One cell phone for every two humans

"Eventually there will be more cell phone users than people who read and write," says Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Google in a recent article by the Washington Post. The article has some interesting facts about how cell phone technology grew so fast since its creation that no one could predict the magnitude of this expansion.

There's a particularly interesting anecdote that illustrates how unpredictable cell phone expansion has been. Mckinsey & Co., the consulting firm, in 1980 underestimated what the size of the cell phone market would be in the year 2000. Its number was not even 1 percent of the actual market size in 2000.