I don't believe we're done with the smartphone revolution in the U.S. either. It's been 9 years since the iPhone came out. Where were we 9 years after NCSA Mosaic came out? 2002. People thought we were done with the web revolution, but most of the dominant web companies of today were either fledgling startups (Google) or not invented yet (Facebook, YouTube, Kickstarter, AirBnB, etc.)
PG observed around 2005 that the web still had decades to go, because "social changes take longer than technical changes". So it is with mobile. The low-hanging fruit that can be picked simply by building an app and putting it on the app store has already been taken, but there are still many big businesses that will be built by people who are in a niche and realize that problems within that niche can be solved more effectively with the help of a mobile app.
This is even more true for social benefit companies. When I attended Netsquared in 2008 it was immediately apparent that the products with the most promise for developing countries were mobile products--for many in developing countries mobile is the internet. One of the exhibitors had built an SMS service that farmers could text for commodity prices to determine when they would go to market and prevent being undercut by middlemen. I'm sure that sort of ingenuity will only be amplified with even low-end smartphone access.
> But I feel that even more dramatic upside is available in the less developed world
That realization is something that has been hard to see in Valley investors. For example markets like India and mobile fintech were uninteresting to most investors on demo days.
The web revolution hasn't even really happened yet. Heck the computer revolution hasn't happened yet.
I've been thinking about this a lot: The killer app for the computer is writing your own function. There are people who can write a function, but the number of them basically rounds to zero.
The computer revolution won't even have started until random children (not just geeky ones) are writing functions to mess with each other during class.
We (CS people) could've made that happen decades ago, but we're too infatuated with the idea that we're extra special smart geniuses (look who's rich now, jocks!) that we just happily plod along with our finicky professional-grade tooling that takes months/years to master.
Any company that starts to move in the direction of wide-availability programming tools (visicalc, heroku, salesforce) ends up getting sucked into the enterprise market because that's where the money is and Greed Always Wins (So Far). And Open Source software has basically stalled since the Web happened and deployment (which is expensive) took the place of distribution (which is essentially free).
That said, the Dark Ages of Open Source will be coming to a close soon. Some kind of cloud-based programming system along the lines of Ethereum/AWS-Lambda will happen and we'll finally see the Big Wave of software getting built.
But all of us are so obsessed with writing our little piece of software so we can get our piece of the VC pie that it's happening maddeningly slowly. C'est la vie I guess.
I think it is not right to map ncsa mosaic to the iPhone. Mosaic will more correctly map to the earlier smart phones like the Treos, window CE and symbians, which were in existence in 2003
IMHO Mosaic maps perfectly to the iPhone 1, with Netscape mapping to the iPhone 2 etc. Like the original iPhone, Mosaic was the first browser that really thought carefully about what the customer needed, and then got mass adoption as a result. WWW, Lynx, Viola, and Midas map to the early phones like Treo, WinCE, Symbian, Palm Pilot, etc.
We still haven't begun to get into haptics, and that will do an number of things to bring the size of a usable phone down, and make medium sized phones more usable. Add 450 PPI screens, haptics and 3D Touch and you have space for new classes of apps.
And whoever makes the IPhone 3G of smart watches is gonna knock our socks off.
Sure, there may be a ton of potential smart phone users outside of G-10. But how much money can one make in these markets?
Not to be flip, and and the same time kick around Path, but they were huge in Indonesia, but at the end of the day they represented a losing investment.
I think that in order to have a second smartphone revolution we need to look beyond the mobile operating systems that we rely on today, none of which seem optimal for the emerging markets (including Tizen and MIUI) considering the expensive high end hardware that they target.
A hypothetical initial focus on supporting productivity and business applications by a small team that could take this on could help narrow down the list of hardware to support as the need to compete for the latest CPU or the best video chip is reduced.
Also, I was wondering if Rust could be to a new mobile operating system what Objective-C was to OS X and later iOS serving as a layer on top of C/C++.
AR was also supposed to be the driving factor of the first wave. Nintendo invested not small amounts of money to make sure the 3DS was a decent AR platform. Not that most of its users ever realized.
I would look to models of existing / past technologies which have proliferated.
As an example, the automobile is popular in the West, but it's the motorbike which is family transport in much of the developing world.
I also expect 2nd wave tech will have to deal with higher (relative) costs, less reliable networks, and data interchange. It's also not going to be piggybacked on top of high-value advertising to a wealthy population, as in the West.
I think underestimating the power of centralized telecommunications and Google's trump card handing out Android with legal limitations on manufacturers splitting from the default distro was an unforeseen and in hindsight forgiveable oversight. Google is basically the problem.
I would have said 'Comcast'. Too many people who will cut your service if they think you're sharing it. Who are the border servers if your ISP can cut you off?
PG observed around 2005 that the web still had decades to go, because "social changes take longer than technical changes". So it is with mobile. The low-hanging fruit that can be picked simply by building an app and putting it on the app store has already been taken, but there are still many big businesses that will be built by people who are in a niche and realize that problems within that niche can be solved more effectively with the help of a mobile app.