The mobile phone industry has endured crises with the help of a certainty pinned to its chest: We have yet to discover what new fields of the economy mobile communication can cultivate. In France, the latest figures published by regulators suggest a mobile communication penetration rate of more than 95 percent amongst the population. But the market will not stop there. After all, the mobile telephone has expanded to text messaging, music, email, video games and internet access. We are now onto video and television.
Where will we be tomorrow? Without succumbing to a blind faith in eternal growth, we’re witnessing new uses open new markets, one by one. The success of the iPhone and its software platform has led to the emergence of a new profession over the past two years, the mobile phone software developer. As a consequence of the remarkable expansion of the market, boundaries among industries are blurring. Apple, Google and even Intel have become key players in the mobile phone market.
Industries from far and wide have found themselves alongside the mobile phone giants at the international exhibition that has just opened its doors in Barcelona. Homes, machinery and even automobiles can become interconnected. Developers and automobile manufacturers have been working on these new services for some time now. But growth cannot come from technological breakthroughs alone. Maybe what’s needed is for a company like Apple to turn to automobile-making and roll out an iCar for all of these new technologies to really take off, in the same way that mobile internet access, developed years ago, had to wait until the iPhone to become a reality.
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