand-alone digital cameras. In 2005 already half of all phones sold were cameraphones so cameraphones outsell digital cameras by more than 4 to 1 and for the vast majority of the planet, not their primary digital camera, not their primary camera of any type, but their only camera is their new cameraphone. Mainstream top end cameraphones now feature 3 megapixel resolutions while the top-end Samsung has a 10 megapixel resolution. And for the video camera. The amateour mass-market digicam is now the cameraphone. We see it daily, just now with Saddam Hussein's hanging, something is caught on video. Not by videocam, but on a cameraphone. For the minnows, the big shark gobbling them all up without much even trying, is the mobile phone.

WHAT OF RADIO

Tomi you skipped radio. Yes I did. There are more radios in use than there are mobile phones, although that time will come around 2008-2009 when this last champion will be also crushed. I've seen recent radio stats of anywhere from 3.2 Billion to 3.8 Billion. The problem with radios is that they "cluster" with a few users, particularly Americans and Europeans. We have dozens of radios. There is one in the HiFi at home, another in the boom box. A third in the car. A fourth in the kitchen clock. A fifth in the bedroom clock-radio. Some of our phones, walkmans, TVs etc have built-in radios. They now sell digital radios for us, many have smaller portables and many variants of still functional older versions of all of the above.

But outside of the industrialized world, radios are rare, barely more prevalent than TV sets. So in terms of the number of users, worldwide, there are less than 2 billion people who have a radio. But out of those, the 700 million Americans and Europeans then have something like three radios each on average. Very many of the radios go unused. Many of us don't listen to radio (voluntarily, so ignoring the radio that may play in the taxi cab for example). And while we may switch from the kitchen radio in the morning to the car radio on our way to work, etc., we don't listen to more than one radio at any one time (typically). And for the young, this has all but been replaced by MTV and other music video sources. 

Oh, PS, yes, many phones today ship with built-in FM radios, digital radio is coming next to a phone near you. And you can access hundreds of streaming web-radio services on your mobile phone.

And if anyone mentioned the wristwatch? You must be an old fogie. 73% of the population now uses the mobile phone as their portable clock. Not all of those have abandoned their wristwatch, but look at the under 30 year olds around you, more than not, they don't have watches anymore. That is why Seiko and Casio are rushing SMS-alert watches to recapture this segment of a market slipping away.

SO HERE IS THE BIG PICTURE

2.7 Billion phones in active use. There is a subscription for 40% of the planet's population. Maybe 10% of those are multiple subscriptions (in Europe and Industrialized Asia mostly) so perhaps 2.4 Billion people or 36% of the planet's population actually carry at least one phone.

During 2006 they sold about 950 million mobile phones. More phones sold last year than the total installed base of personal computers in use. Out of the 950 phones sold last year, two in three had built-in cameras, 30% had MP3 players. Four out of five had colour screens. All 950 million could access the web (at least via WAP), and all 950 million could send and receive SMS text messages. Over two in three were high speed (at least GPRS/EDGE/CDMA2000 1xRTT); while one in five phones sold last year was a 3G phone.

WHERE IS THE MONEY

The mobile telecoms industry earned 725 Billion dollars last year. 135 Billion of that was mobile data revenues (the majority of which is SMS text messaging but over 45 billion dollars was mobile content revenues). The mobile data industry is rapidly cannibalizing other industries - global music industry earns 16% of its revenues from mobile phones (mostly ringing tones); videogaming earns 14% of its global revenues from mobile.

By far the biggest business opportunity of our lifetimes, the mobile telecoms industry grew by 16.8% last year - many times the rate of global GDP growth, but the sheer economics of these numbers mask enormous success. The growth in dollar terms, from 2005 to 2006, was 105 billion dollars. Yes you read it right. The growth alone last year made new money for the industry worth 105 billion. Why were you not in, sharing in that enormous growth pie? This is not hype-money of investor hopes. This is real revenues, billed to customers, faitfully paid. Honest dollars. A 725 Billion dollar industry which grew by over 100 Billion. Before the decade is over, mobile telecoms will be bigger than the global automobile industry, or the global armaments industry, or the worldwide airplane manufacturing business. And yes, mobile telecoms service business, not counting handsets sold or networks, is already twice as big as the global IT (computer-side, not counting telecoms) industry.

