EDITORIALOCTOBER11


Your world on a SIM


Co. going all out for the emerging markets, and the mass of mobile phone owners whose handsets aren’t deemed ‘smart’. The two companies have collaborated to produce a version of the Facebook platform that can be embedded on a SIM card. The interface is necessarily rudimentary, but still allows for status updates, messages and friend requests to be managed from lower-end handsets. And because the service is SMS-based, users don’t need a data plan. There are those who believe that Facebook has already peaked and, like MySpace before it, is teetering on the brink of a gradual demise as users leave for alternative net- working communities. If this is the case in the advanced markets where the platform has enjoyed its early success, then hitting the emerging markets before the handset technology fi lters down to them is a canny manoeuvre. Gemalto, which developed the solution, said in October that it will go fi rst to Latin America, with Telecom Argentina the debut operator partner. The carrier had almost 17.5 million mobile users at June this year,


T


here was a fascinating announcement early in October from Facebook and Gemalto that showed Zuckerberg and


according to Informa Telecoms & Media. That is a signifi cant market. What’s interesting about the deal is that it puts the mobile operator at the centre of the play. If Facebook has to be distributed on a SIM to get to the second and third wave markets, then it has to be distributed by the operator. By the time the more advanced handset technology fi lters down, perhaps the relationship between the operator and the OTT provider will be tighter, more symbiotic. Going after the mass market was some- thing that Steve Jobs always avoided. With the launch of the iPhone 4S, just as this issue was going to press, came the familiar clamour for some kind of ‘nano’ iteration of the iconic device that could get Apple’s foot in the door at the lower end of the market. But, again, such a device did not appear. In the end the launch was overshadowed by


Jobs’s untimely passing, at just 56. The plaudits came thick and fast and, whatever you think of the products, or Jobs’s approach to their crea- tion, it was a situation when—unusually—those plaudits didn’t overplay the importance of the man. The iPhone changed everything, and the iPhone was the Steve Jobs vision made real. His death leaves a huge gap not just at Apple, but in the wider mobile industry.


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