Date: Thur, 24 Jan 2007 18:00:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - January 24






                                        SuitWatch -- January 24, 2007
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 The Mobile Life

   My problem is that I'm still a writer. Worse, a reporter. Worse yet, an
   editor. I'll cop to my prejudices, but I do like to get my facts straight.
   Other folks' facts too. It's an antique value, coupled to antique habits.
   For example, I may be typing this on a laptop keyboard, but my pounding
   fingers and worn keys testify to decades spent thundering away on upright
   manual typewriter

   We were like masons working rocks back then, pounding prose onto paper we
   hated to waste, because that meant we were also wasting time. There was no
   backspacing out of errors, no copying and pasting. Your prose had to come
   out logically and stay that way, forcefully building a case or a story or a
   feature, or whatever. Your typing didn't need to be perfect, but it had to
   be readable by other editors, and by typesetters.

   Now the words flow like water from our fingertips, pouring into vast oceans
   of prose, laced with sounds and pictures both moving and still. As readers
   we're not drowning in it, though sometimes it feels that way. The specific
   gravity of attention is less than that of prosewater, so we float around on
   the top, looking for stuff when we aren't busy also creating it.

   Looking is easy. Finding is another matter, at least if you're in the hunt
   for facts, or data that's close enough.

   Statistics, for example.

   Right now I'm looking for some statistics about mobile phones. Also about
   mobile devices in general. My purpose is not to just to write stuff, but to
   provide thought-provoking fodder for the Mobile Identity Workshop
   (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/identity/Mobile_Identity_Workshop), which
   Harvard's Berkman Center is putting on in San Francisco tomorrow. The
   workshop will be led by yours truly, in my first public performance as a
   Berkman Fellow.

   Questions crowd the front of my mind. "How many mobile phone are we using in
   the world today? Is any other digital technology more widely used -- or more
   personal? And how can we use them to assert more capable and powerful roles
   for ourselves, as customers and as citizens? Can our cell phones carry and
   present the credentials we need to engage organizations in helpful ways? How
   can mobile technology help us improve the both the efficiency and humanity
   of the social spaces we call markets?

   I figure only the first question is searchable. Since I'm guessing the
   answer should have "billion" in it, so I look up billion mobile phones
   (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=billion+mobile+phones) on Google.
   The lucky top result is "Two billion phone mark reached"
   (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26253) by Tony Dennis in The
   Inquirer, dated 18 September 2005. It sources Wireless Intelligence
   (https://www.wirelessintelligence.com/), a company that sells data for a
   living (and offers little current help for non-customers on its website).
   Tony adds, "Curiously world No: 1 vendor, Nokia, reckons it will take five
   years to put on the next billion. After all with an estimated 6.5 billion
   people in the world, we're running out of people to flog new phones to." Who
   at Nokia?, I wonder. Does the whole company "reckon"? What's the source
   here? He doesn't say.

   The next result is "2.5 Billion Mobile Phones in Use"
   (http://www.cellular-news.com/story/19223.php), a story in Cellular News
   that also sources Wireless Intelligence. This one also has no date, but one
   paragraph offers a hint: "Over the four quarters to the end of September
   2006, world total net additions were 484 million. Of these, 41% were in Asia
   Pacific. Eastern Europe and Latin America together accounted for 30% of the
   growth. Africa took 10% of the growth and the relatively mature markets of
   Western Europe, North America and the Middle East took the remaining 20% in
   more or less equal measure." So I figure the vintage is recent. It adds,
   "According to Wireless Intelligence forecasts the next half billion new
   connections will take a little longer to be added - 16 months - meaning that
   the market is on track to reach 3 billion connections around the end of
   2007."

   The next result is "Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users"
   (http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html),
    by Tomi T Ahonen in Communities Dominate Brands
   (http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/), which is the name of
   both the blog and the book co-authored by Ahonen and Alan Moore. It's an
   interesting post that compares the 2.7 billion mobile phone figure with cars
   at 800 million, landline phones at 1.3 billion, TVs at 1.5 billion, credit
   cards at 1.4 billion, PCs at 850 million, and Internet connections at 1.1
   billion. Great stuff, but what are the sources? By now my stonemason
   mentality has me yelling at the screen.