Data service revenues in mobile (so if we ignore the phone as a voice device, and only consider the data services side of this gadget), at 135 billion dollars in 2006, are as big as - the total internet content industry, plus the internet advertising revenues, plus the global videogaming revenues, plus hollywood box office revenues worldwide, plus the global music industry, combined.

Remember the car? Before the car there was no Motel 6, no Exxon/Esso. Think of how much the fixed landline phone and TV changed the way we work and play, and how many new industries they spawned or changed. Think of the credit card, PC and the internet, how radically our world today changed. And how much money could be made from anyone from the guy manufacturing leather wallets (credit card slots were not in wallets in the 1960s) to the coffee shop manager (witness Starbucks and laptop users).

The phone is bigger in its reach than the car, TV or internet. It will make bigger changes in the next decade than any of these did. The phone adds the combined utility of the fixed telephone, internet, computer, credit card, and TV. The phone will impact your life in more ways than we can imagine, because of its multi-functionality aspect, and its reach. And because it will cannibalize some or all out of every other pretender on this list except the car. But even for the car, how many unnecessary trips have been cancelled, or the driver re-routed when we were able to reach the driver on the cellphone in the car. Honey, could you stop by and pick up Mary on your way...

Whatever your business or interest, going mobile now will give you a competitive advantage. But going mobile next year will be a desperation move to stay in the game. 

Don't miss out on this. Mobile is the biggest opportunity going. Where is your business? Where is your mobile strategy? Talk to Alan or me if you'd like some assistance in finding your place, opportunity or market space (oh, and you can get a rapid start by reading our book).

FREE INFORMATION - for those who would like to understand the basics of the mobile telecoms industry, its current size, replacement cycles, second subscriptions, mobile content revenues, SMS texting usage etc, I have written a concise 2 page Thought Piece on Size of Mobile Industry. Send me an e-mail to  tomi at tomiahonen dot com   and I'll send it to you for free.

UPDATE 5 - I've added the updates to where these numbers will go during 2007 and a rough time-table of when you can expect to see 3 billion subscribers, 100 billion in SMS texting revenues etc. See it here: Coming to a Headline Near You

UPDATE 4 - We now have official verification in April 2007 of this finding (the 2.7B number) by the trusted source of telecoms subscriber data, Informa. Please see this posting 2.7 Billion now verified by Informa

UPDATE 3 - I've added now my latest thoughts on how powerful Mobile will become as the 7th Mass Media. Not the dumb little brother of the internet, but rather mobile to the internet is as superior as TV is to radio. Read it at Mobile as the 7th Mass Media

UPDATE 2 - I have developed my thinking about how content migrates from the lecacy (fixed PC based) internet to the mobile internet. The latest installment of that thinking is here: As Web Content Migrates to the Mobile Internet

UPDATE 1 - Since I wrote this blog entry, Apple released its iPhone. If you'd like to read a handicapping of how that "new entrant" will fare in this cut-throat market, please read the blog, Handicapping the Race: iPhone markets and rivals.

UDATE Dec 10 2008 - I've just published my annual statistical review about the overall size of the mobile industry for end-of-year 2008. All new numbers so if you are interested in the "big picture", you may want to read this blog entitled Trillion with a T: Newest Giant Industry is Mobile

NOTE - that blog covers all of the topics in this, older blog posting, so unless you want to read about the history of mobile, I suggest you hop over to the newer blog where the current numbers are discussed.

Comments

[Mobile Jazz]

Today, First time I visited your blog. I got good information. Thanks

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Piers and Mobile Zazz

Thanks for visiting and leaving comments.

