If TomTom were a country, its mobile penetration would rank between Gambia and Gabon (137th)

In the report I wrote for the Dutch government on M2M (or embedded wireless, or internet of things), quantifying the size of the market for M2M was one of the important issues. Today TomTom published some of its ambitions with real time traffic information and its HD traffic product in a Manifesto. As part of this they give a number of the amount of devices that are GPRS/UMTS enabled: 1.38 million!

If TomTom were a country, it would rank between Gambon and Gabon in terms of active mobile devices or 137th. Its goal is even more ambitious and that is to bring 20 to 25 million devices on the road, which puts it in the range of  The Netherlands, Australia and Taiwan, somewhere around 35th to 40th in the world rankings. Yes people, that would mean that TomTom would have more devices in the field than many European mobile companies.

M2M is going to be really big and it will change the relationships between telco's and M2M end users.

OECD publishes broadband statistics december 2007

The much debated OECD broadband statistics have been published again. The stats portal is here. They also published a paper on broadband policies, which I hope to give a separate blog post.

Australians will again say that they're rubbish (biggest drop), USA will not know what to say (they remained equal), Luxembourg will say that their broadband policies work (biggest rise, probably because they installed 1 DSLAM in their country) Weirdly enough Korea dropped 3 places... but that can probably be attributed to the fact that the top has become very competitive. (I would like to see the OECD statistics not only on a per 100 basis, but also percentage of households connected)

	June	dec-07	Up or down?
Denmark	1	1	0
Netherlands	2	2	0
Iceland	6	3	3
Norway	5	4	1
Switzerland	3	5	-2
Finland	7	6	1
Korea	4	7	-3
Sweden	8	8	0
Luxembourg	14	9	5
Canada	9	10	-1
United Kingdom	11	11	0
Belgium	10	12	-2
France	13	13	0
Germany	17	14	3
United States	15	15	0
Australia	12	16	-4
Japan	16	17	-1
Austria	18	18	0
New Zealand	20	19	1
Ireland	22	20	2
Spain	19	21	-2
Italy	21	22	-1
Czech Republic	24	23	1
Portugal	23	24	-1
Hungary	25	25	0
Greece	27	26	1
Poland	26	27	-1
Slovak Republic	28	28	0
Turkey	29	29	0
Mexico	30	30	0

I've also updated my motion chart (unfortunately Google hasn't yet updated motion charts)

OECD broadband infographic using Google Motion Chart

Over the weekend I've been fiddling with the OECD Broadband stats to get them into a Google Spreadsheet and then be able to publish the results in their moving charts. I've also made a heat chart. It's not really perfect, but it shows the possibilities. One of the conlusions I do draw is that there seems to be a strong correlation between household PC usage and Broadband penetration. Unfortunately there are only limited numbers available for PC usage

I've found that the apps are not consistent in the way the work. A heatmap works with rows, a moving chart with columns. Also I'm missing tracking options to follow one particular dot (you can click them, but they don't leave a trail unfortunately.) You can find the sheet here.

If you really want to know how it is done, than have a look at http://gapminder.org/ or look at the Youtube movie of Prof. Hans Rosling, the inventor, at the end.

Moving Chart


Heat Map



Hans Rosling