Fred Wilson writing about mobile and the developing world:
But the next 2.5bn people to adopt smartphones may turn out to be a different story. They will mostly live outside the developed and wealthy parts of the world and they will look to their smartphones to deliver essential services that they have not been receiving at all – from the web or from the offline world. I am thinking about financial services, healthcare services, educational services, transportation services, and the like. Stuff that matters a bit more than seeing where you friends had a fun time last night or what it looks like when you faceswap with your sister.
The developed world created the smartphone, then we used it to solve all kinds of first world problems.
Now that the developing world has access, they’ll be using it to solve more fundamental problems. And without the burden of legacy anything – infrastructure, economy, business models, ways of working – it’s not far fetched to think that the next major disruptions to how we go about life will be cooked up in places that couldn’t be any further removed from Silicone Valley.