The title of this post -- which sounds like some sort of mashup between a Philip K. Dick and Roald Dahl short -- is instead the future. Don't stare directly at the future! You just did it again! Look away...
Jokes aside, the explosive growth of mobile broadband and personal smartphone/tablet devices is truly something to behold. In a recent LA Times piece, David Sarno cites the Global Mobile Traffic Forecast from Cisco, to estimate that 6.3 exabytes (or "the equivalent of every man, women and child on earth sending 1,000 text messages every second") will be sent each month globally by 2015.
These are staggering figures, but easy to accept when one considers that in many areas of the world, mobile is the only web, since fixed Internet was never a part of the infrastructure.
Mary Meeker, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, calls this "the fifth most major technology cycle of the past half century."
MaintainPR calls it the unstoppable mobile web, and it excites and concerns us on a daily...hell...hourly (if you look at the speed which mobile-related technology news is flying out at) basis.
Take today as an exampled. During the time I have taken to write this post, we have had first impressions of the app-dominating iPhone 4 running for the first time on a new major U.S. network, the launch event and anouncement for Google's tablet-scaled OS, continuing commentary on the web-based version of the Android App Marketplace (which was announced yesterday)...oh, and how about some investing advice from Forbes around Nokia, one of the silent, but still dominant mobile web players.
Head spinning yet? What if I told you that the Wall Street Journal is reporting world-wide revenue from mobile apps to triple this year to $15 billion?
Whether you love them or hate them, smartphones and mobile apps are about to dramatically alter the way we live. In part 2 of this post, we'll take a look at some of where MaintainPR believes all this is going. Thanks for reading!
