Sherine Nasr finds out that getting connected has become second nature In the technological realm of today's world, the aim to accomplish more tasks in an efficient, cost-effective and faster manner is dictating which direction new advancements are heading. It is almost impossible to perceive how the world will look like in 10 years from now. The information and communication technologies (ICT) industry is certainly flourishing and creating new realities in too fast a pace a layman can ever grasp. "Data traffic is exploding and more capable devices are driving the process. This can change the way we look at things," said Hakan Eriksson, senior vice president, chief technology officer and head of Ericsson in Silicon Valley during the Ericsson Business Innovation Forum held recently in San Jose, the de facto capital of the world's famous Silicon Valley. Acting as the innovation hub of the world, the Silicon Valley is where GPS, Google maps, smartphones and iPads have all been invented. It is, therefore, home of ICT giants including Ericsson, Apple, Intel, Google and Yahoo to name but a few. The fact of the era is that people need to get connected and they continue to do so in a more advanced manner. A good example was the royal wedding in Buckingham, an event that increased Internet traffic by 35 per cent during that day. "Broadband is going to be commonplace in four years from now," said Eriksson. The latest statistics have shown that 800 million young people aged 14 in India, South East Asia, China, the Middle East and Africa will roll into broadband services; hence, they are going to extend the mobile society. "They have the ability and the devices and they are already connected. Yet, they need more facilities and services," said Douglas Gilstrap, senior vice president and chief technologist, Ericsson. Studies conducted by Ericsson have shown that poor people in Africa, Latin America and Asia are ready to skip meals and make other financial sacrifices to get access to mobiles and data services. "We found out that using mobiles enabled them to save money by cutting out middlemen when selling their harvest and by avoiding lengthy travels. Mobiles also helped them become more entrepreneurial. They could also get more job opportunities," said Erik Kruse of Networked Society Lab. Cities are now assessed for their ICT maturity. Some interesting findings have been underlined by the Networked Society City Index (NSCI) based on the United Nations list of the largest cities; ICT mature cities have shown a better economic, social and environmental development and a more positive return on investment. For example, for every 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration, the isolated economic effect on GDP growth is around one per cent, while with every 1,000 additional broadband users roughly 80 new jobs are created. Cairo ranks 16th on the index. A major trend of today's reality is urbanisation. Notably, more than 50 per cent of the world's population lives in urban areas, and by 2030 the number may jump to 60 per cent. "Today, more than 20 cities are classified as megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants. By 2020, at least eight more cities will grow into megacities," Kruse said. On the mobility side, while connecting people to people has been the norm, connecting machine to machine (M2M) for an easier life is on the rise now. "Anything that needs to be connected will be connected. This applies to anything that is not a phone. The new trend is rapidly prevailing in different sectors be it security, logistics, pharmaceuticals, or household tasks," said Gilstrap. Well then, does a cow need to be connected? "Absolutely," says Wayne Ward, vice president of Emerging Solutions, Sprint Nextel. "This will determine the cow's food intake, due vaccination and how to spot it, among other things," said Ward. The new trend to put connectivity to everything in order to provide operational efficiency and make consumers more satisfied will create the type of growth in the ICT industry within the next decade that will change the face of the world. When addressing possible applications, the sky is the limit; remote monitoring and in-home care in the health sector, fleet management, safety and convenience in transportation, collaborative and personalised learning, anywhere and anytime access in education, surveillance, asset tracking and protection in security, and the list goes on. "It is all about connectivity. A whole new world is formulating and in this new world, possibilities are endless," said Ward. Paul Saffo, consulting associate professor at Stanford University, could not agree more. "The next two decades will see more changes than the past half a century," commented Saffo. These new realities, he believes, have already made the shift from the consumer economy where TV played a central role to lure people into buying new products to the creator economy, "where ordinary people are making new things without even realising it." It is ordinary now for anybody to make a Wikipedia entry or broadcast items on Facebook or YouTube. The introduction of smartphones has added a new dimension to the consumer's behaviour. People are constantly interacting with their smartphones and many consumers are using applications that integrate Internet use into their most basic everyday activities. When consumers were asked by Ericsson ConsumerLab studies what next device to purchase, smartphones topped the list (19 per cent), followed by laptops (16 per cent), tablet computers (13 per cent). However, consumers, particularly in the US and Japan, associate the new online experience with the applications and services rather than with the device itself. "So while people are currently on a smartphone honeymoon, the smartphone itself may turn out to be easier to replace than the actual applications," says an Ericsson consumer insight summary. It is an era of data explosion: - 5,500 billion mobile subscriptions. - 15 billion downloaded applications. - 785,000 applications in application stores. - 200 million smartphones shipped in 2010. - 79 per cent are Internet users in the US. - Smartphone revenues are greater than mobile phone revenues. Long-term Evolution (LTE) fact sheet of three continents; America, Europe and Asia