   The next result is "Mobile phones: more than two billion served"
   (http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS7957256950.html), at Windows For
   Devices. "The two billionth mobile phone subscriber worldwide signed up at
   the end of September, 2005, says ABI Research
   (http://www.abiresearch.com/). The market data firm expects the three
   billionth mobile phone subscriber to sign up sometime before the end of
   2008." It also says "2008 might also see the 3,500,000,000th mobile
   customer", sourcing ABI Research (). When I go there looking for more, I
   find it's another research house that wants you to pay for the numbers. It
   does offer a pile of press releases
   (http://www.abiresearch.com/media.jsp?page=1&perpage=20) to dredge
   through, but I'd rather press on through other Google search results first.
   On July 5, 2005, Windows for Devices also sourced
   (http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS5566717572.html) a fresh
   Gartner report that predicted that "shipments of mobile phones will surpass
   1 billion units in 2009". (Wondering... How many old mobile phones are
   purgatoried in desk drawers?)

   Next is an Inquir (http://codemode.org/) piece from December, 2005
   titled "3 billion mobile subscribers in 2008, not 2010: Nokia". The link
   uselessly redirects to the link-packed but non-helpful Inquir index page;
   but Google has kindly cached the original
   (http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Rs_pTqBgkqUJ:codemode.org/viewitem.php%3Flinkid%3D15078+3+billion+mobile+phones&hl=en≷=us&ct=clnk&cd=3).
   It begins, "The industry is expecting 3 billion mobile subscribers by 2008,
   not 2010 as earlier predicted, according to mobile phone vendor Nokia."
   Specifically, "'We've changed our forecast due to the faster growth in
   emerging markets,' said Parikshit Bhasin, country general manager of Nokia
   Philippines at a yearend briefing."

   So that's pretty solid, source-wise. Mr. Bhasin is just one guy, but he's
   talking about a company forecast.

   I'll continue on my fact-gathering mission. Meanwhile, as my SuitWatch
   deadline arrives, I find myself wondering if there shouldn't be a connection
   between mobile technology and search.

   When we're mobile, our timeframe is anchored in the present. Mobility in
   action is about what's happening now. Meanwhile, search of the sort we find
   in Google's main engine is all about the static Web. It's about the pile of
   Everything to which Anything else links. If the most links for "billion",
   "mobile" and "phone" go to a document published two years ago, that's your
   top result. (Yeah, I know PageRank is more complicated than that, but the
   core algorithm is about inbound link votes.)

   Meanwhile the Live Web is also growing out there. I've written about this
   before, in Searching the World Live Web
   (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8573), The Chronological Web
   (http://www.itgarage.com/node/739), among other pieces -- and in talks
   (http://www.edbatista.com/2005/12/doc_searls_at_s.html) such as
   "Cluetrain +7: The Dawn of the Live Web and the Intention Economy"
   (http://www.searls.com/doc/presentations/2006samtalerne/). What I've
   observed is a split between the Static Web of "sites" with "addresses" and
   "locations" that we "architect" and "build", and the Live Web where we
   "post" and "blog" and "podcast" and "syndicate" -- and where engines such as
   Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati populate their indexes within
   minutes or even seconds of when a post goes up, or anything else happens.

   I've been thinking about the Live Web mostly in terms of the Web of course,
   which has for most of its history been a Computer Thing. My nature as a
   writer gives me a pro-Web prejudice, naturally. I hate to admit that my
   favorite cell phones have been phones. Not cameras or game devices or Web
   cruisers.

   Yet to be alive is to be mobile. Could it be that the biggest portion of the
   Live Web is the one that will connect 3+ billion human beings through their
   mobile devices? That's a good topic to bring up tomorrow at the Mobile
   Identity Workshop.

   At this writing there's still room for more participants, by the way. Go
   here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/identity/Sign-Up_Page, to sign up on
   the workshop wiki: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/identity/Sign-Up_Page. Look
   forward to seeing you there.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
     the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
     a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
     University.
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