I haven’t had time to read this full piece myself yet (it’s long; I hope to finish it tonight), and I certainly won’t have time for a few days for a thorough blog post. But I want to call your attention to the most detailed, thoughtful piece I have read on the global mobile communication revolution (and the resulting opportunities for communication companies).
A tweet by Neil Perkin this morning brought my attention to Everything you wanted to know about mobile but were afraid to ask by Tomi T. Ahonen (whom I had not heard of before, but will be following and learning more about).
If you’ve read my posts on mobile-first strategy, I highly encourage reading this. Ahonen’s view is more global than mine and not focused on the news business. His broad view provides excellent context for my narrower view and his understanding is significantly deeper.
Highlights from the first several sections, which I read on my commute:
Ten years ago, worldwide use of television, automobiles, landline phones, the Internet, personal computers, credit cards and mobile phones was about comparable, all between 500 and 900 million people and all dwarfed by FM radio, at 3 billion. Mobile now has 4.6 billion users. Some Ahonen comments, putting mobile use and growth in perspective:
All other major technologies that were roughly of the same size, TV, PC, internet etc – grew roughly speaking to double over one decade. Doubled in ten years. Mobile started roughly of same size but grew nearly to ten times its size in the same decade. They started as more-or-less equals, today mobile towers over all others.
There are more people with mobile phones than have access to running water. More mobile phone subscribers on the planet than use a toothbrush (its true!).
Another critical point Ahonen makes is that it’s inaccurate to call mobile devices “phones” now. Text messaging has surpassed phone calls as the leading use of mobile technology:
The New Zealand Herald reported just this April, that the latest statistics from that country find that a typical email is opened within 48 hours, but an SMS is read within 4 minutes. That means, that a typical SMS is 720 times faster than email.
Ahonen sees multimedia messaging as a more important mobile opportunity than applications:
MMS is not a picture messaging platform (else it would be called PMS, Picture Messaging System). MMS is a Multimedia Messaging System. Yes, multimedia includes text, includes sounds, includes pictures and includes video. Video content. You could send short clips of stories via MMS. Or a series of pictures (like a cartoon) via MMS. And sounds yes, plus longer text based messages than in SMS.
Its a media industry’s dream. It has all the benefits of SMS, but it breaks through the 160 character limit, and allows pictures, sounds and videos. This is the ultimate couponing, advertising, music and TV and movie and gaming -related media platform. The ultimate.
This is huge. MMS alone is bigger than the global music industry, and this year is passing the global movie industry box office revenues in total value. MMS is a magnificent platform to deliver compelling but still very simple multimedia experiences to end-users.
I will blog more on this later, but didn’t want to wait to call it to your attention. Technology this useful that is growing this swiftly provides tremendous opportunities to news organizations with the vision and commitment to pursue them.
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[…] Tomi T. Ahonen’s view of the present and future of mobile […]
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