Influx Insights Tag Feed: nokia

play is the thing- dopplr's matt jones

Influx Insights — 2008-04-24T14:57:09Z

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

dazzling mobile phone stats from nokia

Influx Insights — 2008-04-11T22:59:06Z

It's Chipchase day here at Influx Insights, so here's another post with a great slide from his deck.

Mobile is a huge business and I am not sure we quite realize how big.

One billion + phones are sold a year!!

Worryingly, 400,000 phones a day are retired in the US.

One surely has to question the sustainability of a fashion driven business.

Bring on the modular eco phone...

Posted by Ed Cotton

jan chipchase- the life of a digital nomad

Influx Insights — 2008-04-11T21:53:23Z

Nice piece from The Economist that follows the life of Nokia's Jan Chipchase (see our previous post)

It's a film that uses photos and a phone recording.

Jan offers his observations on technology in his work life and life in general.

Posted by Ed Cotton

ingenuity in developing markets

Influx Insights — 2008-04-11T19:37:35Z

I was fortunate enough to attend Jan Chipchase's Street Hacks (avail for download from his site) presentation at Adaptive Path the other night.

He's Nokia's resident field researcher/ethnographer.

His function is to help Nokia better understand how people use mobile phone and identify potential opportunities.

In his presentation he shared some great examples of how people in the developing world are adapting/hacking and playing with limited resources to deliver experiences they want and need.

Here are some of his examples;

1. Not An Official Product: Two SIM cards on the space of a single SIM so users can switch between providers

2. Stealing Electricity, but with a Meter- from Brazil- It costs to add the meter, but having the meter gives you an address and the "rights" from having an address.

3. A system for airtime transfer gets turned by its users into a banking system- Africa- people can send airtime quicker than money and in towns and villages, individuals exchange that airtime for cash.

Posted by Ed Cotton

retail experience: nokia vs. apple

Influx Insights — 2008-04-10T00:35:02Z

John Dodds over at Make Marketing History has a nice post about the differences between Nokia and Apple in their retail experience.

He compares two stores in Oxford St, London and concludes;

The Nokia store is a gallery.
The Apple store is alive.
The Nokia store staff are tech sellers.
The Apple store staff are tech users.
The Nokia store is a place where you browse.
The Apple store is a place where you use.
The Nokia store is about surface.
The Apple store is about corporate DNA

In essence, it's clear that Apple has a brand and Nokia doesn't. This was fine for Nokia when they had the mobile world to themselves, but it looks like they need some serious brand work to prevent Apple from taking some major share in this space.

Posted by Ed Cotton

nokia thinks about a recycled phone

Influx Insights — 2008-02-14T02:57:40Z

It's only in a design concept stage, but at least Nokia is starting to think about the opportunity of re-use.

Shown below is the Remade concept.

Here's a video explaining a little more about the idea.

Posted by Ed Cotton

thinking about the electronics we consume

Influx Insights — 2008-01-13T18:02:40Z

The other day, Piers at PSFK posted an angry editorial about CES.

"Another year, another electronics and gadgets conference that is out of whack with modern concerns around sustainability and the planet. The C.E.S. is an arrogant refusal to admit to the problems the electronics industry has created in terms of material waste, poisonous polution, energy waste and over-consumption."

He is not alone, today's New York Times Magazine has a great piece by Jon Mooallem called "The Afterlife of Cellphones".

The piece explores the world of cellphone recycling and tries to understand why we need to constantly upgrade our phones. Reading the article forces you to think again about waste.

Jon concludes;

"Even the most idealistic visions of how e-waste should be recycled and reused take for granted that consumers and businesses will never reconsider why we are buying and discarding so many of those products, so quickly, in the first place. If the rush of castoffs isn’t likely to stop, we need to clear a proper path for it, considering all the inevitable compromises and costs along the way and delivering those products to as consequenceless a place as possible."

Most companies seem pre-occupied with creating "lust' for their objects that ensures continued market share and admiration.

While on the surface, this doesn't appear to be a responsible attitude, it reflects the realities of the marketplace.

Consumer electronics are the new fashion, so much so, that they are taking share from the fashion business and it's one of the reasons the US sports shoe business is so soft right now.

The presentation below is from the design team at Nokia and it does a fantastic job at explaining how the company creates lust objects. It's all insights and needs driven, but it does nothing to bring sustainability into the mix.

| View | Upload your own

This is a battle about hearts, minds and marketing.

With Macworld coming up this week, Apple and Steve Jobs are masters in the creation and marketing of lust objects, they do it so well.

Governments aren't going to force the issue, pressure groups like Greenpeace have limited voice, change is going to need to come from the market.

If companies want sustainability to be considered, they are going to need to do as good a job as Apple in making it sexy.

On the positive side, it appears to be easier than ever for new brands to enter the consumer electronics space, just look at flat panel TVs for that.

Could here will be a new electronics brand with real sustainability built into its DNA that emerges in the next couple of years?

Could, somewhat ironically, that brand come from China?

Posted by Ed Cotton

nokia thinks the future of media is circular

Influx Insights — 2008-01-10T17:29:51Z

Nokia and the Future Laboratory, have just completed a research study that explored attitudes and developments in the use of technology and media.

They talked to 9,000 consumers in 17 countries. The breakthough finding and brave prediction is the emergence of what Nokia is calling "Circular Media"

"From our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call 'Circular'. The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media.

We think it will work something like this; someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file - the soundtrack of the evening - then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on. The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."

Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia

It's an interesting theory, the idea that consumers will add and to, interact and participate with media makes complete sense, but the constant addition and participation by members of a friendship group is hard to believe, as is the shelf-life of each piece of content.

This could get easily become boring in a short period of time.

Nokia's report also appears to miss the blending and blurring of user-generated and conventional media; users taking established media content and adding their own spin to that content.

Posted by Ed Cotton

nokia plays offense

Influx Insights — 2007-08-31T13:27:00Z

Nokia dominates the global handset market- in Q2 2007 the company sold 100 million phones and holds over 35% of the global market.

However, it’s been something of a sleeping giant, it hasn’t had the coolest products or image that Apple possesses, but could that be about to change?

In the last week or so, Nokia has gone on the offensive and launched:

1.Ovi- a new web portal for mobile social networking

2. An iPhone clone set for launch early in 2008.

With the combination of aggressive copycat tactics- (clone phones and retail stores) and a new cooler image, Nokia could easily extend its category dominance.

All it needs is better advertising.

Posted by Ed Cotton

why can't anthroplogists lead companies to an iphone?

Influx Insights — 2007-07-12T05:29:18Z

Nokia and Microsoft now have armies of anthroplogists scouring the globe for insight into how people communicate and use technology.

"As an ethnographer for Microsoft, Donna Flynn uses her training as a Ph.D. in archeology to analyze how ordinary folks from London to Beijing make daily use of their cellphones.

She feeds results of her field studies to two dozen designers, engineers and strategists toiling in an unusual research lab on the Microsoft campus. Awkwardly dubbed the Mobile and Embedded Devices Experience design center, or MEDX, it is where Microsoft plots strategies to sell souped-up cellphones that act a lot like PCs."

USA Today

Despite all the collective wisdom and intelligence of these armies,they haven't inspired their designers to create anything as captivating as Apple's iPhone.

Is it because they are looking at what is, rather than imagining what could be?

Posted by Ed Cotton

touch screen technology on out of home boards

Influx Insights — 2007-04-23T14:22:27Z

Bus shelter out of home board with touch screen technology. Being used by Nokia to promote the N95. Via Textually.