60% of world spend a mobile xmas

As announced on this mobile blog almost 3 months ago to the day, the UN's head of telecommunications' statement that 60% of the world will be connected to a mobile phone by the end of the year has come true.

According to 3G Americas and reported by Fierce Wireless today, the historic milestone of 4 billion mobile phone users worldwide was passed this December 2008. While Africa was the continent of the mobile in 2008, it looks like South America and the Caribbean will be the most vibrant areas in terms of market growth in 2009... wow! I actually said "market growth" and "vibrant": never thought I'd be saying that among the doom and gloom of 2008!

But I guess that's what it's all about: there are nuggets out there, it is up to us to dig them up and enjoy the opportunities! And with that, I would like to wish all my readers a very happy xmas... looking forward to 2009!

Mobile creates new jobs and dynamism in Nigeria

Apparently, the rapid growth of the mobile industry in a number of emerging economies in the Global South - in this case in Nigeria - is creating jobs, shaking up social mobility, and empowering new communities. According to this great article on mobileactive.org, 10% of the Nigerian population now own mobile phones, and in the past five years a space of 1% of the active population's worth of new jobs have been created directly or indirectly related to the dynamism of mobile services.

Now I'm sure we're not talking about Oyster-/Suica-like e-wallets, GPS location services and other mobile YouTubes. But when there are figures dating back to 2006 (!) that a full 80% of international WAP access to the BBC's WAP site were exclusively from Nigeria and South Africa, we start to see that there is a fairly large gap between perception of mobile as one of many media we use everyday for collecting information from our surroundings and that compete with each other, and other countries where they are the fastest-growing, easiest-accessible, lowest-cost and only means of access to information and close friends and family.

Throw social networking in the mix and heaven forbid what might happen... if it hasn't happened already. Fascinating stuff happening under the noses of the more "developed" West. We may soon be the ones looking at the new "developed" First World of mobile services.