In some African and Asian countries, GSM is the only networked technology available. As you can cover an important area with one single antenna, it’s not very surprising to see GSM ahead of ADSL, fiber or cable. These countries are (slowly) leapfrogging directly to the mobile era.

Now GSM – and the mainstream mobile terminals – come with huge limitations when it comes to exchanging written information: you can only be a content consumer. You can not distribute anything.

Not anymore? Maybe! The guardian reports that Nokia has managed to turn cell phones into web servers that can be accessed via bluetooth.

Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, in order to enable mobile phones to serve content on the World Wide Web.

Link

The first mobile web servers? It is not fully working yet but there is hope. And an interesting proposition that would open a lot of possibilities. What could happen in the developing countries? A few ideas:

• site access reselling
I mirror a famous websites (wikipedia?) on my phones and give you access on demand. As phones don’t offer infinite storage, you would have the wikipedia guy, the NYT guy, the country’s newspaper guy. Completely new market. Business model: pricing per page.

• asynchronous relay
You write your blog posts on my phone that I will sync with the web next time I hit a town with broadband. Same with emails. Pricing: price per action (post, email) with supplements depending on size.

• not on-demand distribution of on-demand content
I compile a few videos from google videos (around a specific theme for example), put them on my phone, and distribute them at previously arranged hours with my community. Business model: pay per view.

It will be interesting to see where this technology – mixed with people’s creativity – will end up. (thx nico)

Matt Jones sent me a link to Widset, a Nokia venture that provides mobile widgets. Seems like a nice concept, and my operator – billing me for every single kilobyte I transfer – should be happy about me trying out the flickr widget…

“According to new research, 57% of 18- to 34-year-olds have interacted with a company via an SMS short code number and 60% have used their phone to access mobile content in the past three months.”

Link via Marketing Alternatif

These figures clearly announce a fundamental switch that will soon force us to “think outside of the computer screen”. Add the impressive adoption of blogging (and its derivatives) by teenagers across the globe, and suddenly there are plenty of reasons to invest in mobile blogging (in Switzerland, get some Kaywa stocks! ;-)

I was amazed to see the volume of blog posting in Japanese surpass the volume of English posts. But the main reason is probably that this country is already very advanced in mobile blogging, which equals numerous but shorter posts.