The December 4th issue of Business Week has an article on the future of technology that centers on the mobile world in Korea and Japan today with the "Thumb Generation", and coming to your hands tomorrow.

The article begins with a look at a 21-year old Korean University student who uses her mobile (I prefer that term to cell phone anyway) to pay her fare at the train station turnstile, to watch satellite TV, to read an e-book, to send an average of 66 text messages a day, snap pictures of cute guys to send to friends and to play on-line games.  I'm not sure what you would call this thing... but I do not think of it merely as a phone.  (If you are not following this yet - you may be too old to get it.  Sorry.

The term "cell phone" does not seem to do justice to this device's capability.  The future will most likely have a connection to networks like WiFi and WiMax, not merely cellular.  (Sort of makes the word "wireless" really confusing, doesn't it?)

And what happens when mobile voice becomes free - like long distance really has already?  The article notes:

The next big battleground could be your back pocket. Studies show that people notice their cell phone is missing within an hour of losing it, compared with a day or more for credit cards and wallets. Such insights helped persuade MasterCard, Visa, and American Express that phones are central to people's lives and actually could start to replace wallets.

One novel idea: Let visitors in a shop download and pay for a music video simply by waving their phones in front of a poster of a band. Some 450 million handsets with this sort of technology built in are expected to ship by 2011 in the U.S. It would open up a "micropayment" market that could be worth $1.3 trillion. In Japan, contactless payments will total $900 million this year, according to researcher Strategy Analytics. MasterCard and Visa researchers found that consumers whip out the contactless device 18% more often than debit or credit cards, and they spend more per transaction. 

Many tech investors are also betting mobile video will eventually catch on. When Paul Scanlan and a partner founded MobiTV in 1999, they had just $500,000 in venture funding. By 2003 their service offered 12 channels of video. Today they have $100 million in backing and stream XM Satellite Radio, along with premium fare, to handsets. Last year, MobiTV began distributing video for Sprint-Nextel, Cingular Wireless, Orange, and a more than a dozen other carriers worldwide.

Carriers have an urgent need to make these new services stick. While Americans still gab at a rate of 67 billion minutes a month, call revenues have declined sharply because of fierce competition. And as more devices tap into cheap or free Internet calling systems such as Skype, revenues from voice calls could take another hit.

Back to the "you're too old to get it" comment.  Members of this "Thumb Generation" see their phones as extensions of their personalities.  Social networking is all the rage now.  Not just with sites like MySpace, but consider loopt (to find where you are, and where your friends are) or mobo (to save time in line when ordering your favorite foods from your favorite restaurants). 

Talk about your mash up!  And I thought these things were just to make phone calls, and take the occassional picture.

What is going to make all this possible is new high speed networks like WiFi and WiMax, but also IP Multimedia Subsystems, or IMS (which Paul and Todd discuss on a recent podcast, and on which we featured an interview with Steve Shepard a few months ago), and newer batteries so that power does not evaporate in three minutes, new screens that use less power and cost less, and new location specific services.

Strap yourselves in.  It's going to be a wild ride.