I got the ten-minute version of his work. For your convenience, here’s a two minute version, covering some of the figures that might be surprising or interesting to readers of this blog.

Q: How big is mobile?

A: Very big.

The population of the world is 6.8bn. There are 4.6bn mobile phone subscriptions. That’s 700,000 more than there are FM radios; three times as many as there are TV sets; four times as many as there are land line phones or PCs; five times the number of cars in the world.

In the Industrialised World, the penetration rate is 133%. In other words, a third of us have two mobile subscriptions.

In the Emerging World, representing 4/5 of the world’s population, the penetration rate is 56%. Not so high, but mobiles nonetheless account for more than double the number of radios; five times the number of televisions; six times the number of PCs. Ahonen states that mobile is the first media in the emerging world; it’s the “only medium able to reach half of the population”.

Q: What makes the most money?

A: Contracts and access, of course, and then voice calls.

Voice revenues – worth $615bn in 2009 and growing.

Messaging (SMS & MMS) is worth $153bn, and also growing. MMS – which I still consider quite niche and unused – was worth $29bn in 2009.

Q: And the mobile internet?

A: It’s growing fast, but even the largest parts of this area don’t do half of the business that ‘lowly’ MMS does.

Mobile data services are worth $98bn in total. The largest segments of this are video ($14bn), music and ringtones ($13.9bn) and video games ($11.6bn). These revenues are growing at 15–25% year-on-year.

The fastest-growing segments of the data market are mobile learning and search, each of which has grown over 200% in the last year. Mobile advertising and marketing is finally starting to happen, too, grossing $5.9bn last year, up 85% on 2008.

Mobile social networking is the fourth biggest earner overall in data, worth $10.3bn in 2009.

Q: Should I make an iPhone app for my publication/brand?

A: If you are looking for reach, no: you should make a Nokia app. Even better, Java or (best) an SMS or WAP-based service.

Overall, Nokia has 38% of mobile device market share. Samsung has 20% and LG 10%. The fourth and fifth place are taken by SonyEricsson and Motorola.

If you restrict the sample to smartphones, Nokia is again way out front with 39% market share. Then it’s RIM (Blackberry) with 21%. Apple has 15% and HTC (Android) just 5%.

Smartphones represent only 13% of the mobile device market. On the other hand, 95% of phones can do WAP and every phone can now do SMS. Over 90% of phones are capable of 2.5G or faster transmission speeds now, so this isn’t the WAP you remember from the nineties. 53% of the phones in use world-wide can do Java apps.

Picture credit: RoamMobility

PS: Tomi has given me permission to pass on the full data he sent me via email, so leave a comment if you’d like this.

Late December and early January see the seasonal appearance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-in-trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the following year, by which time everyone’s forgotten. I’ve written a couple in the past, but refrained this year, leaving the task to wiser heads than mine.

Heads such as those at analyst firm Gartner, which has just produced its own variation on the theme:  Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond. Since they get paid thousands of pounds by businesses to be correct about the future, Gartner doesn’t offer many 12-month predictions, with several stretching to the six-year level – even high-paying subscribers won’t remember by 2015. ;-)

Anyway, the bold bits are from the press release. The regular text is my attempt at a quip or reaction.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

Quite a lot of businesses own very few IT assets right now. The phone is still the key communications tool for plenty of bricks-and-mortar firms. But what Gartner is talking about is the Cloud, of course, or – more prosaically – leasing arrangements. I’m not entirely sure I buy this. I can see that there will be fewer server rooms, more leasing and more thin devices, but no IT assets is quite a stretch. As I understand it, most leased IT at present is basically the big printers that have come to replace photocopiers, which were always leased anyway.

By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.

A safer bet here, I think – with 350mn subscribers already, Facebook could already make this claim to some extent. But Gartner is bolder than this looks – it means all web socialisation. That other social networks and websites will have to offer Facebook integration to survive. This goes against the common wisdom that the incumbent dominant social network will eventually go the way of Friendster, Six Degrees and Friends Reunited as fresher networks attract the restless young.

