Mobile Web 2.0 & Multimedia

Matthew Ingram writing on GigaOm about the fascinating rise of the Book as the Killer App on the iPhone (see above chart):

According to Mobclix, which does mobile advertising for apps, the number of books in the iTunes store now exceeds the number of games for the first time since the device was launched, making books the largest category in the store. The numbers from Mobclix, which keeps a regular tally on the most popular apps and downloads, show that there are more than 26,000 books in iTunes, compared with a little over 24,000 games.

And just yesterday we wrote that the market for small, stand alone apps on the iPhone (and by extension other smartphones) was probably an early adopter fad. Prescient or what As Matthew notes, this is disruptive to an already Disrupted 1.0 industry

This fits in with something Om wrote recently based on data from Flurry, which also showed a substantial increase in the number of books being downloaded to the iPhone. At the time, Flurry said that Apple was “positioned to take market share from the Amazon Kindle” for book reading, despite the small size of the display, and that “with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor [Aka iPad], running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition.”

The Battle for the Book is thus looking very interesting, albeit it seems to be taking an initial backward step as various publishers and hardware providers try and jockey for proprietary supply models. This of course will be a hit with the customer like it has been every other time its been tried (not!)

So - some predictions in this space over the next few years:

(i) Greedy and shortsighted players will try and make proprietary content-to-device deals and attempt to lock in high prices of eBooks despite much lower production costs

(ii) This will be accompanied by the wails from the Book Industry that billions are being lost to e-Piracy (oh wait, that's started) and demand the Government Must Do Something

(iii) One player (my money is on Apple as the have form) will break the logjam allowing you to get most of the content on one (ie their) device

(iv) Les Autres will wail about unfair competition, but they have only themselves to blame - after all, the playout of the music industry is plain for all to see

(v) Authors still won't see more money for their work, so will start all teh alternative channels as musicians have.

In other words, another Santayana Moment

There are a number of people whose blogs I always read, and when it comes to incisive comment on Planet Mobile one of those is Dean Bubley who writes Disruptive Wireless. I thought his recent piece on Mobile Apps was particularly useful when I read a story about an app on android selling $13,000 pm

Numbers

- About 70,000 downloads of the free version.
- 6,590 downloads of the paid version
- Price of the app was raised from $1.99 to $3.99
- The app steadily climbed the charts, briefly reaching a peak of #4 in the Travel category for paid apps.

Good luck to them, but putting one's business hat on I asked "is this a business model" - and then recalled Dean's post:

Wandering around Barcelona last week, I started feeling a deep unease at the current level of hysteria around mobile apps. It is was compounded this week by seeing a T-Mobile advert on the London Underground which didn't show a phone, but just said "Would you like a free phone with apps for just £20 a month?" [meaning "We'll sell you a cheap Android instead of an iPhone, but don't dare mention it or show it"]. Apple is bombarding the world with "apps, apps, apps" advertising as well.

That was what was on my mind too - as Dean says, this may not be sustainable:

But maybe it's just a fashion? After all, do you really want any form of ongoing "relationship" with a handset manufacturer? Will the mass market really want to keep adding new stuff to their device?

The first 100-200m owners of PCs bought and installed lots of applications. The most recent 100-200m have probably just got Office, a browser, Norton or some other security package, Skype and their favourite IM client. Apart from gamers, most people don't continually look for and download PC apps - although they're there occasionally if need strikes.

........

Most "cool new stuff" will be in the browser, just as it is with the PC. And maybe, just maybe after you've got used to it, you'll bother to find out if there's a 20%-better application. Once there are easy metaphors for multiple browser windows and tabs on mobile, and more ubiquitous support for multi-tasking, the idea of a "widget" becomes obsolete. They're just contrivances to get around small screen size, I think.

And the endgame?

The bottom line is that I'm wondering if the massed billions of phone users will really care about iPhone-style junk applications. Personalisation is all very well - but it's best done upfront, not on an ongoing basis. The hand of fashion could also start to dictate that people customise something else rather than phones.

A vision of 4 billion "modified" smartphones represents a dystopia of geekiness.

