What Indonesia's media consumption means to all of us

It took a while before I saw it.

Escaping from the Asian Media Summit in Manado, Indonesia, for a few hours, I decided to go downtown (total taxi fare about 45 minutes and £2.70) and see what the town had to offer.

Manado Town Square sounded a good place to start. Despite its name, it isn't a square - it's a vast shopping mall, all air conditioning and marble floors. Inside this shopping mall is everything you'd expect: a supermarket, a Levis store, a Pizza Hut, a few coffee shops, a food court; and a few things you'd not expect, like a motorbike showroom and an entire floor dedicated to selling mobile phones.

I leant against the upstairs balcony to people-watch, only to be slightly startled as the electricity failed and we were plunged into darkness - an impressive thing in a windowless shopping mall. After the electricity flickered back on, I wandered over to attempt to order a coffee, and found a suitable table.

And then I saw it.

Everyone, without exception, was holding a mobile phone. Not hidden in their pocket or bag, but in their hand. If they were alone, they were talking into their mobile phone. If they were with friends, they were holding a simultaneous conversation with their friends and also typing into their mobiles. Everyone.

When it comes to mobile, Indonesia is something special.

It's the world's largest BlackBerry market: that and Nokia's Symbian operating system both have around 40% market penetration each. iOS and Android both have less than 5%.

Indonesia is also the second largest country on Facebook. Not an inconsiderable achievement, since the country is made up of 80 million people, and the only country that beats it in terms of numbers, the USA, is rather larger.

It's not just Facebook. Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is the world's largest city on Twitter, too. So it's no surprise that everything in Indonesia is plastered with Facebook and Twitter IDs. Social media is huge here.

Free wifi is everywhere, too. As far as I could work out, there's a free wifi provider that's available in most parts of Manado that gives you ten-minute chunks of wifi, in return for seeing an ad. (You can subscribe to remove the ad, too).

Unlike Europe, almost all mobile phones here have FM tuners in them, too; promising a good future for the country's many radio stations. Indeed, many stations here are also carried on cable TV and, naturally, online too. That probably explained the blank looks when, earlier in conference, we were talking about the need for mobiles to include a broadcast radio chip.

Indonesia's grasped a mobile future: one where the mobile phone is the primary means of communication, not a laptop. For websites, that turns user-experience upside down; a mobile-first experience needs considerable thought (not least if you're funded by advertising). Hardly surprising that, later, I saw a school lesson - inside another shopping mall - about developing for Android. No, really.

Upstairs in the shopping mall, I was looking down into the future. And, after finishing my cup of strong coffee (and washing it down with the green tea that inexplicably accompanied it), I wandered outside to take my chances on the street.