Piers - Yes WiMax is a very big opportunity for connectivity and high speed data. I've been monitoring the WiBro developments in South Korea and I think there will be many specific areas where the WiMax family of connection options will deliver excellent service. I do see it first, as a major wireless play for fixed line incumbents and internet providers, but more of a custom and niche opportunity for the mobile players, where the big parts of the mass market is with 3G/3.5G (and from about 2012 we will of course get 4G - by this I mean the officially ratified next generation as defined by the ITU, which will have the World Radio Congress assign radio spectrum for 4G later this year, so I am not discussing the various marketing opportunitists who claim to deliver 4G before it even has a standard specified)

We'll be looking at WiMax a lot in the upcoming years.

Mobile Jazz - thank you. We hope you will visit us soon again

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Januarius Chan]

M from malaysia. suprised on the advancing technology that happens around the world. Guess i've been living under a coconut shell. :|

[Brett Leary]

Hi Tomi -

OUTSTANDING ARTICLE! I liked reading it so much, I just read it again ;-)

Is there any way you can publish your sources for some of the figures you state in your article?

Regards,
Brett

[Jami Laes]

Excellent review of the convergence of platforms, history and their sizes. It is a generally overlooked fact that mobile phones have gone wider than the Internet - in not that much longer a time.

From technical and access point-of-view the convergence is truly leading towards a mobile 'jack-of-all-trades' solution.

What interests me is what kind of content will suit this new brave medium? As we all know that without content any platform is almost useless. I don't think that the mobile consumers of tomorrow will be satisfied by watching TV, reading newspapers, surfing the Internet - like we do today in the native forms of the media. I think that like the internet has shown as the latest example of new media culture formation that new and platform defining content and applications that are most successful are never just carbon copies from pre-existing media - rather something new and unique to the platform (YouTube, Google, Amazon etc.).

What will be this for mobile in terms of TV, games, applications, Web, social communities etc.? Probably ultimately it will be something else than any of these, like SMS has shown the enormous potential of low-fidelity applications that can be successful because of their ability to leverage social contact that people have an ever growing urge for.

The 2.7 billion and growing installed base will make sure that the potential to strike it big will attract new innovation. I could envision new hybrid media applications coming to life first in mobile and then getting ported back to traditional media....

Working in mobile games and social applications myself the largest entertainment platform in the history of the world presents a truly unique possibility for the rest of my life.

Cheers,

Jami Laes

[Andy]

Andy from Melbourne here, fascinating article mate, well done.

Would love to see some of the sources of your data, noticed this question posed a couple of time but can’t find a response.

Cheers

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Januarius, Brett, Jani and Andy

Thanks for stopping by and posting comments. You may find my latest thoughts around Mobile as the 7th Mass Media also interesting (just posted today)

Januarius - Hi, greetings to Malaysia. Actually you're still ahead of the curve in Malaysia, some pretty advanced stuff happening there in this space, 3G already launched, new operators coming online, MVNOs etc, quite advanced for much of Asia (other than South Korea and Japan obviously). Nice to have you here.

Brett (and Andy) - I hear you about the sources. This is a summary article on thoughts I've discussed in shorter pieces on the given areas during the past year, and some stem from my books, especially my second, m-Profits. So its not a "news" article when the given stats have been released, but rather a state of the industry kind of article (not unlike the annual State of the Union speech by the US president etc, hap-ha). So the stats are from the various relevant sources - telecoms and IT numbers from the ITU and Informa, etc. Most of these issues have been discussed individually on earlier blogs here, and the latest statistic and source has been quoted there.

Jami - great points, and yes, I am very eagerly following the early innovations into this, mobile as the 7th mass media, and what kind of content is "native" for mobile, invented for mobile. Early indications are indeed "low fidelity" - like SMS text messaging, distinctly lower in capability than e-mail; or ringing tones, distinctly less capable than full-track MP3 music files.

But we are also starting to see services which combine the utility on the handset, the power of the network service in real time. The first such services I've found are Shazam the music recognition service from the UK that has already launched in a couple of dozen countries. With Shazam you point your phone at any recorded music and dial a numnber. The phone listens to the music for about 10 seconds, then hangs up. Within a minute you receive an SMS text message with the name of the song, the artist, the album it is on, etc. This kind of service cannot be deployed on any other platform currently, not on DVD, not on a stand-alone PC, not on a (stand-alone) PDA, not on digital TV, etc. But it works perfectly on mobile phones.

Another is the recently launched Kamera-Jiten in Japan. Its the "Camera Dictionary" - or what I more like to think as the "magnifying glass which translates". You take your cameraphone and point it at a magazine or book in English. Turn on the Kamera-Jiten service, it snaps the picture, performs the OCR conversion (from an image into text), then connects with the network and gets a translation, sends it back to you in Japanese characters. Takes a few moments, but like a magnifying glass over a page with small text, this intelligent camera dictionary will look at a paragraph in one language, and display it on the cameraphone's screen in another language. Brilliant.

These are the first steps into a new age. Just like drama, transferring from the stage to cinema, when it learned that actors did not have to be shown from beginning to end, that the story could be edited, and things that were not possible on stage, could be shown on film. Or what TV did when moving concerts from radio and records to music on TV. Toss in some creativity and crazy advertising executives, and before you know it, someone launches MTV and we have a new format only-for-TV, called music video. Its still music - also sold on records and played on the radio - but BETTER when you add the unique benefits of TV.

These are the kinds of innovations we need to do with mobile today, not only to replicate the web and TV etc experiences, but go beyond them. Invent to mobile what were reality TV and talk shows and game shows on TV, or what are social networking and wikis and blogs on the web.

Andy - thanks. Yes, like I told Brett, ITU, Informa, etc Computer Industry Almanac, etc. But sorry, the article was already so darn long, I was editing it down for more than a day when I finally posted it, and I did feel that repeating the sources that I've quoted many times before, was a waste of space at the time. Apparently I should have left them in...

I'll stick the sources into the next major piece like this.

Thanks for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[KEVIN MANUEL MORAN HERRERA]

ok

[Philip Bishop]

Fascinating reading.

Like others have said, sources would have been valuable, but I guess we now just have to read your other writings to find the references.

I found your anecdote about the homeless man saving his life with a cell phone interesting -- particularly, as a web developer, I'm just producing a mobile site for an agency in the US that serves the homeless. The mobile site will contain information for professionals in the field but it will also have info for the homeless about how and where to access basic services. Given that that there are three times more cell phones out there than PCs, even a homeless person is more likely to have access to a cell phone than a PC, as your anecdote proves.

[Januarius Chan]

someone is taking the 'opportunity' to promote for their own sake. :|

[Gio Bacareza]

It's a really interesting essay. Thank you for writing it.

There are a couple of things I want to discuss:

1. I would be interested to see a graphical representation of your story where we can see the relative growths of these technologies.

2. When you say "All 950 million could access the web (at least via WAP)" are you referring to the device's ability to access the web? I think we also need to consider the carrier's ability to provide internet connection. How are data connection statistics among operators in the developing world?

3. While I believe that internet-in-the-phone or the "mobile web" is the future, what do you think of the role of internet-to-phone, where people can still take advantage of the real estate and richer user interfaces in the PC but couple that with the ubiquity of the mobile phone. Before the "internet-in-phone" eclipses "internet-in-PC" I think there will be a necessary step of "internet-in-PC-to-phone." The bridge has to be be built first before mass migration happens, figuratively speaking. What do you think of this?

4. The mobile phone's been a godsend to a lot of businesses (especially the operators) because people are willing to pay while in the traditional desktop internet content is mostly free. In the mass migration to the mobile internet, will the free content ideals of the desktop internet spread to the mobile web or will the carrier's power (due to their control of the networks) prevent that from happening?