I must admit to having a lot of sympathy with this view, probably the kindest alternative view is to extrapolate the iPhone evolution, where an 80/20 (at best) is emerging - a small number of Apps are selling well (and these are the "$13,000 a month" stories), but a huge number are not.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering where the money really is, news today that the iPhone has a 60% gross margin.

My slides from Mashupevent's Location Based Service Session last night - these are the notes, they are based on client research we did about a year ago.:

Predictability - of a sort

Location based Services is one of those cyclical hypes, coming round every 10 years or so. Like all overhyped areas, it comes complete with way overoptimistic market projections. The last time round, in the WAP fuelled dotcom atmosphere, $20bn was typical of the froth. 5 years alter, a few millions was more like the truth.

This time round, $13bn are the sorts of numbers thrown about. Suffice to say that we believe these numbers too are way overstated. However, it does give us predictability of a sort, in that the peak of each hype wave is 60% of the last one, which allows us to predict that the peak of the next LBS hype cycle will be c $7bn in 2018

Four Squares

So what is the size of the market? The honest answer is it is too early to tell (a scenario based approach is better, which is our approach of course ). The two key determinants are penetration and Average Revenue Per User.

Penetration can vary between "only smartphone users" (bottom of the chart) and a set of scenarios that imagines location aware consumer devices, cars, etc etc - and if you add low cost "Internet of Things" devices it can be immense

ARPU can vary between "Free" - is location services are given away as part of something else, and directly "paid for" - the horizontal axis - and depending on your assumption here that gives you a number to multiply by your no. of users, and you get a market size.

Update (forgot to add): One also has to be very careful about who gets this new money. The owners of the real estate - the device and the LBS info transport networks (eg operators) - have real market power here and will absorb a lot of any surplus.

We built a number of scenarios for our client, and its worth looking at the two key ones - ie there will be a large number of users for services which are low cost to use, ie are typically funded in some other way (ie the "market" as such will never see the value). Ad funding - the beloved "Ad push discount to find a cool restaurant for your friends" business case - will be a small, and "difficult to get right" part of this in our view, mainly because it is invasive of the very limited real estate on the smartphone.

Another viable market will be niche services that deliver real value to a group of people, and they will pay for these. This will be a market of smaller numbers of users but far higher ARPU.

In our view the $13bn market projections is of the "Pangloss" school of forecasting - assuming the best of all possible outcomes in the best of all possible worlds, and our scenarios tended to give an order of magnitude lower set of answers.

I'm OK, You're.....

This slide segments the most likely strategies that consumer based mobile services will adopt, and looks at the likelihood of success. We covered this area in more detail in the post over here, and the potential privacy issues over here

There's always someone looking at you....

We believe that privacy and intelligent usage of people's digital footprint will be critical - as Google Buzz found out, do this wrong and even the most respected player will be torpedoed below the waterline. The slide mentions two amusing "hacks" that illustrate the privacy issues with LBS

- Robmyhouse.com - shows what you can do to mashup location data for helpful services - for burglars . We covered this in more detail over here

- The Invasion of the Foursquare Bot Snatchers - fun hacks of Foursquare to show what a malicious approach could do - we covered this in more detail here

Other issues that were covered in the Q&A (not on slides)

- Biggest B2B markets? In our view, Logistics (Transport, Scheduling, empty truck ride clearing etc) is the major market.

- Why do people use Foursquare, Gowalla etc? First Gen LBS like Dopple failed, 2nd Gen are more "game" like as that has been shown to be more "sticky" for a user, increases the potential of selling virtual goods, and is more likely to get them to divulge personal data

Somebody asked me afterwards why we are so "down" on LBS. I replied that the problem is not us, its the hype cycle around the industry that is driving it to an artificial overvaluation (hey, even a $2bn industry by 2015 is still good) - and everyone is colluding in this. For example, we were interviewed by one of the MSM's (fairly well known) tech journalists on this topic last year, and gave our fairy rational prognosis - as above. The piece when it eventually appeared was totally upbeat and didn't even mention our views as a counter-story. This, if I may say so, is a total dis-service to all those who work in a sector. Big it up by all means, but you are on a hiding to nothing if you don't understand the limits to growth.

