Innovation on the mobile platform has been held back by carriers—until now. The new possibilities have the Wikipedia founder excited.

Question: Which big technological innovation will hit us next?

Jimmy Wales: One of the spaces I’m really watching very carefully is mobile space.  I think that for a long time innovation on the mobile platform was held back by the carriers and their control of everything and their passion to control everything.  Now that we are getting some brands of phones that are consumer brands that are popular enough that we’re starting to get the correct kind of separation of – people say they want an iPhone, or I want a Google phone, or a Droid Phone.  People start to say those kinds of things and those are the brands they want.  And the carrier is just whoever you get service from.  And if we can break that control that the carriers have had over the platform then we get the same kind of innovation we had on computers on the internet.  People can be building apps and doing all kinds of crazy things.  And I don’t know what’s going to come out of that.  I just know that when you put together a platform that people can innovate on, interesting things end up happening.