“There were 6.6 billion people on the planet in October 2007″
“There were 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers in October 2007″
“60% take it to bed every night”
“A study by Unisys revealed that if we lose our wallet we report it in 26 hours. If we lose our cellphone, we report it in 68 minutes.”

When a book hits you with these kinds of statistics about mobiles - and a lot more - within the first two pages, you know that you must surely be reading a book by the formidable Tomi Ahonen. And, if it’s stats and market insights you want, then Tomi won’t let you down. He has never let us down. I’ve been reading Tomi’s books from the start, having been in the mobile game for so long, and it is nice to see that he hasn’t lost his touch. The touch being his finger on the pulse of our great industry.

Tomi goes on to bombard us with fact after fact after fact about mobile usage, a method familiar to those who have attended any of his lectures. “Trust me,” he implores in the opening pages, “The ‘Crackberry’ is a mild drug compared with SMS text messaging.” And away he goes with another dizzying battery of usage stats and insights.

What, then, is Tomi’s thesis this time? The title reveals all, as do the stats above. For so long now, people with things to sell, stories to tell and points to make, usually political, have been muscling in on our busy lives via various broadcast technologies. To be clear, the seven mass media are: print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, Internet and, now, mobile.

Mobile has become the latest in a long line of mass media technologies. As Tomi says:

“The cellphone is certainly the most widely spread technology. There are 20 times more cellphones than Playstations; 30 times more cellphones than iPods. It is the only universal gadget, and it has now become the newest media channel.”

It’s a simple point to grasp. Given the above stats and the pervasiveness of the mobile in our lives, there is clearly a sea of tiny screens roaming the planet, always within a second or two of our reach. What more could advertisers and oracles ask for?

Understand that he doesn’t just mean Mobile TV here. He means New Media, as in Rich Media, as in what we used to call Multimedia. Of course, ‘New Media’ is an old term, as Tomi points out. All of the seven were once new.

Tomi proceeds to explain the significance of this opportunity and, perhaps more usefully, the unique nature of the opportunity and how to exploit it. This kicks off in Chapter 1 with Tomi’s 6 M’s, a deceptively simple, yet powerful, tool for thinking about mobile service development.

Tomi first introduced 5 M’s back when he was telling us how to market 3G services whilst most networks were still scrabbling to get 2.5G working. The five M’s are Me, Money, Moment, Movement and Machines. Think of these as vectors along which mobile services can travel in order to exploit the unique attributes of mobile. I have successfully used the 5M approach in numerous workshops and training courses, which led me to include it in the first edition of my book (see the reference here).

It was during these sessions that I realised that we needed a sixth M - Multi-user and relayed my thinking back to Tomi. I was happy that he included it in his framework and that we now have 6 Ms.

Tomi has a gift for numbers, so it is not surprising to find that he manages to identify seven unique benefits of the 7th mass media, as follows:

1. Cellphone is first personal mass media channel
2. Cellphone is permanently carried
3. Cellphone is always on
4. Only cellphone provides a built-in payment channel
5. Cellphone is available at point of creative impulse, enabling user-generated content
6. Cellphone is first media with near-perfect audience data
7. Only cellphone captures social context of media consumption

If you want to know more details about these benefits, then I suggest that you buy the book. It won’t disappoint. It is another valuable addition to the Ahonen catalogue of books that have provided much of our industry with great insights for so long. As usual, it is liberally sprinkled with Tomi’s insights, statistics and numerous references to real services throughout the world, including detailed case studies.

I don’t think that anyone else on this planet knows as much as Tomi about what’s going on with mobile services in nearly every single marketplace. This is yet another great title from Tomi and I thoroughly recommend it. Available from FutureText publishing.

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