DAVOS (Switzerland): At a time of dizzying uncertainty and constant innovation, one prediction seems certain: the mobile phone business is big and getting even bigger.

Less obvious, judging by the concerns of top executives who focused on the issue on Friday at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, is how to cash in.

“There are more than 3 billion people with cell phones,” far more than there are personal computers, said moderator David Kirkpatrick, the senior editor for Internet and technology at Fortune Magazine.

“It will not be long before we are all carrying video (transmitting) cell phones. What we now call the cell phone is becoming the de facto Internet device. The technology industry is rapidly becoming the mobile technology industry.”

But the panel, which included the heads of Google Inc., Sony Corp., NBC Universal and the China Mobile Communications Corp., seemed less optimistic about the prospects for profit.

“Show me the money is one thing you can ask,” said Sony chief executive Howard Stringer. “There isn’t any obvious money. ... Is all voice going to be free going forward? ... Obviously we’re not making enough money off downloading of music to offset the loss of our packaged goods.”

Wang Jianzhou, whose company is the largest mobile provider in China, was the most ebullient panel member, noting that China boasts a half billion mobile users and is adding to the number at a rate of 6 million per month. The future, he suggested, was with “location advertising” enabled by the devices’ global positioning system.

“We know where you are. If we want to know how many people are in a stadium, how many people are in a supermarket,” he marveled. “We can know the speed (of cars). So we can send special kinds of information.”

US congressman Edward Markey — a Massachusetts Democrat — called such omniscience “bone-chilling.”

“It does raise significant privacy concerns,” agreed Kevin Martin, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission which regulates the industry.

Stringer turned to Wang: “With 500 million phone users, if I could sell you one song to each of your users my music company would finally break even.”

“The world that uses mobile phone, which is young people, don’t like advertising,” Stringer lamented.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, was upbeat, predicting “a huge revolution.”

“It seems obvious that advertising, that works so well on the traditional Internet, should also work well on the mobile Internet,” he said.

“After all, they know where you are. You’re driving along and it says, ‘Eric, you had pizza yesterday and there’s a hamburger stand on the right.’ In theory location-based advertising will be a very good business and useful to the end user.”

Kirkpatrick cited estimates that put the US mobile advertising market at under $1billion annually for at least four years more — a paltry sum.

But Schmidt said the estimates would be adjusted upward once the business reaches a “tipping point” — as long as there were “open networks” in which devices and content and service providers are not inextricably linked.

“We need to create that framework in which the really creative people can build (mobile) applications that none of us can even imagine. That is the recreation of the Internet, the recreation of the PC story and it’s very exciting. It’ll happen in the next year. It will be big.”

Stringer offered that the emergence of short form video — “soap operas of three minutes apiece and so on” — was key to making video viable on mobile devices.

Schmidt — whose company owns YouTube, the video-sharing website helping drive the form — readily agreed.

In a sign of the times, the appreciative Stringer declared: “I really like Google!” Gesturing toward Schmidt, he added: “The only reason I’m on this panel is to get close to him.”—AP