Until this point, the existence of Gen MO has been largely speculation. But now we have actual evidence and the surprise is that there’s many more Gen MO than you might reasonably expect – certainly in emerging markets, but also in developed markets like the US and UK.

On Device Research is a new kid on the block, founded by Alistair Hill, latterly of research giant, M:Metrics and my old pal and mobile veteran Pamir Gelenbe. As its name suggests, it conducts research and panels via mobiles and it’s getting some great insights that simply weren’t available before.

The latest survey shows that mobile-only usage is as high as 70% in Egypt and 59% in India, with the Big Four Asian markets (India, China, Indonesia, Thailand) coming in at an average of 43% and the Big Five African ones (South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya) even higher at 56%.

But the really big surprise for me is how many MOs we have in the US (25%) and the UK (22%).

Clearly, the case for mobile advertising is already proven beyond all possible doubt. But if you’re still not using mobile to reach your potential customers, there’s clearly a bunch of people you’re just not going to reach.

As a market, these MOs are someone we should all be studying closely. Not only will they give us clues about how they use mobile today, but will provide a really important insight into how we will all be behaving in the future and the tools we need to develop to enable the Post-PC world that we’ve been writing about for a long time now at MobHappy.

This export of technology innovation into developed markets is probably going to be the first time that this phenomenon has ever happened at scale and on a consistent basis, so it’s going to be fascinating to observe it at first hand.

I was delighted to hear that this is a theme also promoted by Iqbal Quadir, the visionary and influential founder of Grameenphone, when we spoke at the same event in London recently, so there must be something in the idea!

This week I was at Mobile Web Africa, which proved to be a well attended event in Johannesburg, with a great line up of speakers. Africa is certainly a market to watch in the future and I expect to see huge growth in innovation, mobile usage and revenues from the mobile ecosystem. So it was a privilege to be asked to speak and to learn what’s happening in person.

M-Pesa, the Kenyan branchless banking system undoubtedly stole the headlines, judging by the Tweets and ReTweets and is a very African success story. Not only is it now the biggest bank in the world with 8 million customers, but annual money transfers are now equivalent to 20 – 25% of Kenya’s total GDP, depending on who you believe has the most up-to-date facts. Many banks will clearly try to replicate this and probably most will fail, but it does paint a great picture of what mobile banking success looks like.

By the way, M-Pesa launched in March 2007.

There were many other examples of the new, new, but one of my favourite pieces of out-of-the-box thinking came from Mocality, which aspires to be Africa’s largest (only?) business directory. The challenge is how they build such a thing from scratch, especially in the content of small businesses’ lack of tech savvy and indeed, tech access.

Their solution was to crowd-source – employ a whole bunch of agents to input the data via their wap-enabled phones, along with photos uploaded from camera phones. The problem comes with ensuring the accuracy of that data – and avoiding completely fraudulent entries, created purely to make commission.

So, when Agent A completes an entry for a business, the data is sent randomly to another agent in the area. Agent B then visits the business and verifies the entry. Both get paid, but the result is as accurate as it can reasonably be expected to be and probably better quality than if the businesses themselves uploaded the data in the first place.

I thought it was a very clever solution and one that I hadn’t come across before, so I thought I’d share.

I love traveling to Africa and seeing what works here and already looking forward to my next visit.

Some good did come out of .mobi in the form of Mobiforge, its developer arm, which created a large number of resources for mobile web developers. A blog post there says business will carry on as usual. Hopefully that’s the case.

And in case you were wondering, my favorite .mobi site, flowers.mobi — you remember, the one that was purchased for $200,000 in 2006 and was supposed to be developed into a legit site with “relevant content” — is still just a parked domain with ads. And it’s still not compliant with .mobi’s rules for its sites. Big surprise there.

It’s another example of what I labeled co-browsing a while back: following along on your mobile or PC while watching a sporting event live or on TV. Football3s runs through a Flash-based interface, so it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be seeing it on mobiles very soon, but this is just the tip of the iceberg for this sort of thing, with a huge number of potential applications — particularly for mobile users.

