Mobile Ministry Magazine

Posted also via this week's Carnival of the Mobilists, I've recently published an interview of Interview with Tomi Ahonen. He is the author of the book Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media and a 2009 Mobile-Fact Almanac. Here's a snippet of the interview:

The internet has legitimately been the biggest disruptive effect to all of global industry and business in the last two decades. And the internet will cause MORE changes in the next ten years than the last 20 years. So far more is yet to come. Now consider mobile. The first downloadable content for mobile phones was sold just over ten years ago, in the autumn of 1998, when in Finland some little company named Saunalahti (now part of the Elisa group) decided to sell this little things they called ringing tones. The ringing tone business rapidly became a 5 billion dollar global industry. But that one idea spawned a mobile content and data services industry in only ten years, that is now worth.. 200 billion dollars. The mobile "internet" and data industry, including SMS text messaging and premium messaging like voting on American Idol, etc, has grown to be rougly as big as the total internet industry, in only half the time. This to me, suggests that the mobile data opportunity is far less understood than the internet. It is also a more dynamic opportunity (if that is even possible) and about to grow to become bigger than the internet, in about only half the time. Mobile is difficult and complex, but it is a huge opportunity and it is a major cannibalization threat, even more so than the internet was. Any industry and business will ignore mobile at its own peril.

Read the rest of the interview at my personal website. The interview and book contributed greatly to the MMM BibleTech presentation.

Labels: Carnival of the Mobilists, interview, mobility