Just back from Forum NOKIA event in Monaco (where we participated in the Hackathon), in an event targeting the "developer" sector of the mobile industry. One thing was abundantly clear (although a lot of developers seemed to miss it), and that is that NOKIA is ready to make phones that will help transform the digital and media advertising marketplace.
I think a lot of developers missed it because all they do is develop, many of them are not marketers.
What NOKIA was saying sounded a lot like, "we are producing phones that will mean everyone has an iPhone equivalent type of device but with more functionality and of course is a better phone, but specifically capable of reaching the internet as a computer in your hand, social networking ready with maps and AGPS to let you share anything or everything with friends and or everyone".
So nothing real surprising there. NOKIA has been speaking about maps and social networking for ages. Just marketing speak you may say. But look a little closer about what this means.
For the first time in the history of mobile technology, 50% of the market is about to start using phones that can, and are encouraged to access the Internet. Nothing surprising you may say. But again look a little closer.
What this means is that those corporations that want to speak to consumers in large numbers, who previously could only do it on high priced TV commercials or newspaper ads, can now do it via the mobile phone. And how much more powerful is that? Direct. To people who WANT to be contacted. To people who are prepared to tell application owners (who will be bought by corporations and media agencies), all of their most personal informaton, actions, wants, desires.
What this means is that we are about to see ad and media agencies creating campaigns that reach out directly to consumers on devices that have a substantial market share. This could never have been done before. Mobile tech has promised so much, but been incredibly unusable by agencies because they could never reach sufficient quantities of data (people). That's changed now (or it will have in the next few months as NOKIA's OVI store launches with always-on devices such as the N97 and the family of devices that will roll-out in the same vein).
Now, there's the iPhone, Blackberry, Google's Android and the OVI store opening full access to applications capable of delivering advertising to individuals who by their very actions everytime they use the phone are telling media agencies or application owners, exactly what they need to know about a specific individuals behavior, wants and desires (even if the individual doesn't know it).
Maybe the agencies don't know it yet. Maybe they will take some additional time to work it out. But those who know, will start to experiment very soon.
I can hear someone smart saying that NOKIA doesn't own 50% of the global market or it will ONLY be the smartphone sector. Or developers will still have to develop applications and this takes a lot of time and wont be suitable for fast paced media agencies who need to respond immediately.
Then listen up good. NOKIA's Hackathon showcased something unique. 12 developers were put in a room for 36 hours to develop applications. (Now not all of us took the challenge literally and a few did their development before hand), but it showcased the speed of NOKIA's WRT platform.
Cellcity competed with just one programmer. And i fact he is more architect than programmer. If we had a creative development team, a designer, a grunt coder, an architect and creative director, man we could have finished that development in 10 to 12 hours. A days work.
Then with our secret sauce, put it on 4 other operating systems as an application and a web service and captured 70 to 80% of the smart phone market on release via a global network of mobile application distributors.
So think what agencies could do if they had us on their side. It is just a matter of time. it will be interesting to see who wins, because in the agency business, whoever has the means to reach these new channels is likely to secure contracts that can last for as long as they can remain in the lead.
just to prove it we walked out of the Hackathon after the winners were announced and went back to our hotel. turned on the TV and saw the swine flu news. 15 minutes later we had created a new application. check out the news on monday when we release it.
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