Thoughts

Sometimes I’m amazed at how much Nokia “gets” being in the mobile domain, and I wonder why they haven’t made a bigger dent in the American market yet.

Take the Nokia Sports Tracker for example, which comes to us from the Nokia Research Center which just got a brilliant highlight in BusinessWeek that’s worth reading:

This option alone says a lot. Here’s how the NRC describes this application:

[This] is a GPS based activity tracker that runs on S60 smartphones. Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored to your training diary. To be able to use [this] application for real, you need Nokia S60 3.0 phone with Bluetooth GPS device or Nokia S60 3.0 phone with integrated GPS.

And this is just the surface of what they do. On the flip side, as Jan Chipchase, one of their exploratory human behavioral field researchers — who recently spoke at the TED conference on the mobile experience — says in the BusinessWeek article:

Let’s talk about a study we did last year on how people share objects. You can relate this to mobile phones. They’re basically designed as personal objects. But if you look at usage in Africa, increasingly the phone is shared. A family might have one. A village might have one, or someone who runs a phone kiosk in a village might have one. We’re thinking about how we could redesign the mobile phone and the communication experience to be more suitable for sharing.

These are truly smart people who really are looking to enhance the mobile experience and you gotta applaud them.

(via textually, e-series)

Last time I showed Twitter around, I got asked how they make money. It’s a good question, because as it stands now, I can’t see how they can. The reason why it’s catching on like wildfire is because it is so simple and so open. No cost of entry. Text subscriptions that go everywhere and (seemingly) anywhere. Which is why we see companies that blog (Veer, Adaptive Path, etc.) popping up there just as much as we see application updates (Twitterrific, etc.) becoming “users” of the site. There’s no paid path into this functionality required to take advantage of it.

The problem for real business use, however, is that public on Twitter is the public Internet. While you can be private, it still means you can add people other than co-workers into your circle, ruining the privacy. The way to make it useful for companies is to make that state of being private be within an intranet instead. There’s two distinct ways I could see that happening.

The first would be to make Twitter an internally deployable platform. It’s unlikely, because given the history and current growth of Twitter, I believe Twitter is made up of a lot of custom and open code spread across a network of systems. The magic of Twitter is that its growing in a human-like fashion — there’s an electronic body being grown an organ at a time, and it keeps picking up skills as you show it new ones. It’s very much alive. There’s no way to reproduce that as a “single package” for a business to install.

The second is more realistic, and similar to current web 2.0 offerings: offer a subscription for a secure custom domain (third-level or other). Establish admins who are given configuration access to all users. Phone numbers, IM handles, etc. can be whitelisted so they match official records. Things of that nature. More importantly, Twitter needs a true mobile app, like Jaiku’s, that integrates status with the phone’s Contacts list and can easily manage the modality that would arise from having a public Twitter and multiple private Twitters.

Even so, this experience is too new for business. Would they know how to use it? Hell, most are still uncomfortable finding a place for instant messenger. How would they react to an IT-supplied phone with a mobile app that auto-updates phone on/off status? Or even their position on campus using mobile GPS? Badly, I would imagine. The majority would scream invasion of privacy. But for those willing, it could become a huge benefit for staying in touch and up-to-date.

Even so, just the existence of such a private Twitter could fracture the activity on the public site if individuals began signing up for it. What if your friend set up a private space? How would you reconcile being on his list there while trying to still update for friends on the public site?

Ultimately, you end up with an explosion of SMS short codes that you need to text to and that excess of modality would kill the experience. The beauty of the system is that it is simple. The challenge of the system is that it is simple.

Too simple, perhaps, to make any money in the business world.