InfoTangle One Day to sho a pair of Jeans

InfoTangle: "In his Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwarz talks about the tyranny of small decisions and about how the proliferation of choices in our society necessitate that we invest significant time, anxiety, doubt and dread to trivial matters. He asks why it takes an entire day to shop for a pair of jeans nowadays?"

Helge: Trivial matters consume a big part of our 24/7. Before people needed the entire day to collect their daily food. Some of us spend our days to search, analyze and process information.

The Next Big Thing

I guess, Nokia has to redefine its position USA. The bay area trend factory is producing googles, youtubes, ipods, iphones, myspaces, flickr (cdn), gadgets and vidgets. Nokia is still an outsider in the US market. It has been innovating products, production and logistics for years. Nokia is a global megabrand and industrial powerhouse. But there is an urgent need for the company to become a household name in the blogosphere and in the Internet communities. Design is one factor. Bigger screens for mobiles is another. Touch-screen as in iPhone? Yes, maybe, a bigger keyboard, at least for me.

CARRIERS

I think that the relationship with mobile consumers has to be revolutionized. The box that has to be reshaped is located at the carriers. The phone's can't do it all. User generated services to enhance the mobile experience IS the key. Or are we going to see Symbian and Skype taking away mobile business to the Internet? The Web 2.0 and Mobile mashup might end up and become something very different from what we percieve today.

MOBILE TIME

The time we spend with our mobile deivices has been declining. There is a huge user-base on a global scale. But what are we using the phones for? We still make short calls and send SMS's. That's the big picture. All the new services are technical possibilites. But they haven't been consumer friendly yet. SMS isn't user friendly either, but it's the best thing around. The interface is still the problem. I want bigger screens. I look for a pocket book sized phone that allows me to work while on the road.

CONNECTED EVERYWHERE

And I want to be connected everywhere. This development has to include and involve the carriers. The big black box is there at the service providers. They don't care about the users; yet. Why? Is it a technical problem? Is it easier to launch a new traditional mobile phone - thinner or trendier - every single day than to start to work with the services. Broadband brought us Web 2.0 and user generated content. Pay per minute will never bring UGC to mobile phones.

Trend Factory

Finland has been a trend setter in the mobile industry. Nokia is still the largest mobile phone's producer on this globe. Apple is a new player in the mobile world. Nokia has a giant lead with 34 % market share. Apple, planning to sell 10 million iPhone's, is only targeting for 1 % of the global market.

From a Finnish point of view, there has been a shift in trend setting capacity and power. Web 2.0, Google, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, iPod, iTunes, and now the iPhone have been created and conceptualized on the North American west coast. Flickr was started in Canada, Vancouver. We've lost our position as a trend setter in the information society.

This year, at the the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, the leading entrepreneurs did come from US, the west coast. The lack of European entrepreneurs was evident. EU is trying to become a leading information society. But at this very moment, we talk more, and achieve less. The trend setting factory has been moving over to Silicon Valley.

If we can't beat them, why not join them? I need to think more about this in the coming postings. We've great SME's in the field of mobile development. We might do things together. The global market is waiting for Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 convergence products. We Finns could get out of the cold and do things together with Apple, Google, Yahoo, etc.

We've one promille of world population, but we are a super power in mobile development. We're not strong enough alone.