Jan

8

Recording of culture started with messages painted on rocks and caves. Ideas behind pictures held on and on. People gathered around the place to experience the message. Years passed and visitors changed and the message transformed into something else, maybe it was lost.

Millenia passed, and the message did become easier to transport. All sort of scrolls and plates have been shattered against the tides of time, but many of them still remain. However the nature of information changed. It wasn’t about the location or ritual anymore, but about the movement. You could pass on information.

Today books are too long to be read through, stories too long to be followed. If we have information with us at all times, we never stop to consume it, we nibble and lack focus. Which message will stand the test of time, let’s say five minutes?

Cave painting text messageIf you had the patience to read this far then you better continue reading John Puterbaugh’s fantastic article about Mobile 2.0.

Jan

7

Kind of magic

January 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Cigarett smoking girl It’s like smoking, dangerous, sexy and mystic. It is all about being in control and thereby being respected by others. Hey, don’t you respect the one who controls the smoke? Don’t you envy the people who hurt themselves. Smoking is a ritual of pain. If you never did it, there’s no way your face will have such an orgastic expression on your face, and you know it.

Girl in a phone lightPopular culture has cultivated this image ever since the Queen started to do it. You noticed the girl, yeah? Well, she’s having a cigarett. She might as well have a mobile phone, especially a brand mobile phone. Yes, that’s how you do it today.

Sony Ericsson is giving the power of control to the people who own a specific Sony Ericccssson (don’t you just forget how to spell it?) mobile phone. Brilliant, brilliant! I want one. But how do they do that?

Z555 has one truely, truely, truely cool, even chilly feature – you can mute the phone with a wave of your hand. Just think of the respect that you will get at any board room when that annoying little thing shuts up with a commanding wave. You really must know magic, world obeys your every whim. You will see people in Starbucks, reading a book, carelessly whisking their hand to general direction of their phone, doing everything in their power to show that they just don’t care. This phone model will sell.

Jan

6

This is our first blog carnival and there is no better way to start than with a bang at the Carnival of the Mobilist, which is now hosted by Mobile Point View.

For some time now, Nokia has been touting their new content service called Ovi. This word comes from Finnish language and means ”door” in English. As we all know, doors close doorways and therefore do not connect people.

door

Unimaginative word games aside, Nokia still ventures outside their traditional slogan. By providing us with a portal of mobile content, Nokia doesn’t help us to connect with people but with content. How they do it is that they garner copyrighted content and package it into mobile form. Boring.

This is an ancient business logic from old-school movie and television distribution business. Just take a brief look at any TOP10 box-office list and guess if entertainment business is lucrative or not. Yes, you guessed it right, it is an expensive game of marketing.

Now take a look at any hot mobile application, they all include some form of social aspect. People are connected with other people and they are having fun. In best case they are having fun without any bought content, they just rely on conversation. Yes, conversation!

I don’t understand why Nokia is abandoning their well-served mantra of ”connecting people” and welcoming stagnated forms of business like ”providing content”.

Aug

19

International competition among biggest mobile phone brands gets tougher and tougher. Nokia’s near dominance of the market presents steep hurdles for other mobile phone brands. Cooperation is the solution for this problem.

Today almost every mobile brand is introducing phones that have some sort of cooperative aspect in them, we recently wrote about Samsung, it has become impossible for mobile phone companies to survive on their own.

Alliances divide mobile phone manufacturers into groups, which won’t mix. Therefore every company are trying to grap the best partners and try to tie them into exclusive partnership. Popular internet services are the latest battleground, now that mobile phones are reaching true internet capabilities. Google, Yahoo!, Youtube, Flickr, Facebook and others are now pawns in open strategic cooperation war.

Aug

1

Sourcing came first, then it was manufacturing and now it is time for research and design. Nokia is opening its’ first design studio in India.

For the longest time, strategic business development mantra has been that China does manufacturing and India does designing. For the most part it has been true just in case of China, which is a huge manufacturing country. India on the other hand hasn’t really gripped its’ supposed role on world market arena, but is now picking up.

Business tends to shift in cycles. It used to be profitable for companies to move manufacturing to cheap labour cost countries. This wave has passed and now it is a norm on any business field on which physical product is part of the complete service. Now we will see increased investment on R&D diversification around the globe.

