BusinessWeek has a look at South Korea to find out what is coming in the mobile market, and how the “thumb generation” will use their handsets. We (or at least the thumb generation) will be using their phones to pay bills, watch video, read books, get special advertising deals, find friends, and so on and so forth. The good news for operators is that — if the arguments in the article are correct — ARPU will routinely pass $100 per month as people do more and more things on their handsets. For example, “more than 3 million Koreans regularly use their mobile phones to log on to the giant Cyworld social networking site”, which is a small percentage of total users but nothing to sneeze at.
There’s also an interesting tidbit on MobiTV: “When Paul Scanlan and a partner founded Mobitv in 1999, they had just $500,000 in venture funding. By 2001 their service offered 12 channels of video. Today they have $100 million in backing and stream xm Satellite Radio, along with premium hbo shows and other fare, to handsets”.
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