Financial Cryptography

Skype -- the mobile leader?!

Finanser posted this great picture from Sameer Zafar on mobile payment systems:

in commenting on some talks from Safar and Dave Birch. Well, you probably had to be there, but the picture is quite a compelling one, if you're interested in Skype, VoIP and the mobile market. For reading, these are probably more useful:

Dave [Birch] developed on his themes, and presented one slide that was incredibly insightful statistically speaking. There are:

• 5 billion active mobile phone subscribers out there
• 4.1 billion actively used mobile telephones
• 4 billion text message users, increasing at 19% per annum
• 2.2 billion bank accounts in use
• 1.6 billion television sets
• 1.4 billion email users, increasing at 7% per annum
• 1.25 landlines at its peak, as there are now 1.15 billion and falling
• 1.2 PCs of any kind

According to Dave's research, half of all phones In the developing world are 3G and a third are smartphones whilst, in the emerging world, only 4% of all phones are 3G and 8% are smart. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 phones are never used for voice calls, and data now represents a quarter of all mobile revenues.

Which leads into an old theme here at FC: what's with Skype and payments?

Posted by iang at October 16, 2010 01:05 AM | TrackBack