I will be talking about some of our location based service research next week at Mashup events, and one of the areas I want to talk about is abuse of LBS - one of the issues I see is that people who drink the LBS Kool Aid assume that all participants will have good intentions at all times - ie these systems are woefully inadequately protected, and this is a major risk as history show that when money appears, human motives shift from benign and altruistic to power, greed and fear (to quote Machiavelli).

However, instead of me being boring and banging on about it, excerpts from this brilliant essay on how to pervert Foursquare should both amuse you and make the point. Jim Bumgardner first used the Foursquare API to create lots of new locations to make himself Mayor of:

At some point last week, I devolved into a 12 year old hacker, and I spent many spare hours (and my computer’s spare cycles) abusing the system with a set of scripts operating fake accounts. Not only did I add new venues like the North Pole, but I started persistently checking into coveted landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty.

What can I say? It was fun, and foursquare’s incentives (badges and mayorships) spurred me on. Incentives invite abuse, even from mild-mannered folks like me.

Then he started to use the API and a bit of hacking to bump off other people:

I created five “Java Monkeys” which grabbed about 120 different Starbucks in different regions (east, west, midwest, south, intl). I identified and targeted hotly contested Starbucks by searching Twitter for recent oustings. My script automatically visited those ones, to the consternation of the new mayors.

And then he started creating fake personae:

I created a fake Martha Stewart who checks into dollar stores and pawnshops when not visiting Martha Stewart Omnimedia and the set of her TV Show.

I created a fake Simon Cowell who visits massage parlors and gets lunch at Hotdog on a Stick when not visiting the Kodak theater.

I think you can start to see the potential for the damage that can be done, and he also covers how he started to use algorithms to monitor Foursquare activity to pick up behaviour patterns (he used it to get badges for creating swarms, though you can imagine less benign uses). My favourite abuse was when he started to re-categorise landlocked areas as boats:

Finally, I started giving people free sailboats. I found that if you checked into a venue tagged “boat,” you automatically get the awesome “I’m on a boat” badge; and unlike the other badges, it only requires a single check-in. So I started identifying high-traffic places via the above Twitter search, and then adding the tag “boat”. Suddenly, visitors to metropolitan airports and various sports arenas got free sailboats for Valentine’s Day.

Though its interesting what people value:

The “Java Monkeys” got the biggest reactions. Foursquare users get far more irate when they lose mayorship of a Starbucks, as compared to a Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore. People are much more attached to the small places they visit over and over, and have some personal investment in. The smaller the venue, the bigger the value.

Now, think of all that wonderfully funny creativity being used to subvert a service that is using real user data and making transactions. As you can see, just a few of these sort of raids would lead to a Google Buzz level of bad buzz.

Amidst news that Foursquare is growing like Topsy, (I don't get it - clunky UI, minimal user benefits, but hey...) interesting thoughts re the tradeoff of User Experience vs Privacy.....Venture Blog's David Hornik:

Over the last few weeks I've started to suffer from Four Square fatigue. After all, Four Square is a lot of work. To get the benefits of Four Square, you need to proactively check in wherever you go. And, while each checkin requires a relatively small amount of work, in the aggregate, it takes real effort to make the most of the Four Square experience.

Which leads to this interesting thought:

Would it be better if Four Square just checked you in automatically any time you lingered at a location for more than 15 or 20 minutes? Or does that cross the privacy line for most of us?

The challenges of Four Square have gotten me thinking more broadly about privacy on the web. On the one hand, the less proactive input a service requires, the less friction there is in maintaining its usefulness. Automatic Four Square naturally will produce more data, on average, than does a Four Square that requires proactive behavior. And, for many, the Four Square experience would be greatly enhanced. On the other hand, when data is being passively collected by a service, there are natural privacy concerns that come with that data collection. How many of us want our every daily stop published to the Web? So perhaps automatic Four Square would turn away more users than it would attract.

This maps to some research we did last year on location privacy (see chart above). In a nutshell, the best interests of the user are not aligned to the best interests of teh service provider and thus we can predict an assault on user privacy - game based LBS services being one of the most effective ways (see our original discussion here). Now, the VentureBlog author isn't worried:

We have all seen that consumers are willing -- often times happy -- to trade privacy for utility. I know that I am. And, while Mark Zuckerburg's statement that privacy is a generational concern was controversial, I think he is absolutely right about that. The coming generations of consumers may not abandon the idea of privacy in its entirety, but they will certainly have very different views of the appropriate balance between privacy and utility. That balance has already clearly shifted in the direction of utility and I believe the trend will continue.