All these moves are for the good of brand, because if foreign investments earn money, that money can be used to further develop business and win competition. I bet we will see more dropouts in mobile phones market. Those companies that are not good spreading their functions around the world will fail.

Jul

31


I wonder why big mobile phone brands would like to cooperate with design brands? All of the benefit seems to go for the design company in guestion. LG did it with Prada and everybody were touting the beautiful design and good product specifications. It was an expensive phone so ofcourse it had nice specs, but what set it apart in design was more or less all black colouring, which could have been done by LG alone. Prada smoooooothly collected all acclaim.

Usually brands work so that they invest money into developing their own brand and not pouring money into others’ brands. Therefore if one needs to introduce new concept it is usually done under different name like Nokia did with Vertu and Toyota did with Lexus. Now another Asian mobile phone manufacturer is at it. Samsung wants to team up with Armani to create an exclusive (this is the magic word and magic is done by adding e.g. all black colouring, special leather case, copyrighted ringtone by Sting and beuatiful hard paper box with Armani on the top) mobile phone for high-end market. Well, good luck, hope it sells, at least we all know how the phone will look like when it is out for sale.

Jul

29


So many downloads is a big deal, yeh? In games industry, gold and platinum should mean something else beside production phases. Glamour comes with milestones in sales 100,000 and 500,000 or 1,000,000. These are the things to report and overglow across the web. Mobliss is doing the right thing by coming out and putting this message of one million sold “Deal or No Deal” mobile game in front of our eyes.

Jul

29


Lately Motorola has been mostly KonKerned with naming their basic phone line differently. As old truth points, it is quite insane to keep on doing the same old and waiting for new results. However, it hasn’t really been the catchy names but the clumsy phones they churned to markets. Evidently it is time for Motorola to strike back with a flair of product innovation.

Motorola has signed an agreement with Microvision to develop a Pico Projector Display for mobile applications. Smart move because Motorola is in desperate need for new quimmick now that their RAZR pony doesn’t sell anymore. By using Microvision’s ready technology this new products time-to-market should be relatively short. Christmas market anyone?

What about battery time? We all hate Nokia for various reasons, but short batterytime is not among them. Everybody hates Motorola because of their wheeble batteries. Now that this power hungry projector is placed inside a sleek “MOTR-phone“, what will happen? Sleek becomes bleak and fashion designers start to tantalize about needed diet. Luckily robusto is nice coffee flavour and we also have some more room to fit XL-battery inside MOTR.

Did you ever play with your teacher? Reflecting sunlight to some private areas with your wrist watch? Now this projector is a whole new game in town. Tease your classmate by projecting a heart or an ass.

May

21


Interesting news coming from Nokia. Blog enthusiasts will be treated with interactive travelling experience. Peter Schindler will maintain a blog while travelling in China. Peter’s weapon of choice will be Nokia’s new N95, a brilliant multimedia gadget also some other Nseries phones will be used.

This approach will no doubt gather interest all over the blogosphere, although it is still a tad too calculated effort to gain mass following as some kind of special novelty. However, this shows us that travelling is coming more and more shareable activity, which mostly likely will lead into extensive holiday reporting. This bonfire of travel industry need internet connected camera phones to fuel the flame. Good times are coming for multimedia mobile phones.


Feb

24

Symbian fights back

February 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Blazing hot insights about mobile phone industry from Nigel Clifford, the CEO of Symbian (sure he is puffing up his comp, but you know how to read news anyway). Nigel was interviewed by Finnish finance newspaper Taloussanomat.

Importance of software will grow in the mobile phone sector, Nigel claims. He is right of course. It is like saying that in the future people want to have more mobile services.

Platforms are going to be more important because that enables mobile operators to cut costs because there will be less features to be taken care of from the service side.

Nigel believes that openness will give the needed advantage for Symbian over Windows Mobile. I wouldn’t be so sure though, those enterprise users sure love their familiar Windows experience. Actually this makes me wonder, what if Symbian would be used to run PCs? In many countries, mobile phones are actually the gateway drug to information society.

Market share battle is raging harder than ever, because just in few years time the mobile market growth has to come from products and services instead of subscriber tallies.


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