Nokia: Mobile Media
This is really cool. In the background right now, I've been listening to the Nokia Investors meeting: 2003 Capital Market Days and Anssi Vanjoki Executive Vice President and General Manager Multimedia is giving his presentation about mobile multimedia. You can check out the presentation online and download the PDF for a big picture on their thoughts and strategies.
The most interesting thing I heard was about Nokia's enthusiasm for moblogs! Both during the presentation and in response to a question from an analyst about mobiles in the imaging market, Vanjoki stressed that the ability to post photos online and annotate those pictures ("your life" I think he said) as an important differentiator for mobile phones with cameras. This is very interesting to me, as I had the idea that moblogging is a niche idea with a limited audience. But it seems that Nokia is really excited about the idea and is putting a lot of weight on the ability of people to post their pictures online, not just in a photo album, but in a way that becomes entertainment to others.
Very interesting. But it seems from the tone of defensiveness and some of the questions, there seems to be some doubts about the merging of mobile and multimedia. I saw this myself the other day with my review of MobiTV - lots of naysayers about that service as well. If you look at the slides, Nokia has spread the definition of media to include games as well as traditional audio/video and thinks about media in two ways: Active and Passive. Kids want to be actively entertained with interaction and gaming and adults, for example, normally want to be passively entertained with movies and audio.
It's an interesting way of looking at the concept of media and where mobile media is going. Looking at the slide above you can see that this is an emerging market as the bandwidth isn't really here yet for full-on media, but Nokia said in the presentation that it wants to be in forefront of this market and I think it's a pretty interesting place to be and, if you're thinking about developing a new product or service now, something to aim for in the future.
-Russ