The Future is Mobile

The future in the palm of your hand

Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel used to say “listen to the technology. The technology will tell you what to do”.

Today, the technology to listen to is mobile.

As of now, there are 4.6 billion mobile phones in play on this planet, out of a population of 6.8 billion people.

That is, out of the entire population of the planet, if you exclude the 800 million who are functionally illiterate and 900 million children under the age of 7, pretty much everyone on earth has a mobile phone.

This is an absolutely astonishing number. And it says a great deal about where the planet is headed.

There are more people on the planet with mobile phones than those who have access to clean water.

There are more mobile phones on the planet than toothbrushes. (astonishing, but true).

There has never been a technology in the history of mankind that has had such a complete penetration of our global population, nor one that has achieved anything close to that so rapidly.

Once you start to wrap your head around the numbers related to mobile phones, it is truly staggering. And, of course, mobile phones are today far more than phones – they’re small computer platforms. And the technology just keeps getting better and better and faster and faster.  In 18 months, if Moore’s Law holds true (and so far, so good), you’re going to be trashing those 3G iPhones as garbage.  (I only recently came across my first iPod. A brick!).

And as the phones get better and better and faster and faster, they are used less and less for voice calls and more and more for SMS, photos, video and MMS.

I personally have not taken a voice call on my blackberry for the last three years, but I am SMSing all the time. Did you know that SMS is 720 times faster than email? SMS today is the most widely used application on the planet.

So newspapers? Eight times more people pay to send SMS text messages than pick up a daily newspaper, whether paid or free circulation. More than four times as many people send SMS text messages than have a car. Two and a half times more people send texts on their phones than own a TV set, or own a PC, or have a credit card. More than twice as many people send SMS than have access to the internet, and yes, more people communicate with their friends via SMS, than own an FM radio.

And that’s nothing compared to MMS.

MMS is a Multi Media Messaging system.

And now that iPhones are incorporating not only video but also rudimentary iMovie editing systems, they are going to become both creators of and receivers of video content.

That content can be anything, but if you have a message or a product you want to get out to, oh say, 6.5 billion people at once, then it would seem that the mobile platform (a platform you carry with you 24 hours a day) is going to be the platform of choice.

Mobile not only becomes a platform for receiving information, it is also the generator of content. Did you know that for 9 out of 10 people on the planet who have taken a picture, the only camera they have ever touched is a mobile phone camera?

Isn’t THAT astonishing.

The Pew Charitable Trust tells us that people glance at their mobile phones 200 times a day.  You cannot function without looking at your phone to see what you have missed.  And it is updating all the time.

Newspapers are dead. Magazines are dead. The whole notion of watching TV by appointment, or indeed even sitting in your house and watching TV is going to go away. But mobile technologies are with us all the time. Constantly.

The future of journalism, indeed the future of any kind of communication of information is in the palm of your hand.

Literally.

And that space, like the web, like computer software,  is going to belong to whoever gets there first.