Cheers,

Gio

[Mobile Phones]

I think what really strikes me in this article is that the number of Asians who access the internet via mobile devices is actually larger than those who use a PC. As he suggests, that definitely argues that we have reached a “tipping point” from which there is no real return. So, we can say with some certainty that the mobile phone is the device of the future in terms of the internet. Yet this still leaves open a number of important questions. First, does this mean that web content will need to be more and more modified so that it easily works as mobile content as well? In other words, is this a programming issues, one that companies such as Phonifier are already trying to address, but that all web programmers will eventually have to face? Or is this a hardware issue, with competition really aimed towards increasing typing and LCD capabilities on cell phones so that they can be more and more like the PC?

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Kevin, Philip, Januarius, Gio and Mobile Phones

Thank you for posting comments.

First - I have just finished my latest Thought Piece (a two-page very intense fact-filled White Paper) based on this essay. THAT document is thoroughly documented also with the sources. I'll blog something about it shortly and mention it to the general readership.

But those at this comment thread, if you would like the related Thought Piece, drop me an e-mail and I'll send it to you, for free of course. My e-mail as always is tomi at tomiahonen dot com

Now to the specific comments by name:

Philip - yes, I also found that (homeless man) very telling in how far mobile phones have spread

Januarius - am not sure what you referred to? If you meant one of the occasional spammers who try to post ads here, we remove all those as soon as we spot them. Or if you meant myself (or Alan) promoting our skills, books, podcast, etc - sorry about that. This - blogging - is a hobby for us but we also have a day job. My day job is consulting, training, lecturing, books and seminars around mobile telecoms strategy and business; and the digitally converging industries from internet to media to advertising to banking etc. So sorry for the occasional plugs to our business, but we do need to earn the money to be able to deliver this free site for you.

At least please observe we have no ads here to spam you. We don't load cookies to your PC to spy on you etc. This is a totally free site where we try to bring valuable information and our obsevations to you our readers (and to our fans).

Gio - Thanks. I'll address each point. 1) graphical representation. Imagine roughly straight lines. A gradual slope, more aggressive slope, very intense slope, etc. The most intense slope is mobile. I do have plenty of slides from various dates where I've shown those trends but ever since mobile shot past the others around the turn of the millenium, it has become pointless to draw the lines, as the gap is growing bigger in favour of mobile (mobile is the most steep curve)

2) about 950 internet/WAP capable. I mean both handset and operator enabled. So this is the "smallest" possible number. If you take only internet/WAP capable phones, it is a bigger number; or if you take the subscribers served by operators who have enabled internet/WAP then it is again a larger number. This is the case where both are true. Oh, and its well past 950 M by now (May 2007)

3) am not totally sure what you mean by "internet-in-PC-to-phone" but if you mean that the mobile phone is used as the modem for a PC to access the internet, then yes, this is a small niche opportunity already used by some today. But if you have a laptop (you typically would not use that at home with a desktop) and need the mobility, it makes much more sense to get a 3G/3.5G modem and stick that into the laptop, rather than mess around with a mobile phone as your modem. But yes, it can be done and some do use their 3G phones this way.

4) yes good point about content on mobile. And I'd say its a Wild West right now. There are pure-mobile content plays (like SeeMeTV, similar to YouTube but only for 3G phones). There are honestly converged mobile-and-broadband plays (like Flirtomatic). There are fixed content plays where only the money is collected via mobile (like Habbo Hotel). And of each of these there are some services which are controlled by the operator, and others which are provided by independents. What the media content and advertising industries are now waking up to, is that mobile content revenues are dramatically larger than fixed content revenues. And at 31 B dollars of content revenues in 2006 according to Informa, that is more that all of Hollywood, all of music or all of videogaming software industries worldwide. Now we really are getting the attention of the magazine publishers, newspaper barons, radio stations, TV broadcasters, ad agencies etc.

