Our new website is on-line!
I remember the early days of when the World Wide Web was just becoming popular. In the beginning the web reached only a small group of users primarily in the US. And it was painfully slow - recall all the comic drawings of cobwebs strung between sleeping users and screens waiting for content to be delivered?
Fast forward to today. Mobile networks have made the web available to nearly the entire population on our planet at ever increasing speed. I read a while ago that The Nielsen Company discovered that 56.9 million Americans had used their cellphones to access the Internet in July of 2009. Not surprising considering that IDC predicts that today's 450 million mobile users will more than double to over 1 billion by 2013. The majority of this use is still in North America and Western Europe. Africa, South America and much of Asia, however, will drive the continued adoption of mobile web usage. Why? Simply because the introduction of mobile networks represents in many cases the first instance of easily available telecommunications services to people in these regions.
I come from a background working with retail banking systems technology - an area where a differentiated and successful customer experience was of utmost importance already in the mid-1980s. Simplicity and intuitive interfaces were absolute necessities as Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) and tele-banking services were introduced as cost saving measures for routine financial transactions and to increase the availability of banking services. These necessities of simplicity and intuitiveness are highly applicable to today's mobile operator delivering mobile value added services to its subscribers. I look forward to sharing my musings and observations on the subscriber experience as we march onward to 1 billion (and above) mobile web users - or as seen in the context of my previous working life over a billion highly advanced retail banking outlets!
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