Imagine this: 75 percent of the world has never tried e-mail. Now imagine a company like Nokia, which has sold over a billion mobile phones, being the entry point for all those first-time e-mailers.
“Our plan is to democratize e-mail,” Nokia’s EVP of Services and Software Niklas Savandar told the audience in Barcelona. “Move it to the streets.”
“It is clearly in our strategy and our vision that these people will first encounter the Internet through a small mobile computer rather than a PC,” EVP of Nokia Markets Anssi Vanjoki added. “We are going to make this integration extremely relevant to the emerging market.”
How relevant? And when? Starting in 2008, the Finnish company will make Nokia Messaging and Mail on Ovi available in phones as low-end as its 3100 models. Through Mail on Ovi, even users in the emerging market (thanks to GPS) will be able to set up their first accounts in minutes. (We watched a demonstration of a Nokia techie setting up a new personal e-mail account onstage and it really did seem ridiculously easy, something like three minutes.) Nokia Messaging will allow users to access their existing Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Windows Hotmail, AOL Mail and other e-mail accounts from their phones, no matter if it’s a basic 1620 model or an N-series hottie. The technology cost is now cheap enough to allow more people to get their e-mail away from the desk, or in many cases, without even having a desk.
That’s clearly a big advantage for a company that still wants to sell billions of phones in Africa, India and Southeast Asia. We watched a seminar by telecoms trend spotter Julie Ask, VP for JupiterResearch, in which she related how an N-series phone was given to a Masai villager in Kenya. A month later, not only did the Kenyan have e-mail; he was inviting Julie to visit his Facebook page, where he already had 500 friends.
That’s how fast the world is changing.
According to Ukko Lappalainen, VP for Nokia N-Series Markets: “You have people talking about $100 laptops, so I don’t see why we cannot talk about $100 mobile computers in the same way.”
That is, in fact, what Nokia has been talking about since the N series was first launched. And now it’s just about ready to happen, big-time.
According to Tom Furlong, SVP of Consumer Messaging, Service and Software for Nokia, “You’ll get your phone and your phone will say ‘Where in the world are you?’, ‘What time is it?’ and ‘What is your email address?’ And that’s the third question in the interrogation. Then, from there, it’s automatically set up. It’s not a matter of ‘How do I get it, what do I need to download, what do I need to go see my IT manager about to set up the service.’ It’s a Nokia-run service where we control the end-to-end experience.”
That prospect should please millions of newbie users who don’t have access to IT managers. For myself, I asked the woman at the Nokia Messaging booth of Nokia World if this majestic change would take place in my basic-black Nokia 1640 model, which I showed her. No, she explained; I’d have to buy another 1640 next year to get all the software and applications to set up Nokia Messaging. Sure. Understood.
With GPS, it will no longer be unusual for even basic mobile phones to know exactly where you are in the world, which raises obvious security issues. Furlong, a firewall expert, had some reassuring answers. “With any new service, there are those of us who are older who tend to say ‘Why would I ever want to use that?’ and those who tend to be younger who say, ‘Wow, when can I use this?’
“The most significant thing we can do is have very explicit opt in/opt out capabilities for different groups, and not to maintain any information in an unencrypted form and to not put user info and location info adjacent to one another where they can easily be hacked.”
In other words, “strong authentication, good encryption capabilities, and keeping separate data base capabilities.”
Or, put in yet another way, it’s up to users to protect their info. And that’s also a way of empowering users.
But it raises another point, which is that with Nokia’s entry into services and “social location” platforms, it has found itself awash in a mother lode of customer information — names, addresses, phone numbers, contact lists, buying habits, and all the other relevant stuff people plug into their devices. All this data is being collected, passively or not, by the new technology. What will Nokia do with all that personal information, especially in an age where information is not only power, it can be quite lucrative?
The answer is, Nokia doesn’t know yet.
“I cannot speak about the business model,” Nokia president and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said at a conference Q&A session, “but by default, we get more information about people’s behavior than anybody else in the world, so our consumer insight is continuously being served by the feedback we get from these millions of (Nokia users). With this information, and with specific permission of the users, we also get this online database.
“It is a tempting idea to make a business out of this as well,” he allowed, “but the key here is the platform was built in this way, and everything happens with the permission and with the control of the user.”
As revolutionary as universal e-mail may sound, it wasn’t the most far-out concept put out there at Nokia World. That honor would go to British futurologist Ray Hammond, who posited that by 2025, we would all be equipped with nano-scale implants in our necks — Nokia-built, of course — that would speak to us in sweet, dulcet tones about our vital health statistics, remind us of our appointments, inform us of incoming messages and generally act as our personal, internal secretary.
Hammond’s implant, he told us, would be named “Maria.”