Mobile devices, scalability & digital ecologies

Mobile handsets (phones) are expected to increase from the current 4.5B (billion) subscriptions to over 6B in 2013 and thus dwarf the numbers of PCs (e.g. desktop, laptop, netbook, etc.) that are expected to rise from the current 1.1B to 2B in 2015. But more importantly, data transmission from and to mobile handsets is becoming and increasingly available and affordable. The dramatic improvements in the data transmission have allowed the mobile handsets to compensate for their lack of computational resources when compared to other mobile devices. As a result the mobile handset is becoming the ubiquitous computing device for a rapidly growing number of users. This paper focuses on the question of how the growing number of mobile handsets will impact digital service ecologies. The paper examines key challenges in connecting large numbers of mobile handsets to service ecologies and presents possible approaches for dealing with them.