Next Billion Customers Are New Ball Game for Mobile, Says Nokia CTO
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The mobile industry must begin with a largely blank slate in marketing to its next billion customers, who live in the developing world, said Nokia Chief Technology Officer Bob Ianucci. And the industry must start thinking through the software possibilities created by the network’s knowing a subscriber’s location at all times, he added. The cellphone revolution resembles the development pattern of mainframes, minicomputers and PCs -- but mobile must scale up to handle unprecedented amounts of data, provide new levels of personalization and simplicity of use and supply compatibility across the world’s networks, he said. Ianucci spoke Tuesday in a keynote at the Mobile Future conference organized by Carnegie Mellon University and the business school at the University of California, Berkeley.
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This is the biggest computing challenge technology has faced, Ianucci said. Standardization and openness will be central, and in five years most of the economic value in the industry will have been created “by people outside the mainstream of the mobile business,” he said.
Mobile will flop if it assumes that new customers in Asia, Africa and elsewhere are “just like us, only more cost- sensitive,” Ianucci said. “The world of emerging mobility is very different… We have to think differently than what we've thought before.” Many potential customers don’t live near electricity, literacy rates run as low 20 percent, and large parts of some cities are unmapped, Ianucci said. Interfaces must be created that transcend language and culture and don’t require reading, he said. Nokia is sending teams to Africa and India to study how people use cellphones, Ianucci said.
But the benefits of mobile are “dramatic” in activities such as health care and commerce, Ianucci said. People “have seen the transformational value” of cellular so they “are spending disproportionately” on it in poor countries, he said. Mobile can remake microfinancing, how immigrants send money home, matching buyers and sellers, and even currency, Ianucci said. Wireless minutes are being used in place of money for payments from some places in Africa, and that practice will find “significant” use.
And it won’t be long before sales of cellphones with GPS pass those of specialized GPS devices, Iannuci said. Other capabilities will provide information about a user’s location, shaping cellular use, he said. These include cameras, light sensors, accelerometers, Bluetooth, microphones, Wi-Fi and cell triangulation. Near Field Communications will fill in indoor location, a weak point for GPS, Ianucci said.
Nokia’s TrafficWorks technology suggests some of the opportunities, Ianucci said. It collects GPS data from handsets in vehicles as they pass electronic “trip lines” to provide accurate, real-time traffic reports that can be far more detailed than those from current systems using expensive “inductive loop sensors” embedded in highways, he said. Synced with an appointment calendar, this technology could offer alternate routes and alerts a user to hit the road earlier than planned, Ianucci said. - Louis Trager