Interesting stuff about mobile payments. I was reading about why that's such a big deal for the 3.0 iPhone firmware, and your examples illustrate why. We in the US have a much more narrow view of mobile as a phone first.

I'm not sure if it's cultural/socioeconomical or technological (based on what carriers provide), bit of a chicken-egg riddle. For whatever reason, we're behind in mobile.

I remember back in the late 90s hearing about what DoCoMo was doing and thinking how crazy-awesome that was. One of Bluetooth's original use cases was micro-payments for vending machines, but that never materialized here. Instead, we got the wireless headset. Go figure.

For more on measuring mobile leadership on a country-by-country basis, and in particular why the U.S. is behind, I'd recommend this great post from Tomi Ahonen that was sparked by some questions I had asked in the Forum Oxford message board:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/20…

If you look beyond the pure technological advances and look at usage, you'll actually find a tremendous amount of similarity between developing countries and the most advanced Asian countries–far more in common than with the United States.

Take mobile payment for example. In Japan and South Korea, you can buy a large number of products and services with your phone. In India, utility companies give 5% discounts for paying via mobile.

Or simply look at the percentage of people accessing the Internet via mobile devices vs. PCs. In developing countries and in the Asian countries above, more people access the Internet via mobile than traditional desktop devices.

So yes, when we refer to Asia being two years ahead, we're referring to a subset of Asian countries–particularly when it comes to the infrastructure and handset technology.

At the same time, a compelling argument can be made that developing countries may also be ahead when it comes to usage of mobile phones for transactions and business because of the fact that it acts as a leap frog technology.

Innovation is highly based on demand though too, which makes India a very large, addressable market, since mobile penetration there is very high.

Of course, the carriers help hold us back too.

I'm also not a huge fan of the netbook. Regular notebooks (like my Macbook) aren't terribly large, and “ultra-portable” sounds like “new, improved” marketing talk.