Nonetheless, I’m relatively happy with the suggestion that Facebook will remain a dominant force. I see more and more websites with Facebook Connect installed. I even installed a module allowing users to log into this site to make comments using their Facebook account. Albeit an open-standards model that will work with other OpenID providers.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out internationally, though. While Facebook dominates in English-speaking countries, there’s considerably more flux and variety elsewhere. Maybe Gartner meant “in the US”, though the text doesn’t say that.

Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

Woah. That’s a big push – but remember they’ve got six years for it to happen or for us all to forget. There are a couple of problems with Internet marketing regulation: (1) it already is regulated. Companies have to operate to the same standards they do in offline dealings. (2) But it’s regulated by local laws.Suing a dodgy dealer in Timbuktu in a UK court is all very well, but you still won’t get that herbal vi-gr– you ordered. (3) Increasing local regulation tends to be unpopular because it puts local businesses at a disadvantage compared to those in Timbuktu.

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.

I can buy this. If anything, I think it will happen quicker. There are already 4bn mobile phones in use. The next iPhone is tipped to incorporate near-field communications. People change their phones at least every 18 months – so now everyone’s got at least a cameraphone with bluetooth. Chip-readers should surely become standard within two generations.

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.

Pretty vague, but context here means the use of location, time, the accelerometer, near-field communications etc. So if I am walking into Tesco at six-o’clock, the phone loads an appropriate shopping portal that I can wave at the things I want to buy and reminds me to get washing powder, that sort of thing. And why not? Tesco has already got this sort of thing for desktops and dedicated appliances. If my mobile is four-generations better, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t have it there.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As I’ve mentioned above, there are already 4bn mobile phones in circulation, versus about 1.5bn PCs. If those phones are two generations better, then they can probably do an OK job of rendering the web, maybe through micro-projectors and gesture recognition.

I’ll finish, though, with this video of mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the next 4bn mobile users. One key point he makes is that the next 4bn are probably in developing nations and that they’ll still be using SMS and WAP for some time to come (he’s not very sanguine about the mobile web, full stop) – thus the biggest revenue opportunities for businesses aren’t the mobile web at all, but in far more down-to-earth, but universally usable applications.

photo credit: Panoramas

Of course, it won’t happen anytime soon. As Paul Boutin points out in Slate (link below), people want ownership of their own stuff. Having the spreadsheet that tracks your finances in your office on your own PC or your own network space irrationally feels a lot safer than putting it on a website. What’s more, giving the people who run the web services the opportunity to poke through your documents feels very uncomfortable. About five years ago, the ‘next big thing’ was thin client computing, whereby we’d all use cheap consoles to log onto server farms where our applications and documents would live. It never really took off because people wanted proper computers and ownership of their own things.

Also, for all the hype, the mobile internet doesn’t really work yet. Yes, around central London you can easily pop into an internet cafe and obtain access. But try maintaining internet access while you’re in the back of a moving car, on a long train journey or a flight, the times when access to your applications, messages and documents would be really useful. For as long as there isn’t 99% reliability, the sort of reliability that you can expect from your home or office computer, then there is going to be considerable resistance to web applications.

Paul Boutin discusses the Google PC in Slate magazine

It makes sense for Google to develop a Web-based PC. To be clear, a Google PC needn’t involve a new gadget like the “thin client” gear of the 1990s. Every computer in the world is capable of running a Web browser. We might not realize it, but we all already have Google PCs.

You could still run Windows on a Google PC; it just wouldn’t matter if you did or not. Most Google PC rumors imagine a low-priced, Windows-less, entry-level computer for the Wal-Mart set. That could be part of the plan, but it would just be one more option. Instead of trying to convince every consumer on the planet to buy a new machine, it makes a lot more sense for Google to build a super-service that you could log into from any computer, phone, or television, or car and airplane seatback. You would be able to access your files anywhere by logging in, calling up your desktop, and popping into Google’s array of Gmail-like applications for word processing, photo editing, and anything else you can think of.