The latest strip from the webcomic CommitStrip:
Click the chart to see it at full size.
Feel free to use this in your presentations and articles; just credit GSG, Global Nerdy, or Joey deVilla!
The number of mobile subscriptions worldwide is now about the same as the number of people worldwide. According to mobile analyst and pundit Tomi Ahonen, the worldwide mobile subscription rate is at 100%, and as an article of ours from last week pointed out, that rate is even higher in the Americas, Arab states, and Europe, and it’s highest in the CIS (former Soviet republics), where there are 141 subscriptions for every 100 people.
Tomi’s latest article on his blog, Communities Dominate Brands, has a lengthy title — Let’s Do 2014 Numbers for the Mobile Industry: Now we are at 100% Mobile Subscription Penetration Rate Per Capita Globally — but it spells out his thesis quite clearly. In his article, he looks at the size of the mobile market and compares it to numbers we think of a “big” but are dwarfed by mobile: TV, PCs, landlines, and cable/satellite. We’ve taken his numbers and turned them into the graph above (and we’d like to thank him for sharing his data so freely).
The article also looks at other numbers, such as:
- Money generated by the worldwide mobile industry. It’s currently worth 1.5 trillion this year, with 1.15 trillion of that coming from service revenues).
- Number of handsets sold: 1.8 billion mobiles sold in 2013, and nearly 1 billion of those were smartphones.
- Internet users: there are 2.9 billion worldwide, with 42% of them — that’s 1.2 billion — accessing the ‘net via mobile, whether smartphone or feature phone.
- The digital divide. In the developed world, there are 2.1 billion mobile subscriptions and a 175% mobile penetration rate (or: the average person in the developed world has 1.75 mobile phones). In the developing world, there are 5 billion subscriptions and an 85% mobile penetration rate (or: for every 100 people in the developing world, there are 85 mobile phones).
- The biggest companies in the world, when you count only their mobile business. The top three are Apple ($112 billion), Samsung ($103 billion), and China Mobile ($91 billion).
If you’d like to see more of Tomi’s insights and be entertained at the same time, watch his presentation, The Platform of the Future?, which he gave at the 2012 NZ Marketing conference in New Zealand in 2012.He rattles off all sorts of interesting observations about mobile technology, and provides statistics aplenty, delivered in his very animated, very amusing style. If you’re looking for some mobility-related lunchtime viewing or want some stimulating “background noise” while you work, this one’s for you:
Two-thirds of emails are opened on mobile devices
Click the photo to read the article.
According to marketing company Movable Ink, 66% of emails were opened either on a smartphone (47.2%) or tablet (18.5%), with the remaining 34% being opened on a traditional PC. Breaking down the numbers even further, Apple mobile device users make up the majority of email openers:
Click the photo to read the article.
They also noted that the opening of email on smartphones experiences a peak in the early morning, providing further evidence for the observation that the first thing many people reach for when they wake up is their smartphone. There’s also a noticeable peak in tablet-based email reading at night:
Click the photo to read the article.
The big take-away from Movable Ink’s observations is that you should assume that any email you send has 2-to-1 odds of being opened on a mobile device. That means you should make sure that any email you send, along with any landing pages that those emails point to, are mobile-friendly.
Lenovo: Playing mobile Moneyball
Click the photo to read the article.
Bloomberg Businessweek summarizes Lenovo’s approach succinctly: as “consumer electronics version of the Moneyball strategy: Instead of ballplayers, Lenovo hunts undervalued businesses in sectors others are desperate to escape.” Over the past ten years, they’ve been taking other tech manufacturers’ cast-offs — most notably IBM’s line of desktops and ThinkPads — rebranding them as their own, and turning them into profitable products. With the global PC market slowing down, and the mobile device market heating up, they purchased Motorola from Google for just under $3 billion and are looking to take on Apple and Samsung.
Nokia’s “History in the Making” ad
It has yet to be seen whether Microsoft’s absorbing Nokia will be a significant event in mobile history or a historical footnote, but the Rube Goldberg machine-themed ad commemorating the event is pretty noteworthy:
Brett Doar was the engineer behind the contraption in the ad; you may have seen his work in the ad for the girls’ engineering toy Goldieblox or indie rock band OK Go!’s video for their number This Too Shall Pass. Nokia have a blog post covering the making of this ad.
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Tech support, meet life support
Hey, it works for all my electronics…
- Nearly 3 billion users,
- Two-thirds of whom — nearly 2 billion — from the developing world, and
- And most internet users — 2.3 billion of them — will be accessing it via mobile broadband. That 5 times the number from 2008, a mere six years beforehand.
This chart, taken from the ITU’s report, The World in 2014: ICT Facts and Figures [1.7MB PDF], shows the rate of mobile broadband adoption for the past six years and a projection for the end of this one:
Click the photo to see the source.
Mobile broadband should used by 84% of the developed world by the end of the year, if the current 11.5% growth rate holds. That growth rate is more than double in the developing world, who should hit 21% penetration by December 31st, 2014.
The average person in the developed world has 1.21 mobile subscriptions. Here are the regions with the highest subscription rates:
Click the photo to see the source.
Here’s a look at the worldwide mobile subscription numbers over the past 8 years, plus a look forward to the end of this one. We’ll hit the 7 billion subscription mark by the end of the year, and the lion’s share of those numbers will come from the developing world:
Click the photo to see the source.
For the full story, including numbers on fixed (or “wireline”, as we like to say at GSG) broadband, see the ITU’s report, The World in 2014: ICT Facts and Figures.
Back in the early 1990s, processor speeds where measured in dual-digit megahertz, RAM was measured in single-digit megabytes, and hard drives were just beginning to creep from the two- to three-digit megabyte capacity. During that time, commercially-available storage in the gigabyte range looked like the big disk, pictured above among the more common 3.5 inch floppy disks for size comparison.
It’s an optical disk cartridge with 2.62 GB capacity. The plastic case isn’t much more than a jumbo-sized version of a 3.5 inch floppy, and the disk medium is the close cousin of CD and DVD R/W technology. If you’d like to get your hands on one, it can be yours for $50 on eBay.
To give you a better idea of its size, here’s how you’d carry it around:
And while it looks like a floppy disk, it’s never going to fit in that A: drive:
These ODCs, as they were called for short, didn’t see much use outside enterprise computing. Instead, these smaller, cheaper backup storage devices rose and for a while were the hottest peripherals to have:
…and if you really needed more storage space (I did, as I was developing interactive CD-ROMs at the time), you had one of these:
In case you don’t recognize it, it’s a Commodore cassette tape drive, which they called the “Datasette”, which was cheaper than a diskette drive.