Many of you will remember the early days of the web when The Next Big Thing was “always on” — fast, cheap bandwidth that would liberate us from the curse of dialup and would naturally enable new business models to emerge. We normally thought about this in terms of Internet connectivity, separate from mobile telephony. Since those days we have seen the blurring of the lines between voice and data due to the emergence of VoIP, 3G mobile, smartphones and (still too expensive) flat rate data pricing.
I just came across this article in the NYT, A Pocket-Size Leveler in an Outsize Land, by Anand Giridharadas. And it really hammered home the reality of where we are heading as a planet as far as digital connectivity is concerned.
But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. And while the average bill, of less than $5 per month, represents 7 percent of the average Indian’s income, enough Indians apparently consider the sacrifice worth it: if present trends continue, in five years every Indian will have a cellphone… There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening.
A huge percentage of the world’s population is coming online not through PC-based Internet, but through their cell phones. There are 3 billion active mobile device users in the world, 92% of them outside of the US market. (Stats are from Tomi Ahonen.)
What does the social web look like, how does it feel, when your first and only window into that world is a handheld mobile device? Like the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, your perception is determined by where you touch the animal.
A mobile device is by its very nature always on. Since there is little doubt that even the cheapest cell phones will be able to send and receive pictures and videos, listen to and share music and navigate the so-called mobile web in the not too distant future (as many already do), it is fascinating to think about what kind of new social networking businesses will be built to scale to, um, billions of members.
