HELSINKI: The International Tele-communications Union announced that the number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world will reach four billion by the end of 2008. This means it will have taken just five quarters for the latest billion additions. The engine for this rapid growth has been the tremendous consumer demand seen in emerging markets, such as China and India, where in each of these countries there have been over 50 million new mobile subscriptions in the last six months alone, as well as significant growth in markets such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan and Brazil.

The rise of global mobile subscription numbers is, however, set to slow, with Informa Telecoms & Media’s forecasts suggesting the five billionth subscription will be signed during 4Q 2011, with worldwide penetration reaching in excess of 70 percent by this time. Only in Africa will penetration at the end of 2011 still be below 50 percent.

“It is clear that the mobile industry will see a slowdown in growth — it is simply untenable for the extraordinary growth witnessed over the last 18 months to continue,” said Informa Principal Analyst, Nick Jotischky. “Even taking the fastest growing regions of Asia Pacific and Africa into account, where we will see well over 20 percent year-on-year growth in subscription numbers this year, our forecasts suggest that this growth rate will slow to below 10 percent in 2010.” This is why Nokia is already hard at work trying to influence “The Way We Live Next.”

At an event held in Helsinki under that theme, Nokia’s strategists provided insight to the company’s seven-year plan which they hope will ensure their continued domination of the mobile industry. Nokia wants to move from selling consumers phones every couple of years to continuously selling content and services. They are able to consider such a strategy because the company has sold more than a billion mobile devices and Nokia believes that now there are hundreds of millions of Nokia customers ready to use their devices for more than just talk.

What does the Nokia future hold? One of the first new services to reach consumers will be Nokia Point & Find which enables people on the move to access information and services on the internet, simply by pointing a camera phone at real-world objects. In the first beta version of Point & Find to be released in the near future in the UK, users will be able to instantly watch the film trailer, read the review, or find the closest cinema to buy tickets simply by pointing a camera phone at a poster for a new movie.

“For Nokia, devices are the main business while services and software drive growth,” said Teppo Paavola, VP, head of Nokia's Corporate Business Development. “The goal is to create new sources of revenue.”

Nokia plans to do this by developing new business together with new business technologies. This will involve acquisition, partnerships, alliances and licensing.

“Nokia is number one due to focused execution but that can cause problems because anything outside the focus gets crushed,” commented Paavola.

To enable a company as large as Nokia to build “truly new” quickly, Paavola indicated that several methods would be employed. Some new business activities would be in companies not 100 percent Nokia owned.

Each new business program will have an executive sponsor to offer guidance — not day-to-day management and to ensure cross company cooperation. Nokia will also put more emphasis on the industry’s “demo or die” philosophy, creating global test beds for new technologies so the company can learn from larger, wider audiences.

One area where Nokia sees serious potential is in the development of indoor navigation. Structures are getting larger but there is no practical way yet to maneuver from place to place in an unfamiliar indoor environment. Nokia’s concept of how to fill this need is called, “Indoor Positioning,” which will provide a positioning and location-based service inside a building. Users will be able to add new buildings and contribute measurement data and context information.

Indoor maps will be enhanced by user-created Point-of-Interests.

Eventually it will be possible to find not just locations but also family and friends based on indoor positioning.

All this talk of software and services is not to imply that Nokia is abandoning device creation. Nokia’s view of the mobile communication devices of the future however is radically different than what we are using now. The Morph concept device launched alongside The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, showcases some of the leaps being explored by the Nokia Research Center in collaboration with the UK’s Cambridge Nanoscience Center. Nanoscale technologies will potentially create a world of radically different devices, opening up entirely new spectrums of communication and interaction.

See the Morph concept video at: www.nokia.com/A4852062.

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