Foreword 1
Role of Technology in Emerging Markets
Telecom wireless technology has been progressing rapidly over the last two decades. Initial introduction of the GSM platform created global standards in the 1980s and provided opportunities to innovate new business models to reduce costs and increase affordability, leading to substantial growth and expansion in the emerging countries. In the process, GSM technology was enhanced through several new features and functionalities to add data capabilities. In the 1990s, third generation wireless technology was introduced in advanced countries of the western world and Japan. At the same time China and India witnessed an unpredicted growth with over 700 million subscribers in China and over 500 million subscribers in India. Similar growth in many other emerging markets of Latin America, Africa and Asia pushed the number of global mobile phone users to over 4 billion worldwide.
The expansion of mobile phones in the emerging markets has been critical in the overall development of the rural areas and the people at the bottom of the pyramid. This has provided a unique access to basic telephone services and a variety of new SMS based applications related to entertainment, news, agriculture, payments, etc. It has been shown by the OECD and other studies that a 10 % increase in the mobile phone coverage increases the GDP of the country by 0.6 %. This offers hope for new features and functionalities with more data capabilities and applications ...
