Montreal Tech Watch

Photo from John Biehler, “web geek” from Vancouver

I received a tip about M:Metrics which released figures about mobile social networking in Europe and in the States. Apparently, at 3.5% and 2.8% respectively, americans and italians are the biggest users of social networking services on their cell phones. The study also shows that for mobile access, myspace is the most visited for the US and the U.K., while in Italy, Spain, and France, it’s facebook that wins.

The study goes beyond mobile social networking, with exhaustive studies on text and photo messaging, mobile email and IM, and multimedia downloads. For these categories, europeans prove to be much earlier adopters than americans, with Italy then U.K. leading. The US trails behind, with their stats nearly half of the adoption rates found in the European countries.

The study didn’t include Canada, and I also have to question its relevancy now, with the iPhone’s launch. The device has integrated wifi, which means the frontier between cell phones and laptops for accessing websites/services is going to be blurred. If it’s not the iPhone, then you can get an equivalent Nokia, an OpenMoko or a HTC to do that. It’s really easy to imagine everyone, say in one year from now, in your home city browsing the web with their mobile phone. Well, everyone might be a strectch, but if you are an entrepreneur, you must plan in advance and take mobile access into account now.