The Next Billion

An interesting thing is happening in mobile and that is the fact that mobile is becoming the first internet connected device for a majority of the next 1 billion people to get online. This next billion will not be mainly from the developed world but the developing world and that is where there is a hell of a lot of innovation taking place to make that a reality.

Having access to the internet can change lives whether that's access to a medical journal and doctors or knowing what the weather is doing so you know when is best to harvest crops, having access to the internet will be one of the biggest changes for good in this century. We can start to see the importance of mobile in the developing world where often you can’t invest billions of dollars in wiring to get peoples homes connected to broadband. This is why you have to think out of the box and innovate in different ways, for example in Kenya nearly 33% of the countries GDP actually goes through mobile. What an incredible number! All born out of people using mobile airtime as cash so that they could send money to each other via text. Safaricom the local carrier saw this and instead of going against it they decided to make it into a real thing and called it M-Pesa.

The World bank also has said that growth in africa for 2013 is around 5% which is being driven by mobile and the access to the internet. So how else can high speed internet reach everyone in the world efficiently and easily? Well Google think they have the answer with Project Loon which comes out of dream factory Google X. An amazing project that wants to float hundreds of balloons into the stratosphere to beam down internet all over the world. Where companies may be slow to install 3G let alone high speed internet service this technology is one step closer to getting the next billion people online. Below I have put a video that will give you an idea of how the technology works.

With all these new things happening we are going to need devices that people can afford and get them online. It is unlikely that the iPhone 5S is going to be the device that gets the next billion online. The device needs to be cheap its not about technology and features but about the basics like a good battery, good screen and can take a beating in harsh environments. Only a few companies are trying to carve the space up to themselves and one of those is Motorola. Anyone that knows me knows how much I love the Moto X as it is the first phone in a about 3 years that I have used for over 2 months and not gotten bored and moved on to something else. But the phone that blows my mind more than the Moto X is the Moto G a phone that I would recomend to anyone and everyone as their first smartphone and it costs off contract £100. Don't get me wrong this is still a massive amount of money but for what it does it is a step in the right direction and even Motorola released it first in Brazil. Sooner or later we will end up with a similar collective as the $100 laptop but with a phone which can be made cheaper and have broader access to content and applications.

So those are some of the things that I find interesting at the minute and of course I look forward to the future and the innovations that comes from it. There is still a long way to go but the fact that so many people are working on this is great and with mobile about to change the world in ways we haven't even thought of yet to me this is what gets me up in the morning.