Kurt Hellström's first trip to Comdex was to evangelize the convergence of mobility and the Internet.
What is the president of a phone infrastructure company doing at a trade show about computers and the Internet? Looking to capitalise on the fastest growing segment of the communications business where communications converges with the Internet, said Ericsson president Kurt Hellström in a keynote address at Comdex'00.
Hellström said the company, based in Sweden, is taking lessons it learned when it cut the cords in telephone voice communications - and is now applying them to cutting the cords on the Internet. "The mobile Internet is about personalisation and offering instant access anywhere anytime," he said.
Mobile phones currently outsell PCs and will outsell fixed phones by the end of next year, the Ericsson president said. He cited the success of mobile Internet-enabled phones in Japan as an indication of potential success worldwide.
With more than 2,000 mobile services, the three Japanese operators that offer Internet-enabled phones -- including NTT DoCoMo -- have signed up more than 17 million subscribers and are signing up 500,000 subscribers per week.
Mobile e-mail a must
The popularity of short messaging service in Europe has convinced the phone giant that mobile email is a service that they will have to focus on bringing to the market.
Hellström also threw in his support for WAP (wireless application protocol), a standard that is more popular in Europe that in the United States.
