The Conquest of Mobile, the Conquest of Space

Our conquest of space has profoundly transformed the development of telecommunications and the dissemination of information. It initiated new areas of competition as well as cooperation in original ways. It is also a tremendous engine for innovation in many domains: electronics, information technology, energy, and mechanical engineering.
In many ways the developments in the mobile industry resemble the 50 year period that passed between the space flight of a monkey to the development of international space station ISS.
In a time frame of just 7 years mobile gained an overall global penetration of 65 percent. This is the strongest and fastest adoption of the twentieth century, ahead of television (50 years for 92% penetration) and even the PC (25 years to reach 45% penetration). 

In 1979 the first generation mobile telecommunications network was created in Japan. In late 2009 many operators opened 4th generation networks with the commercial launch of LTE, Long Term Evolution, the successor to UMTS. In 30 years we have moved from an era of voice calls and SMS messaging into the era of real-time information, TV, and video on our mobile screens.

We went from a heavy phone with a 2cm black and white screen in the 1980s to mobile phones as powerful as a PC with dozens of features that we only started to tame. And it doesn’t stop there. In the coming years we’ll see an unprecedented evolution of size, weight, autonomy and feature set.
The technological progress and growing breath of usages have been phenomenal and nothing short of a revolution, an explosion of services and application. In 2009 the rocket took off! 

As the conquest of markets is taking shape, operators are under pressure to innovate their services to recruit but also retain their customer bases, while in parallel web giants are starting their programs. 2010 will provide a wealth of mobile services with plenty of application stores and web applications that will grow and further enhance the mobile internet use.

So what will application stores bring in the coming 12 months? A more fragmented offer, the emergence of several best applications, 3 to 4 winning application stores, a collapse of the offer, and the return of web applications in full force. 

But if we put ourselves in the position of the consumers, it may be much simpler because their expectation is not the same as for the experts. A consumer buys his phone at the mobile network operator shop and gets a store preconfigured on his mobile. But constraining choice is not the answer. In the end the consumer wants to have a free access to any applications, pay using his mobile, regardless of who is behind the store front. As long as the application meets his needs and budget, the store is simple to use, applications can be downloaded with a single click, billing is clear, it’s possible to back-up, and settings are easily retrieved when changing phones.
One of the key benefits of the conquest of space was the availability of household applications for anyone. 

The challenge for the mobile industry is to make available to the general public mobile services that are simple and useful, that facilitate the everyday life of billions of users. The tundra shepherd alerts his family of danger, fishermen sell their catch remotely in real time, a family sends money to one of her children thousands of miles away, doctors remotely monitor diabetes patients, firefighters send pictures of an accident for support in action, parents track their 10-year olds going to school, a blind person uses synthesized speech to read the daily newspaper, a businessman in an airport presents his mobile as flight ticket. 

The mobile will also to be a simple means to connect people through social networks, with merchants and brands via mobile marketing and contactless technology, with their environment using augmented reality, and with life via mobile TV. 

Most importantly, the mobile’s voice and SMS messaging capabilities are the global language that allows one to get in touch with a person and to connect in real-time with family and community. 

We'll see innovations that will not stop to surprise us because of man’s infinite creative power. Perhaps already in a few years we’ll experience a removal of Babylonian confusion of tongues, and voice recognition, automatic translation, speech synthesis and cloud computing work together to translate real-time conversion in thousands of languages.
The conquest of space has hardly begun, and so has the conquest of mobile. New players will emerge, new collaborations will form. On the horizon is a brave new world of mobile for the good of all “mobinauts!” Source Christophe Romei for The Netsize Guide 2010: Mobile Renaissance