Spot the link between these two bits of news from Monday morning: music giant EMI announces it is to merge with Time Warner - itself recently merged with internet company AOL. Meanwhile, mobile phone operator BT Cellnet unveils its latest mobile phone range.
Are these two different industries, travelling separate paths? Or two industries racing along roads which are set to cross very soon? The smart money - and the scale of these deals shows there's plenty about - is on those paths meeting.
The mobile phone is a massive hit. In little more than a decade it has changed from a yuppy toy to a vital piece of kit for 40% of Britons, joining purses, wallets and keys as the thing you don't leave home without.
But we have yet to see the mobile revolution really take a grip. Only five years from now, there will be a billion mobile phones in the world, making desktop computing seem a minority sport.
"We're at the beginning of the internet revolution," says Brian Greasley, general manager of BT Cellnet's mobile internet service provider, Genie Internet. He means that mobile phones, rather than the computers we've been using so far, are going to deliver that revolution.
"If you look at the internet today, it's based on a PC platform of 350m PCs worldwide. If you roll that figure forward to 2003, there will be around 400-500m PCs. Currently there's about 300m mobile phones, and by 2003 there will be one billion mobile phones. Every one of them will have an internet browser built in."
Greasley is referring, at least in part, to new "internet phones". They send information using a new standard called Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).
He is not even counting other devices, like Psion and Palm organisers, which already use mobile phones for communication and themselves have web access. They, and new generations of hybrid mobiles which combine organiser and phone, will mean we may still find our handsets much more useful than our computers. They'll not just be for talking - we'll use them to send messages, find out the latest news and football scores, access information and use services on the internet.
And, here's the crunch, the amount of "bandwidth" these phones have - the amount of information they can receive or send in a second - will eclipse today's conventional telephone line connections to the net. This summer, you could have the equivalent of an expensive ISDN line to your mobile phone. In the near future, you will quite easily have the kind of power that will make receiving high quality sound and video on the move quite straightforward and rewarding, reshaping the way we get information and entertainment. And that's why content companies like EMI and Time Warner want to get friendly with internet giants like AOL.
Before Monday's deal, EMI was already teaming up to provide entertainment over mobiles, including a deal with Genie Internet. Greasley says: "With EMI, we'll be providing gossip lines and interviews, all based around SMS (short messaging) and audio. So, if you're a Spice Girls fan, you'll get an SMS message telling you Geri Halliwell has rejoined the band, and then if you hit the send button you can hear the interview and clips on the phone."
It's not difficult to see where this kind of service will go when the more powerful networks and phones go on sale in the months and years to come. "In the longer term," says Greasley, "music will be delivered down the line, and there's quite a few integrated MP3 players being worked on by manufacturers. We believe the phone will become the next Walkman, and the Walkman was the biggest selling consumer electronics product ever."
A lot of these services will be available sooner than you might expect. It is very cheap, compared to the costs of setting up a full web site, for a retailer or content provider to create a WAP site, so many big names have moved quickly to be ready from the off. Ian Germer, product strategy executive at Vodafone, says "Things will be happening soon".
Quite how soon is a matter of some debate. Mobile operators expected working handsets to be on sale by last Christmas, but delivery dates slipped because of problems with the WAP software. It has been an inglorious start for a breakthrough technology: very few phones were around until last week. But Germer does not see the problems holding the technology back in the long run.
"We see that by next Christmas a significant proportion of handset sales will be WAP compatible. Once they've got over the hurdle, it'll be built into as many new handsets as possible - it'll become cheaper to do it that way."
All eyes might be on WAP, but the concept of mobile data is nothing new. Companies with large, travelling workforces have long made use of it, while organisers and laptops computers can log on over mobile networks using PC card add-ons and specially equipped mobiles. But nobody is calling WAP mobile data because it is "a real turn- off", says Germer. "WAP will take off because people don't realise this is mobile data; they'll be told they can get their share prices, or their bank balance, or do their shopping through their mobile, and think 'oh great.' It'll take off because there are things there that people want to do."
Germer predicts that, as with the net, interaction between users and the applications they create themselves to put the technology to use will be the ones which catch most users' imaginations.
