in 2002, just under 15 percent of the global population used a cell phone.

Astonishing numbers

QZone is the world's largest social network. It now has over 200 million active users.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Long ago traditional brands such as Citibank had big client databases of hundreds of millions. They’re now surpassed by social networks that will end up with over a billion members. Eventually the world will stabilize around a few large networks after which they’ll be connected to one another.

CNNIC reports that, end 2008, there were 640 million mobile phone users in China (that's half the entire country's population) of which 117 million have used their mobile phone to access the internet in the past half year. That's double the number last year. 43% uses internet daily. 70% is 19 or younger.

Last year over 130 million missed episodes were watched on Uitzending Gemist, the Dutch equivalent of sites like BBC's iPlayer.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Uitzending Gemist is growing into a content database. Later on we’ll also get content that was never aired, we’ll pay for it and, most importantly, watch it on our tv screens.

The amount of people who use Skype is currently growing with 4 million new users in 12 days. That's almost as much as the entire population of Singapore. Almost a third of all registered subscribers now use Skype for their businesses.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Phoning someone is now disconnecting itself from the device. Later on we’ll be able to phone from any device (TV, computer, mobile phone, mediaplayer, PSP, e-paper, whatever) using, for instance, Skype. The model of telecom operators will be decimated to offering (very good) connectivity of all those devices.

Flickr, the popular photo hosting site, now has over 100 million photos with GPS data, so with location data.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Later every photo and every video will be standardly found on the internet, as soon as you take it, with exact location data and the direction in which you took the photo, and we can determine exactly who sees the photo. All together we’ll build up an archive with which we can reconstruct the world of the past in great detail at any moment we want.

Social network Facebook is growing with 600,000 new users each day. Currently the counter is at over 150 million. About 70% of this growth comes from outside the US.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The amount of companies with a huge customerbase is ever rising. When I wrote my book I identified Vodafone and Citibank with 300 million customers. The amount of companies/brands that operates world-wide, has a shred customer database worldwide and which can help customers worldwide without having to create a new account will happily continue to rise in the coming years. The waiting is for the first company with a billion registered users.

By now 14% of the cell phones in the Netherlands has a GPS antenna. A year ago that was only 2 percent.

The popular MMORPG World of Warcraft now counts 13 million players. It debut was in the US in 2004. World of Warcraft was recently launched in Russia and Latin America, and is currently available in eight languages. In addition to North America and Europe, the game is played in mainland China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile, Argentina, and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

13 million. Soon we’ll get games we’ve walked around in with 1 billion and in the long term even 5 billion people. But what’s a game when reality and virtuality mix completely?

Almost three-quarters of the Dutch internet users in 2008 takes care of its banking via the internet. Three years ago this was less than 60%.

Figures from ICANN show that Africa has the most new IPv6-connections. IPv6 is the newest and necessary version of the Internet Protocol. 22 percent of the new connections in Africa have an IPv6-prefix.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

After China and India have been able to develop themselves to their full glory, it’s Africa’s turn. It’ll be a few decennia yet, but the infrastructure is being laid down.

Facebook now has over 100 million users.

The Financial Times has 450.000 subscriptions for its paper edition and its website has 500.000 registered visitors of which 100.000 have a paid subscription.

And 80% has broadband. The number of .cn domain names is by now surpassing the number of .de domain names.

At the end of February 2008 India had a good 250 million cell phone users. The US has a good 260 million users. India has a monthly average of 8.5 million new subscribers to cell phone plans. In the US the number rises with approx. 2 million people a month.