The latest phone stats are up at Tomi Ahonen’s Communities Dominate Brands blog. There have been more mobile subscriptions that humans for a while now, but the big news is that 72% of all humans, including babies, kids… everyone, now have a functional phone in their pocket. This is four times more than Facebook and six times more than WhatsApp. The big winner continues to be SMS. If you want to reach EVERYONE, send a text message.
This jibes with what my study in Francophone Africa this Spring showed, and the advice in the resulting whitepaper, Communications Tips For Travel Around the World. The most reliable means of staying in touch with your team while you travel is SMS. Skype is a strong #2; it doesn’t have the reach of SMS, but its ability to gracefully degrade in poor Internet makes it the king of the communications apps.
Visiting Friends 