During the course of his keynote speech at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Friday, the Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo highlighted the enormous business potential in the so-called “emerging markets” of the world, and urged the smartphone application developers to turn their attention to these countries and improve the lives of the billions of people inhabiting them.

While other tech bigwigs, like Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer and Intel’s head Paul Otellini, focused largely on the developed markets, Kallasvuo said that calling countries outside the West as “emerging” or “developing” markets is not an apt reflection of the state of innovation and business development in these countries.

Saying that “those ‘labels’ are out of date,” Kallasvuo noted the significance of ‘emerging’ markets for Nokia, which has developed phones like Nokia 1616 particularly to suit the requirements of the users of these areas.

In addition, Nokia – which has been steadily losing market share in the US - has also developed mobile applications, like Life Tools, for giving farmers in the ‘emerging’ markets an access to crop prices and weather forecasts.

With the Consumer Electronics Association forecasting that 2010 will witness mobile devices becoming the key driver of consumer technology revenue, Kallasvuo said: “There is an entire generation of people growing up today that are connecting to the rest of the world solely through their mobile device.”