To some this will be viewed as a warning -- a cry of the coming privacy apocalypse. I don't see it that way. As technologies and standards evolve, doors open to new products and services. We are on the verge of an explosion of new ideas.
Automatic Four Square and its progeny are coming. And I, for one, am excited about that.

This Brave New Worldview is very naive, and possibly even irresponsible as worse still it plays into the hands of those who wish to control by monitoring or who wish to use these systems illegally/criminally. As Bruce Shneier has pointed out, the huge privacy defects in Social Media systems guarantee a requirement for strong privacy and anonymity.

We await the first cases of serious LBS privacy abuse in 2010, and the inevitable outcry will make the Phorm brouhaha look like a Phunfair

OK, the obligatory iPad post............

The tech Apple fanboi press has been hyped to the gills, the tech journosphere has been shown wanting, the jokes have abounded - but what is the iPad's likely future - is it possible to predict? Is it "the most important thing Apple has ever done"?

No, of course not - technically it is using a lot of the technology already in the iPod and iPhone, in many ways its a fairly linear evolution ("gimme something like an iPod Touch but with a bigger screen"). Not only that, it doesn't define a new market - tablets have been dreamed of since PC's first emerged (and before).

But it is standard Apple strategy - take a confused market (eReaders, crap tablet PCs, Netbooks) and drive an iconic device complete with its own end to end content supply chain into it. and as a Cat among Pigeons play its rather good.

We worked on one of the next generation e-Readers (Plastic Logic's) 2 years ago, and research done at the time convinced me that there is a demand for a device that allows you to read and interact with media on a slim A4 style tablet with great print graphics.

By pushing the spec Apple has challenged the e-Reader market - why buy a pure e-Reader when you can get a device with some more interactivity (see the comparisons here). Its also says to the the Netbook and tablet PC market that there is a sort of boned down, lowest common denominator tablet design now in contention.

Is there enough market there to justify a new market, or will it bomb like the Newton? Our take is that 10 years later there is a bigger market to go after (e-Reader, Netbook, tablet) but its still not huge. But given that its an offshoot of existing technology (so low R&D costs) the business case makes sense, and it disrupts some potential competitors (who'd buy a Kindle, now?). So why not?

The one strategic weakness I see is that compared to other tablets this is low cost, that's not Apple's usual schtick - they tend to have smaller production (ie higher costs) of devices that can sell at a higher premium to certain sectors of the market who happen not to be price conscious.

But this device is priced low for a tablet, they may find that margins here aren't like they are elsewhere in the Appleverse, as competitors will (I am sure) come out quite fast now as happened with Netbooks. And this doesn't quite have the same lock-in as a phone.

So - nice play as an extension product, reasonable market to go after, but will be hit by increasing competition far sooner than in Apple's other recent forays. However, by integrating iPod and iPhone I'm sure it can insulate itself from the competition, for a year or so anyway.

Update - I see Dave Terrar has some interesting thoughts, and Google's Eric Schmidt agrees with us - eventually

My notes from Mashup Events "What Your (Mobile) Apps Strategy" session:

First up was Jon Moore of the Guardian

Guardian app is £3.59p, it gives you content you can't see for free on the Web. My colleague Paul lancefield (writer of our first iPhone app) is impressed with it. His key lessons are:

Lesson 1 have ambitious objectives
Lesson 2 know your audience for App and test
Lesson 3 Delight your audience the Apps store is the thing you have to influence -would one put this on their home screen

Biggest problem he sees going forward - too much crap on iStore

Then Charles Weir Penrillion looked at the various options

iPhone - Only viable market today, but this is a tough market - expensive and difficult to market apps (huge number, very few are making money - string power law)
Symbian big market, but OS is cr*p at apps
Android - operators love it as it breaks Apple monoploy but still nothing really there
Blackberry - Corporates and low end youth smartphone Market - could be promising
Others - small beer