I always like to point out that the two largest content categories on the internet are pornography and gambling. Both adult entertainment and gambling also exist on mobile - but they have been pushed way down into niche markets, as mobile has matured as a mass media much faster than the older internet has. Today half a dozen content categories on mobile are already larger than adult and gambling, led by music and social networking services on mobile.

Mobile Phones - about the tipping point. I don't think we are at the tipping point (globally) yet. In Europe in advanced markets its in the 30% range (Italy, Austria, parts of Scandinavia etc). But yes, Japan and South Korea in particular, being also the world's most advanced broadband internet markets (ranked 1 and 2 in broadband penetrations, broadband highest speeds, and broadband lowest prices; South Korea became the first country in 2006 where all internet connections had been upgraded to broadband and they are now already testing gigabit broadband speeds at test sites). So yes, in Korea and Japan, the tipping point has happened and its a VERY worthwhile pair of markets to study to see the future of the rest of the industrialized world as we get to their levels of digital convergence.

On content re-formatting and hardware redesign. Its not an either-or situation, both are vitally needed. I wrote a long blog recently about the 7 C's of cellphones. How mobile phones have gone from being a Communication (only) device to adding ever more capabilities - first content, then creative (cameraphone), then commerce (mobile payments), then community, commercials (advertisements) and now remote control. So we cram ever more into the pocketable device. MP3 players, still cameras, optical zooms, flash, DVD quality videorecording, 2D barcode readers, near field payment systems (like Felica in Japan) etc etc etc.

That means the device needs to be re-engineered ever more cleverly. See the innovations in the upcoming iPhone to see where the industry needs to go. But thats not enough. The content does need to be reformatted and eventually originally created for the small screen. In Japan, South Korea and China all internet content has a default setting for mobile phone access, with alternate options for full screen PC access.

So both will be needed.

Thank you all for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Gio Bacareza]

Hi Tomi,

The PC-to-mobile phone concept I was referring to goes way beyond just using the mobile as a modem.

Right now, there's PC-only web access then there's buzz about the mobile web or mobile-only web access. (The latter is what I call PC-in-mobile to distinguish it from PC-to-mobile.)

Before PC-only concept of web access completely merges with a mobile-only concept of web access, an evolutionary stage is bound to happen where PC-web applications will develop functions that would use the mobile as an extension. Examples are Yahoo Messenger to mobile, Chikka Messenger to mobile, etc. These are examples of web apps using the existing mobile VAS infrastructure to extend its capabilities to the mobile phone.

What I'm seeing, however, is that the hype is highly concentrated on mobile-only web where websites and apps as well as the UI are designed for the mobile. While, as I earlier stated, this would ultimately happen, the evolutionary step above must happen.

But then again, that's my personal opinion. It may be so much easier (ie less total cost) for PC webapps and sites to add functionality to extend to the mobiles (PC-to-mobile) than to create a totally redesigned app that will be viewable in all mobile devices .

What do you think?

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Gio

Ok, now I understand. Yes, I think you're right, both are needed and the long-term scenario is a mobile-only web.

I think we have two independent development tracks. One is any existing internet service or application company, from the Googles and Yahoos to the Flicrks and MySpaces. They all see the emergence of mobile as a viable platform to deliver part of their service, or indeed to enhance it (like Habbo Hotel, Cyworld etc).

I think it would be foolish for an internet company to neglect the mobile platform as an extension of what they offer.

But separately today if you are a game developer, music company, news service, etc and starting from "ground zero" with a new service or application, then pure-mobile services can be much richer, more compelling - and dramatically more lucrative - than similar new services developed for the internet.

So I see both trends happening in parallel.

Then I'd suggest also there is the lesson of disruptive technologies. This is a very dangerous lesson for all established giants. The future success in a disruptive technology area very strongly favours newcomers, start-up companies, and legacy dominant players tend to be very poor at managing a transition to the new area.

