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Robin is co-founder of RefreshMobile Ltd which was Forum Nokia developer of the year for 2006/7. Refresh has developed a number of innovative products including Mobizines (a client providing magazines on phones), Eyemags (user generated magazines on phones) and most recently Mippin (which mobilises the web for Mobile in the browser). See this blog on your mobile at http://mippin.com/forumnokia
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Robin Jewsbury's Forum Nokia Blog
World "everyone connected day" 11th June 2012?
robin.jewsbury | 26 April, 2008 17:39
Perhaps someone can help. I've setup a site at http://phonecount.com which has dynamic counters showing the world population and the number of connected phones at this moment in time. Given the current rates of increase of both I work out when the total number of connected phones is equals to the total world population - I ended up with 11th June 2012. I use poetic license to call this "everyone connected day". Of course not everyone will have a phone, but many people will have more than one phone and this will make up for those without phones. To me this will be an important day for our industry as conceptually it marks the point that everyone is connected via voice and the Internet.
The question is have I got the right figures? I got the world population figures from the US Census Office so I think that's OK. The phone growth figures was taken off the GSMA site and I found this more difficult. I ended up getting a figure of 200M growth per quarter and then inferred 25.72 additional phones per second. Does anyone have a better source for this as it seems a little bit of an estimate? Also has anyone else done this before? Am I the first?
Also please forgive the blatant advertising of my own product on this site. I have to justify the effort taken somehow.
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Prediction
robin.jewsbury | 27/04/2008, 01:44
The prediction is a pure linear projection. Now in reality you would expect the prediction to follow an 'S' shape. Currently the phone growth is on a weakly rising exponential, that is the beginning of the 'S' and you might expect the curve to flatten as it approaches 100% penetration. However, its more complex because penetration might well go above 100% - can this happen in a world context? I expect many to doubt it, but I think it really could happen because of low cost phones being sold - hence my feeling a linear projection is realistic. I guess this one can be debated.
Statistics
JOM | 28/04/2008, 07:28
The curve is going to boom right top of 100%, so you might want to check your algorithm again. I don't really trust statistics, but here's some links because of their history information:
First from Eurostat about Europe.
Second from UNESCAP about Asia
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page?_pageid=1996,39140985&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&screen=detailref&language=en&product=Yearlies_new_population&root=Yearlies_new_population/C/C7/ecb11024
http://www.unescap.org/stat/data/syb2007/17-Information-and-communication-technology.asp
Cheers,
--jouni
Correction
JOM | 28/04/2008, 07:32
Re: World "everyone connected day" 11th June 2012?
craggitt | 30/04/2008, 19:21
it would be cool if it happens but with rising inflation and slowing economy's around the worlds richest countries it is/or will cause a slowdown in the market place so i think it might take a couple years longer unless we see the current state of thing's get better ,but man experts predict it to get worse.With food prices getting higher by the day more people are soon going to be forgetting about things they could live without
re: slowing economy
robin.jewsbury | 30/04/2008, 19:50
Its the economies in India, China and the rest of the underdeveloped world which will define the growth. The slowing of the western economies will have little effect on these numbers actually (since these markets are mostly saturated anyway). Also this article (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/telecoms/article3368000.ece ) interested me. It predicts the £5 phone which I could see becoming free in some markets via subsidies.
This is a very interesting area... especially as no-one really knows what will happen...
Re: World "everyone connected day" 11th June 2012?
kandyfloss | 26/04/2008, 23:43
But how do you get the predictive statistics?