David Kirkpatrick, senior editor at Fortune Magazine has written a great article summarizing some technology statistics that have come out as result of the 2008 Global Internet Snapshot compiled by Imran Khan, senior analyst for Internet, media and entertainment at JP Morgan.
But for cell phones it’s a different story. Here the United States is a laggard, with 77.4 subscribers per 100 people. The place to see the potential for worldwide cell phone use is Europe, where every country but Turkey exceeds the penetration of the United States. Italy, where many people have multiple subscriptions, is the European champ, with 135.1 cellphone subscribers per 100 people. Hong Kong exceeds even that, with 135.3. The overall global average is 41.6 subscribers per 100 people. The world’s 2.75 billion mobile phone users are growing in number at an annual rate of 27%.
Despite the popularity of the iPhone, Yahoo’s new Voice Recognition and other product launches, US mobile usage is still in its early stages; which leaves plenty of room for growth.
While the figures show that there is immense growth potential for mobile technology, it will be the combination of mobile technology with broadband like speed that will be the real killer. On the business model side, perhaps the reduced viewable surface area would mean that companies would have to work on embedding ads in more unobtrusive manner. There is immense need to experiement on this end.
Certainly the future of technology, especially mobile technology is nowhere near to slowing down.