Mobile applications re still bedevilled by the problem of interoperability on different platforms - Its a big cost to port to all the platforms as there is no single language to write it in - so some functions are only available on certain devices. iPhone is the most promising market but deployment is an issue with so many apps on it, its impossible to find one App without a lot of marketing effort. There needs to be a way of finding good apps. However, he believes the iPhone model is how Apps will be sold in 3 years

Gerd Leonhardt - Futurist

Some soundbites:

- It's not about technology it's about emerging practices - that's where the money is
- IPad - the way we interact with it will define what it does
- With Apps, it's about packaging
- Social Media is not the thing, the key to its value is what it actually does for you

There are no clear answers in current Market, but feels that Mobile + Social = money . Also, loads of mobiles on low cost data plans will change the way mobiles are used

Panel - chaired by Vicky Chowney, it had the above speakers also and two more people on it:

Taron Maberry, BT
Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic

Panel Questions

Is mobile app same as net?

- Fragmentation is back thanks to all the players
- Android firmware always changes, Apple then Blackberry priority

How do you make money?

- Freemium will dominate in early days where ads don't work - but challenge is conversion
- Added value of community is valuable
- If you want to monetize today it's Apple as the only ooption
- Ad market moving to mobile/social but still ~ 1%
- If you have nothing on the edge you can't do freemium (Leonhardt - not sure what he means)
- Customer Acquisition have to get customers into the door not anything else, upselling is a % game
- Mobile allowed Guardian to access new Market (Ovum comment from floor - the real story is that you can't get people to pay for Guardian online but they will pay on mobile)

iPad?
- based on iPod technology, see it as a market extension of existing technology
- IPad won't work as a scaled up iPhone

Sustainability ?

A chap from Natwest noted they launched an iPhone app, and in weeks a fake Natwest app on Android was launched

Role of App Store?

- At the moment it's near useless - too many apps, too hard to find
- Today, the Twitter/Social media audience has close correlation to Apple demographic Algorithm drives early marketing success when app hits appstore
- GetJar is a good alternative approach
- There is a risk that iStore will get games by "Disposable Apps" ie Appstore becomes like 2nd Life, where Coporates have to prove they are "Groovy"

How do we build engagement?

- What is it for your audience/Market ?
- Does it fit your aims?

My Conclusions are:

1. Planet Mobile still suffers from the fundamental problem of too many sub-scale platforms. Nothing has changed in 10 years. The iPhone is the best bet, but is still subscale (as Charles Weir showed, even the biggest selling apps are not making the sort of money that can sustain an industry (for consumers anyway - we think SOHO/SME may be different as there is revenue from other sources in the value chain - more on this later).

2. The iStore model falls over at the moment as once too many applications get on it, its very hard to find (i) what you want, and (ii) which is the best option. This is because the meta-services we see elsewhere on teh Web (comparison sites etc) have not yet emerged. This seems to be a useful area for growth.

3. The market is still in massive flux, smartphones are only just getting smart enough to do more than browse the web, form and function are being experimented with still (iPad, multiple .

4. At the moment, the best way to ensure an application works across all platforms is still web access.

Planet Mobile - the more things change, the more they stay the same.........

Our first iPhone Application is demonstrated tomorrow at Mashup's "Apps- Whats your Strategy" Event.

Its an application that lets you photograph documents with an iPhone, then tag and store them and share them on Google Docs. Why? Well, this takes you down an App strategy. We think that SOHO/SME will pay far more for useful applications than consumers will, and will pay on an ongoing basis for useful additions. So, on to (ta-dah)

The Portable Paperless Office

Whatever Happened To The Paperless Office, we hear you ask? It hasn't happened - its too big a task, and too difficult to integrate, too inconvenient and for the most part - outside of some parts of the corporate arena - forgotten

But imagine if we used a few of today's technologies and shrank it all - and made it mobile? We believe that today there are all the elements required for the truly effective and ubiquitous mobile paperless office:

- Phone replaces the scanner
- 3G allows fast transmission to cloud storage
- Paperless Office app supports really fast scanning, OCR and filing of a document on the iPhone
- Captured documents are stored locally and mirrored remotely

So we built an end to end delivery chain system to do just this. Come and see it tomorrow.

