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Most people are familiar with the story that mobile phone giant Nokia was a paper and timber company before it moved into phones.

I also came across this story about Lazard, the financial giant.

"The company was originally founded in 1848 when the Lazard brothers formed Lazard Fr?res & Co. as a dry goods business in New Orleans, LA, with a combined contribution of $9,000. Shortly thereafter, the Lazard brothers moved to the gold rush town of San Francisco, where they opened a business selling imported goods and exporting gold bullion. The business progressively became involved in financial transactions, first with its retail clients and then increasingly with commercial clients. Over time, the business expanded into the banking and foreign exchange businesses."

From dry goods to investment banking!

It's clear we are in more volatile times and companies might need to be ready to move into categories in order to take of opportunities or just to survive. It's easy to have a fixed perspective if you've been working in a category for so long, but perhaps you need to experiment and explore in order to find a new territory that could end up defining you in the near future.

Keep your eyes open.


Posted by Ed Cotton Nokia is trying hard to be seen as an open organization. This website is a good example of a company that's opening its people and process up for public view. If you happen to be interested in working for the company, a huge fan of Nokia or work in a related field, this can be good stuff to see. In essence, it's material for a very limited core audience.

Nokia is a really smart organization which has become truly global by listening to user needs especially in the developing world, but it's in trouble.

It's nice to tick the box in the C21st marketing text book and make some effort to be open, but if it doesn't drive business success, then it's simply a nice to have.

Can Nokia turn its openness into something more powerful?

It's certainly one area that they lead Apple, a company that's widely recognized as being controlling and secretive.

However, Nokia needs to turn its openness trait into something more powerful.

Could Active Openness help Nokia to become the "people's phone company"

By listening more and opening up more it could seize some advantage, but it needs to make this openness bigger, more active and more broadcast worthy. Simply seeing what Nokia employees are doing is no good if you can't interact. Also, if you don't having a rich understanding of the potential of mobile technology, it limits your ability to participate.

Nokia can do one thing that Apple can't, it can educate and invite a global audience inside its company. It can embrace the whole idea of openness and invite all kinds of audiences to help make a truly mobile life a reality for the globe.

While Apple will continue to control and dictate, Nokia has the opportunity to provide an alternative point view, one that's powered by a broad community who are working together with the corporation.

Nokia has a real chance to bring the idea of openness to broad media and encourage two way dialog, debate and discussion about the future of mobility.

Of course, it's obvious Nokia needs killer products, but Active Openness could help them engage.





Posted by Ed Cotton Print and billboard ads now need to be alive and be able communicate with mobile devices. Hopefully this will lead to less copy and more art in the ads we see around us. Stuff that lets the art shine through and seduces viewers into using their mobiles to learn more.


Posted by Ed Cotton MTV or Music Television built its brand celebrating the new art form of the early 80s, the music video. It gave the music industry just what it needed, the eyeballs of a young generation to promote its product which it made a buck a disc for.

Fast forward several decades to the emergence of MySpace as THE music brand and you see a radically different notion of the role of music. Music is given away and streamed, the value of this is to provide exposure and shared advertising revenue for bands and record companies. The money is not made in the music, but in the merchandise and concert ticket revenue.

As Techcrunch told us in October.

"But today the labels have all but given up on DRM, and users can now play virtually any song ever recorded on demand for free. MySpace has created the first ecosystem that has a shot of producing sustainable revenue streams for artists based on advertising, merchandise and concert sales.

If it works, the next step is the fall of per-stream fees and download fees. Instead labels will see music consumption for what it really is - free marketing. Labels will compete to encourage song downloads and streams to move those songs up the charts, attracting premium advertisers, merchandise sales and sold out concerts."

What's interesting to see here is the role music has played as a glue to generate revenue for media companies, but the context of that revenue generation has changed over time.

It seems that MTV has lost its way as a brand with television no longer being the dominant media of the youth generation, music video dying as a form and the network shifting focus away from music to regular television shows.

Apple became the next brand to exploit and dominate the music channel with iTunes and the iPod, but the software was always just there to sell the high margin hardware. iTunes has now being panned by the critics for not keeping up with the times and Apple has a few other heavyweight players including Nokia trying to take a big share of the hardware business.

Another player is MySpace, who came out of the gate in October with a relaunched music service that achieved incredible traction. Just a few DAYS after launch, the brand streamed one billion songs.

At the recent Web 2.0 conference there was all kinds of speculation about the potential for an MP3 player to be launched by MySpace.

However, this isn't really the game anymore.MySpace's core competence is all about community and from day one its community has been focused on music. This is something that can't easily be copied and Apple, Nokia and Sony will struggle to make this happen. The story here is not about an iPod rival from MySpace, but instead the arrival of MySpace as a formidable media player in the new world of music.

Posted by Ed Cotton Nokia demonstrates how it's leveraging insights gleaned from the developing world into products. The mobile phone is made to work a lot hard in developing countries; it becomes the mobile office and primary computer for many of its users. In response, Nokia is launching Life Tools; software included in its phones that can help those involved in agriculture better understand market and weather conditions.


Posted by Ed Cotton Matt Jones, one of the founders of the hip, travel-based social network, Dopplr, spoke at last night's IXDA event in San Francisco.

His presentation was a sort of biography meets sources of inspiration ramble, but it was good.

Jones, worked for three years (2003-2006) in Nokia's design research team spent a lot of time talking and learning about play, a core project he'd been involved in for a couple of years.

Nokia started by searching for universal human experiences something that required no research, just a book, Human Universals by Donald Brown that lists all the commonalities that exist in the human world. Matt and his team discovered there was a lot of global commonality in play which suited Nokia because at the time, it was searching for its own space in gaming.

While Jones and his gang came up with a lot of trend-right directions/themes (social networking, hacking, just-in-time situationalists, reclaim the streets,mundane is the new fun, etc) it appears the only thing that Nokia had on its mind was the doomed N-Gage.

This play project seems to have informed Matt's philosophy for design, he used the idea/quote of Play= Improvisation + Exploring, to make the link back to the design world.

He suggests that most people don't take play seriously, but play is the best way people learn and is all around us. It's the thing that can make experiences sticky and compelling, if you know how to use it right.

He had some nice examples;

The Prius dashboard "makes MPG, the new high score"

Dopplr's brand identity that is personalized for each user and changes as their behavior changes

Playfulness in copy on Dopplr- "July, no trips, we envy you."

As a distraction, Jones talked about his sideline projects for Welsh clothing company, Howies; a computer meets printer meets conveyor belt thingy that spits out Flickr images tagged with Howies. (Russell Davies is a co-conspirator on this).

Another project revolves around creating a map chest for the Howies London store complete with bugs, mid wind speed monitors and web cam feeds from Welsh surfing breaks. His inspiration was to stop the Howies people from becoming homesick for their roots when they were in Central London.

He ended with an interesting thought about the current vogue for the Big Idea, which he doesn't really believe in, instead he feels it's much more about the details and nuances, which are hard to get right and hard to copy.


Posted by Ed Cotton