Eric Schmidt recently spoke about the “Tipping Point” for mobile at a Telecomm roundtable in Davos. What has actually “Tipped” in mobile? For argument sake, lets define “Tipping Point” as the point where adoption becomes main stream. For mobile, “Tipping Point” would then depend on the underlying technolgies you are talking about such as Voice, SMS, J2ME, Video, WAP, Location etc.
For voice there is no question its the most pervasive and widely adopted mobile technology with over 270M or about 85% of the population in the US using it. One could also argue that SMS is a close 2nd but has it really reach its “Tipping Point”. The reality TV show American Idol helped make the SMS market what is it today but according to M:Metrics – in September 2007, only 97M or 45% of mobile users are using SMS. The adoption rate for games, email, IM are even lower ( in the 3-10% range). One could argue that with the exception of voice and SMS, not much has ”Tipped”.
Filed under: open networks