As you know, we are a consultancy and system design house, but most of our systems are embedded deep in other companies' stuff so never seen. This is one off our own bat, and we would be keen to talk to others who want to add functionality to it, or embed it in their systems.

(And yes, we have the scars from building Apps on iPhones, and integrating to the Google cloud, Don't let anyone tell you its easy - most of what we blog about has some basis in our real network design experience, hence some healthy Cloud scepticism in Broadsight Towers)

And yes, we will integrate it to the iPad, when the hype dies down After all, it has no camera - yet....

Last night's Mashup Mixer Event on Augmented Reality was a refreshing change on so many AR events right now - it was realistic about the industry! Speakers Nick Brown (ex Sky CTO) and Andrew Elia of Crossplatform discussed AR today and in the near future from the point of view of (brace yourself) making money.

Now AR has been around for at least 20 years, and MIT has been playing with mobile AR for at least 10 years. The current AR hype is because of the emergence of the first smartphones that are vaguely powerful enough to handle it. However, as the Crossplatform guys pointed out, the smartphone market of today is:

- Small (ie the value to advertisers is still relatively low)
- Fragmented (ie what works on one phone is expensive to make work on another)
- Non-standardised (high costs of building a service)
- Smartphones are powerful, but not that powerful

Standard story for mobile applications over the last 10 years, then. To these analyses we would add the following points:

- on-phone real estate is just not big enough yet for the "location based mass billboard Ads" envisaged by all the apostles.
- because of this, services will be "pull" services of "thin data", not push of volumes of commercial data

In other words, valuable niche services and games are more likely to be the ones that succeed in the early days.

The Crossplatform team believe that in the short term, Ad driven AR will mainly be driven by interactive and digital TV markets as they have the volumes and reach.

The rest of the talk was about how to design AR proposals for overall campaigns, and how to justify its business case. They ended with a plea for AR developers to think about performance metrics from the get go, or it will be very hard to get the services taken up by commercial entities.

(The Broadsight report on The Future of Augmented Reality will be available mid February)

Fascinating report set on the Future of Mobile from Morgan Stanley (hat tip Streetwise). The report comes in 3 bits:

1) “The Mobile Internet Report Setup” – a 92-slide presentation that excerpts highlights of the key themes from the report.

2) “The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes” – a 659-slide presentation that drills down on thoughts covered in “The Mobile Internet Report.”

3) “The Mobile Internet Report” – a 424 page report which explores 8 major themes in depth and includes the two aforementioned slide presentations + related overview text.

I've read the highlights so far, and will be going through the others in the next few days. Morgan Stanley summarise their key findings as below, my comments are in italics:

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter. (Standard new wave pattern described, but the greater wealth creation/destruction argument is harder to justify)

The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years. (Decent devices (thanks to iPhone), lower cost of access and understood benefits make faster rampup a no brainer now - but the point made above still holds - are they as high value?)

Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices. (Social Networking is a current flavourite of the month - the killer app is always comms, insofar as Social Networks facilitate this they will succeed or fail. Twitter and the like are superb unified comms systems so play well to this)

Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate – their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented.(Facebook raises the bar? I'd argue Twitter is pushing Facebook and all the others at the moment. Facebook has the users but its still very clunky on mobile)

Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization. (People have tried to reproduce DoCoMo elsewhere before and failed, we've been watching it for 10 years and I can't see anything that's changed that recently. Industry structure in the West is different - see below - and does not play to a DoCoMo model, Apple ran an over the top model which is in our view the one to watch in US and Europe)

Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers. (Yes, but carriers still have the main power in the value chain in US and Europe - which is why DoCoMo has failed in the past. Some countries eg Scandinavians, France have moved to a more Japanese-like model of state defined market structure so may be easier to ))

Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile. (Yes, but....the mobile pipes fill up fast, and have nowhere near teh carrying capacity of fixed line backbones. But at least a service can get off the ground and the fixed line infrastructure can come later)

A fascinating report, with much to study. But, I have a standard policy with all forecats from Planet Mobile, which is to halve the early predictions - its worked well for 10 years so I see no reason not to do so here, yet