Digital Design Blog

Nokia and the Way We Live Next

You may not have been able to attend Nokia’s “The Way We Live Next” media event in Oula, Finland last week, but that shouldn’t stop you from checking out the many presentations and podcasts from the event now posted on Nokia’s web site.

Richard Humbach from Nokia’s Emerging Business Unit talks about Mobile Payments and Near Field Communications (NFC). According to Mr. Humbach, NFC-enabled consumer services - such as smart posters, content sharing between phones, and using phones in place of credit cards - are leading to the immanent convergence of retail banking and mobile devices. NFC technology is proving to be “simple, instant, effective, reliable, and secure”, and the report cites various trials and commercial launches in partnership with Visa and China Mobile.

NFC technology is seen as particularly useful for “identity management” in developing markets such as India, further emphasizing that the so-called “unbanked”, or those customers without convenient access to traditional banking services, now represent an enormous and largely untapped global market for the payments industry.

In Web Technologies Driving Innovations in Mobile, Nokia’s Ganesh Sivaraman talks about open source initiatives as key to rapid innovation in the mobile industry. Technologies discussed include Nokia’s S60, a web-compliant smart phone platform developed by Nokia, and the large-scale adoption of open source WebKit HTML engine. Geared mostly to software developers and presentation-layer architects, the presentation highlights the extent to which platforms like the S60 are leveraging standards-based web technologies.

This will no doubt be good news for those designers and developers making the transition from desktop to mobile. S60 aims to give mobile designers and developers access to tools to create richer experiences, and to enable user-driven content that users have been accustomed to with Web 2.0.

Sari Tasa, Senior Research Engineer for Nokia Technology Platforms, talks about alternative energy sources for mobile communications. The presentation explores solar power, alternative fuel cells, and energy harvesting via wind mills, human power, bike and shoe heel chargers, and so on.