"The skill here is to get it to the point where the customers invent their own applications, and just get on with them. With WAP, you can see the time when children in the playground will be knocking up their own little WAP sites and showing them to their friends - there will be little playground competitions for the best, or rudest, WAP site around.
"People will develop little applications to help plumbers, or flower delivery companies. This is where electronic commerce is going to take off."
Packaging and targeting the early WAP services will be important in making the technology popular, says Ben Wood of Lucent, a company which installs mobile networks and advises their operators. "If you get people used to the habit of looking at their phones and interacting, you'll be in a better position when GPRS (General Packet Radio Service - a new, more powerful kind of mobile network) and WAP come along. "There's no way you can just turn on a broadband network and say 'OK, we're open for business - come and start using it to gamble, playing games, using it to read news and information'.'
The hunt is also on for "killer apps" - the applications which are so useful to an individual they feel a new mobile phone is a must have. "There's a lot of talk about the killer application," says Wood, "but the idea should be for every user to have one. If you go round a room you will find everyone's different - for me, since I like horse racing, it might be gambling that's my killer application. For you it might be news, for someone else the formula one latest. If you can deliver that - the most compelling information for them - it will be very important." And, he adds, the service has to be absolutely right, first time. Get any part of the complicated equation - breadth of content, partner shops and content providers, ease of use - and users may be put off.
"Bill shock" - where users experiment with new information services and get landed with a huge bill - is also a big no no.
The young are also very important, he says. "There was some research recently which said 300,000 kids got mobiles for Christmas in the UK. The mobile phone was the most requested present for 12-15 year olds. That's staggering,' says Wood.
"They will have an insatiable desire for information. When they get one of these new phones, these are the people who'll be jumping onto it. For years, everyone's been banging on at WAP conferences about providing share prices and email. Those services will have their place, but they're not the applications for people like me."
Schoolchildren might be at home with all this mobile pop news, but what about the rest of us? Will we not be a bit intimidated by the arrival of so much computing power in devices which, until now, we've just talked through? Genie Internet's Brian Greasley reckons that any problems will be overcome.
"I'd point to two things. One is SMS: up until last year people didn't know what SMS was. We as a network in December '98 did 6m messages a month. In January this year we did 62m messages. We have half a million people on Genie doing all this stuff, and we're growing at about 3000 a day.
"Look to the emerging mobile sectors like youth. Youth don't even know what technology is. Nobody has told my son how to work his GameBoy. He just uses it. It's exactly the same in this market. The early Nintendo and PlayStation market is now around 30, so there is a tremendous amount of people who are ready for this."
Where mobiles have been, are now, and will be soon
The first generation mobile phones were almost as unloved as their flashy yuppy owners: vast kits, more often installed in cars than carried.
They were expensive to buy, prohibitively expensive to run, and because they were based on an analogue system (rather like two-way radio) reception faded in and out. The handsets became smaller and could be fitted into a large pocket, and tariffs fell to more reasonable levels, but they were still out of the reach of most people.
In the early 90s, along came the second generation of phone - lighter and smaller digital handsets, with sim cards (credit-card size or smaller bits of plastic, with embedded microchips). Better call quality and much more attractive pricing from the networks, Vodafone and Cellnet, set us on the road to mass popularity.
Prepaid mobiles revolutionised the business: all four networks offer them alongside their contract offerings. Virgin mobile doesn't offer its own network (it resells One2One services) but broadens the choices and offers intriguing possibilities should Virgin's other arms - including music and travel - be brought into play on its mobile service.
Over the next few months we'll see generation two and-a-half: phones equipped with slightly bigger screens and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) software. This mobile internet will offer cut down, highly practical versions of e-commerce and information websites, converted to run on the slower speeds and smaller screens of mobile phones.
That limitation will not be around for long. This summer Britain gets its first high bandwidth mobile service, courtesy of BT Cellnet, which will offer capacity similar to an ISDN land line. Higher capacity will allow music and video to be downloaded quickly and at reasonably high quality, making multimedia entertainment via your mobile a practicality. Expect combined MP3 players and phones by Christmas.
Earlier this month, Britain's Radiocommunications Agency closed the auction for the third generation of mobiles, run on a system called UMTS.
This system will give immensely fast connections to mobiles - up to two megabytes of data a second. That kind of power could complete the mobile revolution.
