Even to those of us who get weary of official statistics, the latest ones about mobile phones are astonishing. The two billionth GSM phone (Global System for Mobile Communications) has just been connected. It took 12 years to sell the first billion, but only two and a half to sell the second, with more than 80% of the growth coming from developing countries such as China, India, Africa and those in Latin America. The GSM association (whose phones account for 82% of all connections) points out that not only is it the fastest growth of technology ever recorded but it is the first communications technology to have more users in the developing world than the developed world, with all that that implies for the bridging the digital divide.

The association is quite right to attribute this success to the original vision of a cross-border digital communications system based on common standards. The unsung heroes are civil servants and businesses, particularly in the EU, who brought this about. They deserve public recognition as they are responsible for the fact that mobile phones are one of the few areas where America's divine right to rule new technologies does not operate.

Sadly, such collective wisdom is not mirrored by the constituent companies of the GSM association, whose myopic attitude to change is preventing the huge potential of the mobile from being fully exploited. It is not fanciful to project that if present trends continue, aided by the GSMA's laudable efforts to produce a low-cost phone, that practically everyone will either have, or have access to, a mobile device in the none-too-distant future. This offers not only opportunities for knowledge enrichment but huge scope for unprecedented business opportunities, particularly for small operators.

Never before has an interactive device been carried by practically everyone in the developed world. Already, the mobile is home to up to 55 functions - from television to MP3 players - which could be sold separately. The industry has performed a miracle in making such devices, but the operators are retarding mass exploitation by erecting walled gardens around their services to shut out competition, by charging excessively for data use when it should be part of the monthly fee (as in the US) and by stifling creativity by denying content providers proper reward for effort.

The scale of the lost opportunity can be seen by asking a simple question. Where are the "bedroom" programmers for the mobile phone like those who cut their teeth on the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC computers two decades ago and went on to become the bedrock of Britain's world-class games developers? Programming for a mobile has to be easier than for a computer but a generation has missed a golden opportunity to create a world-scale industry.

Fortunately, there are signs of change. David Wood, executive vice president for research at Symbian, maker of the operating system for most smart phones, believes that a combination of explosive growth of smart phones and the arrival of an easy-to-learn programming language, Python, could resurrect the bedroom programmers. Python is a free (open source) programming language for mobile phone applications (named after you-know-who). You can test it by going to python.org and clicking on the "Getting Started" link at the top left of the screen. Or go to mobilenin.com to download videos of how people, some new to programming, fared in a workshop. More than 21,000 downloads have been made.

I started one tutorial and found it surprisingly easy to learn about the basics, though not so easy to download the editor/interpreter needed to run programs being worked on. Imagine what would happen if savvy teenagers were let loose on it. Maybe it should be circulated around MySpace or Bebo; or even put on the school curriculum.

vic.keegan@theguardian.com

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