On the Mobile Phone Business
The McKinsey Quarterly often publishes great interviews with business leaders. Today I read an interesting interview with Keith Pardy, Nokia’s senior vp of strategic marketing. Below are some lines that struck a particular cord with me:
"It’s not about pushing out messages any more. You have to initiate interesting conversations and build meaningful relationships with consumers."
"If you start playing games with people, they’ll find out and eat you alive."
"...we haven’t figured out how to unleash all the creative potential that lies in people talking about our products in exciting new ways."
"[in North America] the understanding of the price-value equation is confused, since the cost of the [mobile] device is wrapped up in long-term service contracts."
"watch what happens when you give somebody a new device. The first thing they do is put it in their hands, pop it up and down a little bit, and roll it around. Now that, to me, is an insight."
Read it!
Labels: marketing, Mobile, Phones, Technology
This entry was posted
on May 8, 2007 at 5/08/2007 12:22:00 PM.
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Museums & Interactivity
I've written several posts about my evolving appreciation for how people adopt to new technology. I've also written specifically about the need for communities to get involved in encouraging their citizens to adopt certain technologies like SMS.
Just the other day, a friend was brainstorming with me some ideas to incorporate interactivity and multimedia interfaces for museum goers.
Two technologies came to mind:
1. SMS
2. Bluetooth
How SMS would work:
As a museum visitor walks through the exhibits, the plaque describing each piece in the collection will have a little Google icon (or whichever search service is funding the project) and a unique number to send an SMS to. The visitor can send an SMS to the given number, with any question related to the piece they're looking at.
The unique SMS number will aide the search service to pull more accurate answers because the unique SMS number will indicate to the search service that the inquiry is related to a specific work of art. I envision this working similarly to Google's SMS service which I use all the time, and is generally accurate as long as I include enough information. Most of the time I use it to find stuff in NYC, and I'd love it if there was a unique number for NYC, so I didn't need to type "new york city" each time...
Using SMS promotes the use of an easy to use technology which every phone around the world has pre-installed. It promotes the use of an already adopted interactive technology. Accuracy can be high, and ease of use is already high. Furthermore, there is low overhead to a project like this. Lastly, users can have the answers saved on their phone, for future reference and discussion.
How Bluetooth would work:
When museum visitors enter the museum, there will be a sign (and it will also be on their ticket or receipt for admission) advising them to activate Bluetooth on their phone, and which device to pair it with.
Alternatively, since many people will visit the website of a museum before going, the museum can offer users to pre-set their device to pair with the museum's computers, so that when they arrive, their phone will automatically sync up with the museum's computers and receive pertinent information. There can also be a download right from the site (similar to the already popular downloads of audio-guides to the museum). In addition, if the museum offers ticket sales on their website, users can store their receipt in their phone, and when they arrive they can be validated via Bluetooth at the entrance.
As visitors walk around the museum, each exhibit area can push multimedia data to their phone about the exhibit they've just walked in to, and each piece on exhibit will be feeding information about that specific piece. All of this can include links to the web, for web-enabled phones for further exploration once the visitors leave the museum.
Just some thoughts off the top of my head. Hopefully someone will do something like this soon. I'd use it ;-)
P.S. In the near future, I'll be posting ideas like these to Ideageneration.org - a blog I'm setting up with the specific purpose of posting solutions for various organizations that I simply want to see happen, rather than quit my job to create.
Labels: interaction, interactivity, Mobile, Phones, Technology
This entry was posted
on Apr 25, 2007 at 4/25/2007 01:46:00 AM.
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Parking Meters - got SMS?
I was in Vancouver this week, and saw these remarkable parking meters. You could either pay with coins, or pay using your cell phone. This is such a wonderfully progressive use of technology that is not too complex for the average citizen to use, while utilizing the most advanced tools available to make life better.
Bravo Vancouver!
Why does this interest me, you may ask? All over Europe, and Israel as well, you can buy food and drinks at vending machines by SMSing a code to the number on the machine, which then causes the product to be dispensed. In Japan, they've taken it a step further and put a credit card chip into the cellphone, replacing the card all together. Here in the great USA, I can't expect consistent service in my home town. Forget about using my phone to make purchases for anything other than what the cell phone company wants to sell me...
How do we expect to stay at the top if we can't efficiently enable and encourage our country mates to embrace technology?
Labels: Mobile, Phones, Progress, Technology
This entry was posted
on Apr 6, 2007 at 4/06/2007 01:28:00 AM.
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