Along similar lines, a couple of casinos here in Vegas are offering in-game betting via dedicated mobile devices, which even let people wager on the outcome of specific plays.

(As an aside, I heard about Football3s via the wonderful Football Ramble podcast, which is definitely worth the download if you like football and have a sense of humor.)

If you want to donate and you’re in the US, you can text HAITI to 90999, and a $10 donation to the Red Cross will get added on to your mobile bill.

Typically they invoke a scenario in which somebody makes a call from a noisy location (pub, supermarket, etc.), then the person they’re calling gets annoyed and says to call back later, then they call from a landline at home and everything is super-awesome because it’s quiet and the calls are clear. I’ve seen some ads in the past from landline operators taking shots at VoIP call quality, but not mobile calls — perhaps because many of them here also own mobile networks. Maybe this is BT’s way of expressing regret for dumping BT Cellnet several years ago.

ESPN has now set up a college football site dedicated to co-browsing during games called Section 140. ESPN bills Section 140 as:

# A new MOBILE destination to cheer, comment and maybe talk a little trash with other College Football fans from all across the country.
# A MOBILE sounding board where you can join the conversation from anywhere during the game.
# A real-time, MOBILE place to meet like-minded and not so like-minded fans while your teams are on the field.
# A place to interact with ESPN College Football writers in the Virtual Press Box.

They’ve set up a schedule for games they’re broadcasting and staffing the site with their online writers, who will be there to interact with fans (who can of course interact with each other as well) during the games. Interesting link between the real and online worlds, and something I think we’ll definitely see more of.

My own Twitter and Facebook feeds tend to take on a life of their own during Texas Longhorn games in a sort of ad-hoc dedicated social network. I think it’s cool to see ESPN try and capitalize on this with something of their own.

Any other good examples of co-browsing destinations out there?

I’d been thinking about barcodes for a few days when I went to my local megamultiplex to see a film, and ran into this on the front door. That seemed rather serendipitous. It illustrated the utility of barcodes by taking me to a mobile site for the forthcoming Tim Burton flick 9, where I was able to download a trailer and whatnot. But it also illustrates some of the problems of barcodes: it says to send a text to a shortcode at the bottom. As the text should say “READER”, obviously they’re going to try to send you a code reader. But if you need to get the reader, and have to send a text, would it be better just to get a text with the link to the site? Furthermore, if you’re a normob and confronted with this poster, are you really going to know what to do with it? I doubt it.

Furthermore, the growth of QWERTY devices makes the entry of URLs slightly less painful, and mobile-focused URL shorteners are emerging alongside short-code services to make things even easier. And if the “shortcut” requires users to download and install a barcode reader app, it’s not much of a shortcut.

So it’s a bit hard to see a bright future for barcodes that are nothing more than encoded URLs, isn’t it? Barcodes can be used for a lot more than that — the film I went to see when I ran into the poster was Food, Inc., which got me thinking about how nice it would be to be able to use barcodes to find out more information about the provenance of food items, as lots of people have thought. I think it’s these sorts of applications that, if anything, will draw users to mobile barcodes, rather than URL shortcuts.

What are your thoughts on mobile barcodes? And do you have any cool examples of how they’re being used?

Keep that in mind the next time somebody tells you people don’t like to download apps on their phone.

And remember Buckley’s Law #31:

Citizens will download applications, providing it’s very clear what the application does and what the benefits of using it are.

As well as its corollary, Longino Revised Statute 31.31/b:

Citizens will download applications, provided it’s truly easy, fast, and rewarding.

Nokia announced the SU-7 Image Frame a few years ago, but the price of the frame was pretty steep and finding a reasonably priced way to keep the SIM in the frame alive wasn’t very easy. T-Mobile’s on the right path, with the frame at $100, but $10 per month service might still be high.

I doubt I’d ever use one of these, but I can see grandmothers around the world loving it, and looking forward to getting new photos and updates from their kids and grandkids.