Business Ignores Mobile Internet At Its Peril

Telco consultant Tomi Ahonen has claimed that “by 2010, the dominant device will be the 3G smartphone and all internet content will be formatted for the cellphone”, which is the sort of absolute generalization which is guaranteed to be incorrect. He goes on to say that “the PC is a transitional type of device – much like the Zeppelin was when air travel was first introduced – and that the mobile phone is the platform that the internet will be designed for in future”. While the mobile internet will be big, and there are a lot of things which work better on the mobile internet than on PCs (conceptually, at least) it’s also true that there are a lot of things which work a lot better on PCs than on mobiles.
Anyway, there is one very interesting fact given in the article — worldwide revenues for SMS outstrip the revenues for movies, music and games…combined.
“SMS revenues outstrip those from e-mail 14 to 1 ($70 billion from SMS versus $5 billion from internet messaging), and there are 1.4 billion SMS users compared with 680m e-mail users on the globe… “The SMS business generates more revenue than the music business ($30 billion), Hollywood ($20 billion), and video gaming software ($20 billion) businesses combined,” says Ahonen.”

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