In the 1970s the big 6 in the computer industry were IBM and "the Bunch" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell). They were all Fortune 500 sized companies and several in the Fortune 100, when Apple and Microsoft and Intel appeared on the horizon, and Toshiba and Dell were years from the PC world and HP's interest in the personal computer was more on laser printers than actual computers. Today IBM is a software company and the rest of the Bunch these are long gone.

Similarly when the internet was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in 1994, the giants of the PC/computers/networking world were brands like IBM, Apple, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Novell (the world's largest networking company then with 80% market share) etc. But none of them made a big grab of the internet space where the big global players now are Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and AOL. They didn't see the shift coming until it was much too late.

I should add that AOL did exist prior to the internet going mainstream but its near rival bulletin board companies like Compuserve and GEnie are long gone. Also obviously Microsoft and Apple have significant internet presense. Still they were large enough in theory to have become one of the big five on the web, and missed out on that chance.

Now we see the transition to mobile. My guess is that the major players of today from the computer world like Dell and Microsoft or the internet world like Yahoo and eBay or the other converging worlds like mass media ie TV, newspapers, magazines, radio etc - will not end up the big winners out of mobile. Some of the early front-runners however, find this at their "backyard" such as Nokia and Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo etc who have a strong head-start into dominating this space.

Two companies from outside mobile have recently impressed me with their mobile focus. Google is the strongest. Their CEO keeps yelling "Mobile, mobile, mobile!" Everywhere you see him. And now that Apple finally threw its hat in the ring with the announcement of the iPhone, I expect Apple to be very strong in this space, especially with the iTunes and Apple TV initiatives as well.

But - in 1994 when the internet was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, of the 5 big internet companies only one, AOL, existed roughly in that space. eBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo were only emerging or being founded.

That is how I see the mobile industry ten years from now. The giants whose stock everybody would love to own, are today baby companies of 20 people or less, or perhaps just moving from their home market taking baby steps into neighboring countries etc. Who will dominate there? Who can capture the unique benefits of mobile, see so clearly beyond the limitations of the current internet and TV and print, to build the compelling offerings into that future. And to use the power of mobile as a media channel in and of itself, to boost the adoption of those services.

The real winners of the mobile services industry are not on the stock market yet today. But several of them are being formed or they are already in operation in some corners of the globe today. And then it is execution, who plays the cards right in this new game.

It will be an exciting time :-)

Thanks for coming back Gio,

Tomi :-)

[The Contract Mobile Phone Man]

Tomi and Gio thanks for you contributions to this post its really great to have you both here.

Thanks

Samuel

[Albert]

I like to shop on internet and Couponalbum.com is my favorite site...On my last visit on this site I found good discounts on magazines at Magazines.com store...Visit here for save your money.......!!

[wil]

Great article, well-written analysis of the emerging trend or even existing trend of the huge mobile opportunity. However, i don't think it's appropriate to separate and differentiate the internet and mobile phones to two distinct industries, i think they are pretty much intertwined.

While mobile phones do have its unique characteristics over the internet, as you've written in the other blog post on its benefits, mobile phones in essence is just another means of connecting to the internet. I would say it is just another extension from the internet and a subset of the internet, it gives people the advantage of connecting to and interacting on the internet much more easily with its portability, and all the services you mentioned for the mobile phones are in truth an extension from the internet.

Internet isn't a physical device like the tv or the car or the newspaper, it is a global network for people to communicate instantly, publish content accessible to any part in the world and provide services not bound by physical distance, and anyone can access the internet with a capable device, and mobile phones happen to be one of them.

Anyway my point is i don't think it's suitable to compare the internet to the mobile phones in your context, as some of the unique benefits of mobile phones are utilizing the internet.

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Wil

Thanks for writing. You have good well reasoned points.

