The News

Is Location The Ultimate Context? Stats, News & An EXCLUSIVE Interview With Nokia Make The Case For Mo-Lo

16/08/2007

August 16th, 2007 by Peggy Anne Salz

Regular readers will know I am passionate about mobile search and immersed in research for my next report. While plain-vanilla mobile location search is gaining considerable traction, the mix between mo-lo – as it’s no called - and multimodal is the one to watch.

I covered this emerging trend in this article on mo-lo search for Mobile Europe. The highlight for me was an insightful interview with Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s director of Location Based Experiences. I’ve requested a podcast (most likely after these last lazy weeks of summer) and look forward to piecing together Nokia’s broad and impressive mobility strategy that spans the gamut from mobile social networking (Mosh) to personal navigation – and everything (!) in between. In the meantime, I’d like to share the key points of our last exchange.

Is mobile location where the action is?
No. At Nokia it’s more about location context, which is more than navigation. An example of this is the acquisition of Gate 5; it signals that Nokia definitely believes that location context is one of the most essential features of mobile phones going forwards.

This focus fits with the recent organization of Nokia. Nokia is an experience company now and that means we deliver to the end-user an experience that entails service as well as hardware. So, that is the philosophy of Nokia and I think the new organization makes this quite clear.

What is the thinking now within Nokia about what can be paired with location or what is Nokia pairing with location to get really exciting, compelling services?
Advertising is not a service, but of course you’re right about it being a part of location context services. I believe that at the end of the day, this will play a major role in our strategy. But that’s as much as I can say about this.

Please outline Nokia’s vision of location context.

Nokia thinks about location context in five clusters. Cluster #1 is what we call Move. I am walking and I need to find a place, I need to go to the subway, for example. I need to move around in the city. That map is a very different map compared to what you need when you’re driving. So, you will see more emphasis from Nokia – in Nokia Maps - on the pedestrian use case. It’s about answering the question: “Where am I in relationship to other elements or other places, landmarks of the city.” When you are on the move you care about this – not when you’re driving. Then you only care about the next turn. So, it’s a very different logic.

This is really very essential to what we do and one of the areas where we will innovate. Think about 3-D images – the world around us [on the display] will become essentially a virtual representation of reality. Point the phone to a building and find out what’s there, for example. That’s the kind of vision we have at Nokia. Point the phone down the street, where is the next Starbucks in that direction? That’s Move.

Cluster #2, which is our major source of income today, is Drive. Here it’s all about driving from A to B, and that [information] has to include traffic safety cameras and all the dynamic services which we can deliver much better because we have a connected device.

Now, it really starts to get fun. Cluster #3 is Content Discovery. It’s about bringing together content that relates to a location - some deeper in content, some broader, all of those we want to bring to the device.

Our focus will be on making these various sources searchable through one coherent framework. Then, once you have found the list of interesting objects, you can make a selection from embedded functions in the phone: call the place, send it to a friend, save it for later, add a comment, walk there, drive there. So that’s where I think Nokia as a device manufacturer is much better at creating an end-to-end seamless experience around content discovery and then launching an action - of which navigation is only one possibility.

This brings us to Cluster #4, which we call Create or Collect, and Cluster #5, which is Share. This [combination] has many angles because it could be peer-to-peer sharing. Say I find cool places here, but I don’t want to publish them on the Internet; I only want to share them with good friends. In this case I create a private channel rather than a public channel to share the places and destinations I want. There are very many variations to this.

To give you an idea, I drive with my family on the weekend to the countryside. I use the navigation and I trace the areas I drive through. I take pictures, video, and use the full capability of the Nokia device. So, that’s the kind of experience we want to deliver.

– Location-based services spending: A new market research study from Insight Research Corporation, the worldwide market for location- based telecommunication services is expected to reach nearly .5 billion in 2007 as more mobile operators jump on the mo-lo bandwagon and deliver location-aware services. The report notes location-based services are most popular in Asia – probably because that’s where the services are the most advanced and capable of delivering users with information customized to their current physical location. (More details in this release.)