High-tech world salivates over Internet cellphones
BOSTON, United States (AFP) — A grandmother reminisces: born in Marseille, France, she studied in Athens and Mumbai in virtual classrooms by cellphone and used her phone to play with friends around the world.
This futurist video, presented at the Mobile Internet World conference here this week by Ericcson, the world's leading mobile networks maker, unveils some industry professionals' dreams for Internet-connected mobile phones which they say are destined to change our lives in the next five years.
Pankaj Asundi, vice president of content and media at the Swedish giant, like many other participants, also presented on a huge screen photos of adolescents surrounded by electronic devices.
"This generation is doing more than ourselves. They are digital natives," said Asundi. "They are constantly connected, they spend thousands of hours in email, SMS (short-message service, or text messaging), online, social networks, have multiple identities online. It shows what our lifestyle could be."
"And in some countries, first experience of the Internet happens on these little devices," he added, referring to cellphones.
Most of the participants at the three-day conference that ended Thursday spoke at length about their conversations with their adolescent children, who are consumed with the Internet and text messaging.
The most imaginative participants at the conference were the advertisers.
"I come near a Coke machine, a tropical music rises, and it says to me, with a sweet voice: 'Hey Larry, don't you want a cold Coke? Just open your phone!' And I open my phone and there's a Coke falling," said Larry Weber, chief executive of marketing firm W2 Group.
"You'll be a member of different communities. Like fishing. Or your faith. If you ask your friends in your social network what they think of a restaurant, the restaurant could know it and send you a coupon," he predicted.
Tim Berners-Lee, a founding father of the Internet and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), said the small screens on portable devices will be a pathway to giant screens.
"There will be pixels everywhere, on walls, large screens, you'll be able to take what's on your phone seamlessly onto a big screen, across all the devices, and switch between these things very easily," Berners-Lee said.
"There is a huge amount of creativity, a huge amount of new applications that we cannot imagine," he added.
As for business executives, they are already imagining the profits from this hyper-connected technological future.
Juniper Research, an industry research firm, predicts that casino gaming on cellphones will top five billion dollars by 2012 and mobile games will reach nearly 10 billion dollars by 2009.
The new technologies will make it easier for consumers to pay for goods and services.
About 52 million consumers will adopt technologies to use their mobile devices to pay for goods and services by 2011, pushing the mobile payments market to 11.5 billion dollars, the British research group forecast.
By the same year, about 12 percent of the total mobile phones in circulation will offer direct payments methods, it said.
And mobile broadcast television, which along with mobile Internet appears the most promising usage for cellphones, should reach 120 million consumers in 40 countries by 2012, a tenfold increase from the current level, Juniper Research said.