Alan and I have studied this media landscape for a long while, wrote at length about it in the book Communities Dominate Brands etc. We do bump into that thought from time to time, that we cannot compare the internet to mobile.

Lets take a step back first, and put the internet in context of the five legacy mass media. TV (5th mass media channel) is mostly "a box" or a device. But there is TV broadcasting (and cable, satellite etc) behind the TV box.

Radio (4th media) is similarly a broadcast technology and we need the box (a radio receiver) to listen to it.

Cinema is the third media and has no listening or watching device for individual viewers, we have to pay and go sit in a movie theatre to watch movies (in the cinema, I'm not talking about movies that have been reformatted and broadcast on TV or sold on DVD etc)

Recordings (2nd mass media) are yet another format type, where we are sold the content on a disk or tape or CD or DVD and have to go buy a player to consume the media.

And the oldest, print (1st mass media) had no device to consume it, we bought the printed item, be it a book, magazine, newspaper etc.

So just because one media has a device to consume it - like the mobile, and another doesn't have an inherent device for it - like the internet - does not mean we cannot consider the two as mass media.

What we have to use is a test of are they truly for mass audience content delivery, whether entertainment or news or both. Print, recordings, cinema, radio and TV obviously all are. Not everything is a viable mass media channel. We could theoretically try to sell content via the fixed landline telephone (and some have been very small successes in the past such as directory inquiries, the accurate time, etc) or say by printing messages on the sand at the beach to be read by overflying airplanes, etc, but while these can deliver messages to small audiences, they are not mass media.

The internet emerged as a mass media in the last decade and its primary consumption device currently is the PC.

Mobile emerged as a mass media nine years ago when Saunalahti in Finland decided to launch downloadable ringing tones (ie music) to mobile phones in the autumn of 1998.

Ringing tones are also a very good example of the contrast between the internet and mobile. Ringing tones do not play on PCs. The Ringing tone content industry is purely for mobile, and it is enormous compared to the internet music industry.

The internet music business is dominated by Apple iTunes, and the total size of the internet downloaded music business is at under 2 billion dollars of annual revenues this year worldwide.

The ringing tone business, on mobile phones, is worth over 6 billion dollars - more than three times larger than the internet music content industry !!

The same is true of user-generated content on mobile - over twice as large on mobile as that on the fixed internet, the same is true of TV-related content on mobile - TV voting alone - on mobile - is worth over a billion dollars annually

So since clearly several content formats exist that are unique to one platform, it does suggest mobile is its own media channel.

And thats only at the very early beginning. Now we have new media companies, like Blyk in the UK for example, who are building totally new content and advertising experiences unique to mobile. Services such as Hutchison/Three companies SeeMeTV in the UK, Italy, Austria, Scandinavia, Hong Kong and Australia - are building the most advanced video sharing service, far more economically robust than YouTube. While SK Communciations's Cyworld in South Korea is setting the pace for what social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook will become some day. Meanwhile Flirtomatic in the UK is showing how a converged service on broadband internet and mobile, can make all its money on mobile and does not need to even have subscription fees anymore.

All this is due to the mobile being uniquely different from the internet.

Both are mass media channels. The internet is big, will continue to grow bigger and will impact most of the aspects of the lives of the people in the industrialized world.

The mobile is bigger, will grow to be far far greater than the web in its impact, which will not be limited to the wealthy parts of the globel; the mobile is the only viable content and commerce platform for the vast majority of the planet who are not in the Western industrialized first world..

So thanks for writing, I'm hoping this helped open your eyes that perhaps there is some method to our madness, but I'm not here to force you to accept our view, I'd ask for your comments on this.

You might want to read Alan's White Paper on 7th Mass Media, it will help you also see the vast differences between mobile the 7th vs the internet the 6th mass media channel.

Thanks for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Michael Carradine]

Reality check please! What devices are Android compatible and or approved? Who are the 30 manufacturers? Where do I buy an Android "box", do any exist??