INTRO Nokia - 1 billion phones sold 2 billion mobile subscribers [[ There are twice as many mobile phones, than there are internet users of any kind. There are three times as many mobile phones than there are personal computers. There are more mobile phones than credit cards, more mobile phones than automobiles, more mobile phones than TV sets, and more mobile phones than fixed/wireline phones. In fact a staggering 30% of the global population carries a mobile phone. Since Taiwan first did it in 2001, today over 30 countries have achieved over 100% cellphone penetration rates, and even laggard USA has gone past the 50% penetration rate. In the most advanced mobile markets such as Finland, Italy and Hong Kong the typical first-time cellphone customer is under the age of 10. It is the only digital gadget carried by every economically viable person on the planet. Younger people have stopped using wristwatches and rely only upon the mobile phone for time. It is the only universal device, and the device of the Century... 19% of all music revenues are generated by mobile phones. 14% of videogaming software revenues come from mobile phone games. More cameraphones are sold this year than all non-mobile phone digital cameras ever sold. ]] - Ovum / GSM Association I work in the Insight and Innovation team in Nokia, specifically looking at the future of networked experiences. I'm an engineer by training, but have been designing user experiences for the last 7 years, specifically for mobile for the last 3. We look at potential disruptions in the next 5 years, and analyse their effect on the industry, and Nokia specifically. We try to make the future happen quicker. Projects I've worked on included UI enhancements - Near Field Communication, and more general trends such as location based services and personalisation. Social computing has always been at the heart of Nokia - Connecting People - and has driven this through voice communication, and text communication. SOCIAL COMPUTING We're in the 3rd wave - 1st - connected computers, communication tools email, IRC, Usenet, mailing lists based around existing groups, generally. 2nd - the web, socila networking sites message boards Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn 'pretend friends' - artificial networks - friend of a friend means nothing "are you my friend - yes or no?" - Clay Shirky 3rd - conversations around objects photos - Flickr links - delicious (not really conversations - although it has happened) music - audioscrobbler / last.fm selfish! These sites work well just with your own personal content, but are enriched by others, and the community aspects are jsut a bonus services that are open-ended, and can be used in many ways Flickr is used by pro/proam photographers, as well as cameraphone pics. split between public and probjectivate photos. small number partake of groups and community. More objects - places UpMyStreet conversations, Craigslist *but* more importantly, loosely defined 'here' - Placesite, Plazes, with Bonjour/Rendezvous really useful glue. Nokia Sensor - local proximity people finder and conversation-starter. WHAT'S NEW: TAGGING seemingly everywhere - even OSes are tags the same everywhere? not really can't read too much context out of them - what does 'london' mean? not so much folksonomies as mind maps of the self people have different tagging strategies - I'm pretty freewheeling, so I have over a thousand delicious tags geotagging - great, loose system, emergent tag format - 20-30,000 pictures tagged so far however, hard to search (generally created a new specialised database with all of these in - see geobloggers) and,again, worry about context - is it where I took the picture or what it's of? system tags aren't tags - things like media formats et al. These are basically hints by the user to the service. Still useful - delicious audio RSS feeds are some of the most useful quality podcasts tags don't replace taxonomies or great search - just another way of remembering where you left your content CONTACTS / IDENTITY How many address books do you have? 5? 10? 50? Each service has it's own connections of friends. which are definitive? which really mean something? Surely, they cry, you just want one! Yes - and no. On all these services, you have 'friends of convenience', whether it's for bookmarking them, giving some extra priviledges. So, again, you can't draw too much context from the links. Flickr breakdown of contacts (bookmarking)/friends/family is really great Now, there is one address book that is truer than most - your cellphone contacts. Plus there's metadata - call logs, message logs. I don't think there's enough innovation here, especially in visualising the knowledge contained (partially our fault!). Once again, have to be careful about drawing conclusions - your local taxi firm or pizza delivery isn't your best friend, no matter what the logs say! Biggest negative - rarely contain email addresses, IM details - or in other words, links to the Internet. IM IM is weird, in that it's one ofthe few basic communications innovations recently (the other being SMS). Somehow works despite the interoperability issues (yay, 5 more address books). IM and SMS dominate youth communication - email is only used when they have to correspond with grown-ups. Now we're starting to see some consolidation - Jabber is emerging from the quagmire of proprietary systems, and also services based around IM. Allows conversational entry of information, rather than filling in forms, and, well, 'seems human' (The Media Equation et al). FUTURE IM goes mobile - a no brainer. Smartphones are powerful enough to have real Internet conversations - no need for special protocosl or proxies. We tend towards being a platform and tool builder, rather than applications and services. So - making it easy to write for our phones is a priority, and we've got Python and Flash Lite running on our phones - tools that come from the Internet, with seamless use of phones' networking and other capabilities. Constant partial attention - of others We now keep in touch passively - blogs, Flickr, delicious - little radar pings to our attention. If people aren't generating RSS, they disappear. Presence information is still nacent, and I'm expecting a lot of innovation there (and a lot of mistakes!) - particularly see location information as coming soon. Have to build new social etiquette around all this (which means designers have to prototype and try this stuff in reality - publishing my location on my website publically). Social software for the rest of us - Flickr is a long way there (my entire family have accounts, which is mindboggling), plus things like Typepad's Project Comet. People always ignore Livejournal and Myspace, but they're the biggest 'real' Internet communities. Now plug in mobility, and presence - make loose ties stronger. We are going to see key information stores, and arbitrage services for them. I don't want to have to tell each service what my music tastes are - last.fm already knows! So these services are being linked in the background. Expect similar services around identity, contacts, calendar. Won't be one winner for any of these - and they'll all have their own data standards and formats. BUSINESS Once value has disappeared, you can't get it back. Schemes to charge for mobile IM at SMS rates have failed. Similarly, charging for mobile access to a free Internet service doesn't work. Money in arbitrage between networks - such as Skype - maybe the same for IM (though these can often be solved at the edges by applications - loads of IM clients that can connect to multiple networks). Value in making metadata and context - especially if it's hands off. Mobile phone knows a lot about you. Anyone can build a client for (our!) smartphones, or even Java apps. Nokia Lifeblog client, and Nokia Album are storing more and more metadata about photos. It's going to be a fight between mobile operators - who also get a lot of rich data due to the communications passing through - and Internet services, who are starting to wake up to mobile clients. Be the trusted holder of data - Flickr has done this really well. Services don't own the data, they just have the privilidge of storing it. Especially don't sell metadata to advertisers! Getting the data out is as important as getting the data in. Value in making this data useful - currently mainly recommendations (to you), but there's money in looking after this data and access to it - paid for either by the customer or by the services that use/want the data. Again, the customer owns the data, so trust and control are key. There are still some messy problems to be solved - good group communication on a mobile (Push To Talk is just one solution), Internet calendars (loads of activity here - and they all suck!), location based services - and tieing these three things together in an intelligent useful way. Don't assume everyone has a laptop - or even traditional Internet access. There is money outside the USA!