The real mobile revolution

I HEARD a crime story from Cambodia recently which illustrates both how
not to use your mobile phone as well as just how far advanced the
technology is in Asia.

A man in Phnom Penh tried but failed to
extort some money from his ex-employer with an anonymous death threat.
The Cambodia Daily explained that his main downfall came from asking his
victim to transfer the money to his Wing account, a system that allows
for money transfers to and from mobile phones.

It doesn't take a
rocket scientist to figure out that it's probably best to leave your
personal phone out of things when you're sending someone threats by SMS.
But I guess this guy wasn't all that clever. Now his phone, on the
other hand, was incredibly "smart"-this small-time crook was using a
service that would be the envy of many people in the US, where the
majority of transfers still have to be done by paper checks even in a
country that's rapidly embracing smartphones that can take full
advantage of the Web from anywhere.

The fact is that Asia has
been a leading innovator in mobile Internet technology for years. On one
side, you have places like Japan and Korea, where people were paying
for train tickets and streaming movies with their mobile phones years
ago.




On the other, you have clever people across Southeast Asia making the
most of the SMS as a simple but powerful lever to exploit the Internet's
banks of servers, turning their phone into a computer.

Farmers
in rural India can check agricultural prices from the fields while
several Asian companies have used the mobile phone to deliver financial
services to the enormous swathes of the developing world where banks
have refused to go. G-Cash of the Philippines is another famous example.


In Kenya, using SMS, you can buy weather insurance and receive
payouts directly to your phone automatically if the rain doesn't fall
within a specified range.

A company in India has built an entire
mobile OS around SMS-based apps, including Google and Facebook. The SMS
is very much alive and well and doing more than ever before.

People
have been hailing the "mobile revolution" for a while now. But what is
it that makes 2011 so different from just a few years ago?

These different changes are being driven by a fundamental shift, one that unites the smartphone and the most simple phones.

Asia's mobile community is converging on the open Internet from all
sides, whether it's through the SMS, the smartphone browser capable of
rendering all Web pages, or open-source operating systems like Android.

In all cases, innovation can quickly spill across devices and platforms.

It
hasn't always been that way. In some countries, phones with inventive
functionality were introduced but were unable to interact with the
Internet or phones on other networks. In others, each new phone brought
with it new software requirements for developers.

In fact, it
was not so long ago that at Google we were spending as much time trying
to make our mobile maps application work on different phones as we spent
actually improving the product itself.

It's now a completely
different picture. On the high end, the smartphone supplies an open
platform that any developer or manufacturer can use and Asia is grasping
the opportunity.

China is the second-largest country in terms
of downloaded mobile apps. The expectation is that Asia will become a
global hub for app development in a few years.

Both Japan and
Korea can boast truly international hits for iPhone and Android that
would have been hard to catch on across borders a few years ago. As the
smartphone gets cheaper, this power will spread across Asia.

We expect a billion people will have inexpensive, browser-based touchscreen phones over the next few years.

Both
the insurer building SMS-based insurance and the Japanese developer
making a photo app for Android can take that technology across the globe
in a flash. And for that reason openness is a much surer foundation for
Asia's mobile Internet than closed, walled gardens.

We should never underestimate the power of being able to send information without worrying about barriers.

In October, the prime ministers of Cambodia and Thailand resolved a
minor border crisis via a back channel. Was it a red telephone attached
to a hotline? No. It was an exchange over SMS.