While most of the Symbian world has been focusing on the Smartphone Show, in Camden, Maine, Nokia is taking S60 and MOSH to an entirely different audience. Richard Bloor spoke to Eric John, Director of Marketing at Forum Nokia about the event.
How can technology make our lives better? This is the question which preoccupies Pop!Tech, an annual conference "about science, technology and the future of ideas". It brings together a diverse range of people, from the developed and developing worlds, from science and the arts, and this year it is focusing on the human impact of technology.
The mobile phone is one of the most widely used of modern technologies. With an estimated 3 billion users worldwide, for many in emerging economies a mobile phone is their first experience of the hi-tech that the developed world takes for granted. Almost one in three of these mobile phones carry the Nokia brand.
"Pop!Tech is not your typical technical Forum Nokia sponsored event audience," says Eric. "These people are thinkers and doer from a realm that Nokia does not often connect with so directly. The delegates are visionaries looking at the impact of technology on social behavior and more particularly how technology can help in the emerging economies. We want to put our technology in the hands of these people. We want feedback on how our technology can integrate with their work and the visions they have for the future social landscape."
To achieve this Forum Nokia is employing the Nokia N95 and MOSH. A number of Nokia N95s will be made available to speakers and delegates at the event. Eric hopes that these Nokia N95s will then be used to capture the sights and sounds of the event as seen through the eyes of the delegates. The raw "memories" will then be stored in MOSH and used to create regular snapshots of the event that will be posted onto the public MOSH Pop!Tech portal.
"Pop!Tech is very much focused on the impact of technology in the developing world," says Eric. "Nokia believes that connecting people in emerging markets in economically, ecologically, and technologically sensitive ways will deliver results unlike anything seen in mature markets, as the next billion come on-line via their mobile devices."
While this may seem a laudable objective, given Forum Nokia has always focused on developers and MOSH, superficially looks like another community based content sharing site the connections do not seem obvious.
"We see the current version of MOSH as a promotional tool for developers," says Eric. "As the volume of mobile content and applications grow it is increasingly difficult for developers, particularly small developers, to get visibility for their products. MOSH is an opportunity to explore whether a community approach provides an effective promotion and distribution method."
However, while MOSH offers a promotional mechanism it does not contain an ecommerce engine. At the moment, if developers want to sell their applications, they will need to lead the customer to an external shop, either on their own site or one of the established channels such as Handango. "We are looking at other ways in which developers can generate revenue," says Eric. "One of the possibility is to host advertising on MOSH and allow developers to incorporate an advertising stream into their applications." While there is already much debate around the acceptance of mobile advertising, this approach may hold some promise for developers by removing the concern about product licensing and piracy.
However, the future direction for MOSH is very much in the hands of its users. "MOSH is all about the beta culture, what might more formally be called Agile development" says Eric. "We are serving a global market place, so understanding the requirements of users in countries as diverse as India, Russia, Indonesia, and America is not trivial. Sometimes it is better to maximize speed to market, then enter a phase of continuous learning and optimization. And this is the approach we have taken with MOSH."
Although MOSH has only been in open beta for a few months it has already seen 3.5 million unique users upload 4.5 million pieces of content. Eric notes that the MOSH learning experience is not just about the delivery mechanism or functionality offered to the community, it is as much about learning what content will be of interest to mobile users. "We are already seeing some very interesting content being created," says Eric. "Take Dr Dan for example, he is a cardiologist by trade and using MOSH to distribute videos on first aid. So we are already seeing some surprising and innovative approaches to content."
In this context the relevance of Pop!Tech is much clearer. As mobility becomes pervasive, the smartphone will increasingly be the tool that people use to connect to their chosen communities, whether those communities are local or global. As Nokia transforms its self from a handset vendor into a company embracing the whole connected experience the learnings from MOSH will undoubtedly shape part of our online future.
Check out MOSH at mosh.nokia.com or at mosh.nokia.mobi on your Symbian S60 smartphone. You can also find PDF copies of some recent SymbianOne features here on MOSH.
