Putting Internet in Your Pocket

Putting Internet in Your Pocket

Tero Ojanpera of Executive VP and Chief Technology officer of Nokia says although Internet is becoming mobile, through cell phones and PDAs, in essence, it is still the same Internet, just in a different form.

He describes a phenomen of Internet communites, such as YouTube, Myspace, etc, and states that the next phase is seeing these communites go mobile, which has already started with Myspace.

Ojanpera says we are approaching a time when we are starting to do without hard cash and coin. A new technology is being developed and tested with Citibank, Mastercard, Cingular and Nokia to put credit card information into a cell phone, similar to the pay pass system now in place. Simply scan your phone in front of a pay pass scanner and it authorizes and reads the phone like a credit card. "We don’t have to build a huge new infrastructure, because there are thousands of paypass machines already," says Ojanpera -- all they need to do is put the card in the phone.

He describes another new feature in development called mobile augmented reality which combines the phone's camera, GPS and orientation sensors to enable a mass market augmented reality. An example: if you’re standing on a city street and are looking for a coffee shop, simply hold your phone out, the phone's screen shows what is in front of you in realtime and shows you on the screen, with a box, or an x where the nearest coffee shop is.

Ojanpera invites professionals in the audience to help develop this technology, "I’m just waiting for someone to do that for me, thanks," he says with a smile.

He shows a graph that estimates that in 2010 there will be about 4 billion mobile subscribers.

"We want to invite everybody to develop with us," Ojanpera says, closing his speech. "I think this is about openess." In today’s world, there is no end in the value chain — it no longer ends with the consumer: now, the consumer is starting to produce. Value does not start and end; it continues.