Working ourselves out of a job...

This is probably going to give away my age, if I haven't already.

When I started working in the Telecom industry, everything was shiny and new and the future was so bright that we wore our RayBan Wayfarers at night.

With great power, great responsibility came with it, in many cases and particularly with my engagement in developing markets, our work was somewhat heroic, deploying life-changing technologies and greatly impacting the quality of lives of the population at large. From enabling businesses to the levels of first-world countries, putting internet under the fingertips of the kids attending schools accessible only by dirt roads, to the birth of the mobile information society and the freemium long distance services.

While we did this, my colleagues and I were in privileged positions, calling a developed country our residence and working for staple-name corporations. We were the only ones that could do this job.

As the transfer of these technologies further advanced, we saw the world shrink and flatten and our colleagues on the other side of the wire get more empowered. The result now is that in many of the more mature technologies, the ones doing the work we used to do are no longer our neighbors.

When we foresaw these changes, we recognized them as a shift in paradigm and to a certain point, we succeeded in achieving these but somehow in the process, we might have worked ourselves of a job....

iPhone came - Some friends are coming along

So far Apple has experienced a spectacular product success with its iPod line of music players. Apple's statistics indicate that 100 million iPods have been sold. This 29th of June, Apple is releasing its latest creation, the iPhone converged device, the media is all hyped-up about the features, the functionality and the prohjected sales of 10 million of these devices.

The iPhone is a data-centric device, and as such it is being offered with a diversity of Mobile Internet plans, including an All-you-can-eat option.

This is what is really thrilling and disruptive of the iPhone. The instantaneous creation of 10 million mobile Internet users with ubiquitous Internet and with an almost as good experience as on a desktop, laptop or tablet PC.

10 million new users, accessing broadband content on the Internet, whenever, wherever they want. The first impact on this of course is the traffic, a maximum of almost 4000 additional Gigabytes on the network. This might not sound as much considering the enourmous capacities built into todays networks.

The real impact is of business and social nature. The introduction of the telephone, the Internet and -most lately- a high grade of adoption of broadband access have reshaped the business world and the lives of people here in the US and around the world. Business models unthinkable of before, become possible by the adoption of these technologies. Online document delivery, application hosting, such as Google Documents and Spreadsheets, photo printing through the web, Vonage, Skype, and software and video downloads as well as the 99c/song model would not be possible without broadband.

In the same way, the availability (and the assumption of a demographic with the availability) will eventually lead to new business models to be discovered. The exact successful ones are difficult to predict as they require that fortunate factor of being accepted by the public. Mobility is being replaced by pervasiveness.