12 Apr 2009, Posted by Scott Goodstein in Guests from Washington D.C., 0 Comments

Nokia!

The day I had been waiting for had finally arrived - a chance to meet the folks of Nokia.  We drove to Espoo, their worldwide headquarters, to visit with their marketing & management teams and learn about the future of mobile technology.  As we drove up, I joked that the building looked like “the mothership.”  But Pekka Somerto actually let me know that the building was designed to look like a ship and even has a lot of naval motifs integrated throughout the architecture.

Pekka is Nokia’s vice president of sales and marketing.  He gave me a brief tour and explained how Nokia became the largest cell phone provider in the world.  I learned that they are also the largest manufacture of cameras (because most of their devices now come with camera in them).  As their technology further advances, they will also be the worlds largest manufacturer of GPS navigators and MP3 players!  They even have a map of the amount of cell phones being purchased around the world with real time estimates being updated in real time.

It is an amazing story for a small Nordic pulp and paper factory to advance into the regions largest rubber and cable equipment provider.  But Nokia again reinvented themselves into becoming the dominate force in the mobile industry – all within the last 15 years.

I also learned that Nokia is consistently ranked as one of the best places to work in Finland and have helped many local businesses evolve.  It seemed that almost everyone I met in Helsinki knew someone that worked for or with Nokia.  This is probably because they are almost a third of the Helsinki Stock Exchange and represent over 3.5% of the Finnish Gross Domestic Product with over $35 billion in revenues.

I took a quick walk down recent memory lane in the Nokia cell phone museum display.  I even saw several of my old cell phones on display.  They had everything from their first mobile phones that weighed several pounds to the first video phones that weighed almost nothing. Of course they had a number of multicolor Nokia 5800 and 6100 that all of my friends used a few years ago. I forgot how much I loved my old Nokia 6820 flip phone that had a full keyboard.  The interesting thing to note about this display of cell phones was how quickly the technology advanced.  Their display only goes back ten to fifteen years!  Therefore, the excitement is really about what comes in the next ten to fifteen years, and will we be laughing and reminiscing over our first touch screen phones?

The folks at Nokia joked with me about my iPhone and showed me their version of a new touch screen phone that is going to be released in a few months.  This devise will compete with both Blackberry and iPhone.  It has both touch-screen and a full keypad functionality (about time someone realized that many of us like both types of functionality).  It sounds and looks great. Nonetheless, I hope the battery life is better than my current devise (and the international data charges are not as confusing).

Nokia is also moving into software development and social networking areas in the days ahead.  Pekka showed me how all of their new devices are connected to a software suite called “Ovi.”  This software will connect GPS mapping to your phone in fun ways so you can easily geo-code your photos, monitor workouts, track your friends music, download or stream music to your phone, play games, and check email! Visit Ovi.com to learn more about this software suite.

Knowing that cell phone reach is far greater than electricity, