It was 1976 when a spoke with the local veterinarian over mobile phone. He wanted to check the details of his ad in local newspaper where I was editor. The paper was not San Jose Mercury News and the location was not Silicon Valley but a very small township in a small country which is cut by Polar Circle.
When I 15 years later moved to France, I was a tiny bit involved with the introduction of mobile phone over there. Years later, when I living in Silicon Valley, a mobile phone company from that tiny country was sneaking in to the market and one of the persons responsible for marketing said company’s profile must be kept low otherwise the introduction would not be successful due to reluctance to accept foreign competition.
Mobile phone history is interesting. Those early days we were lucky when we got our message through to persons who were on the move. Now we don’t care if the calls go through, more important is how the device looks like, how cool it is perceived by colleagues and potential lovers. And yet not all the calls go through even in Silicon Valley. But at least we have multitasking and will not know how far the innovative engineers will reach in that area.
Sometimes innovators go into the dark hole of oblivion. I did not know about the father of SMS, but fortunately The Economist has been better informed. The paper awarded Matti Makkonen for his work on Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging.