The Hindu Business Line : ‘India, China are like double-humped camels’

Helsinki, Nov. 11 How to sell feature-rich devices with a lot of high-end applications in a price-sensitive, ‘poor-country’ market such as India, is precisely the question that Nokia is now faced with.

Ms Purnima Kochikar, Vice-President, Forum Nokia, likens India (and China) to a “double humped camel” with big markets for both premium as well as low-end devices. ‘Forum Nokia’ is the platform on which Nokia works with some 4 million applications developers.

“Our applications are not restricted to the high end,” Ms Kochikar stressed, while addressing journalists here at Nokia’s ‘The Way We Live Next’, an annual meet of the world’s largest mobile device manufacturer.

Rural market, local needs

And so, while there is a big market in India for premium devices and services comparable to any developed country, there is also a big rural market, where money could be made by addressing local needs.

A good example is Nokia Life Tools, which gives information updates to farmers. The information ranges from prices of commodities to tips on agriculture to teaching English language.

Ms Kochikar said that the new mobile devices have given a new meaning to the word ‘local’, which no longer refers to a piece of geography. Applications developed under Forum Nokia are changing the way people live, she said.

More than calling device

What with radio, recorder and camera having become almost a standard feature on mobile phone, people have long stopped thinking of the handset as an instrument to make calls. Today, ‘calling’ is just one feature of the device.

But practically with each passing day, the mobile phone is becoming a lot more than what it began its life as.

The vibrant ecosystem of developer network, which Nokia fosters as a matter of business strategy, has made this happen, Ms Kochikar said.

For example, she said, a Chinese developer who happened to attend a Forum Nokia meeting in 2003 was inspired to develop an application which has become very popular today – an SMS spam filter. There have been 10 million downloads so far and the demand is still strong, she said.

Giving an example for the expanded connotation of ‘local’, she said that another developer has made it possible for the Malayalam daily, Malayala Manorama, to be available on an English-language phone. This has become popular with Keralites living in West Asia.

More to come

A lot more applications are on the way. One is Nokia ‘point to find’. You point your mobile to, say, a hotel or a movie advertisement and click. All details about the hotel or the movie pop up on your screen. The service was beta-tested last year and is available in the US and the UK, on Nokia N95 devices. Now, Nokia is rolling it out across other markets. The service is available free to the customer and can be downloaded from a mobile phone or a desktop computer at pointandfind.nokia.com.

Among the hundreds of other applications being developed or tested is one that would help elderly people live independently. A voice recognition feature in the devices helps them give commands. Originally developed for use while driving cars, the application is being expanded into a utility tool for the elderly.

The future is going to be richer, say Nokia officials. Nokia Research Centre is working on using bio-sensors to sense several measurables – be it quality of air and water or body health parameters. The centre is also looking into the possible use of nanotechnology to miniaturise the bio-sensors.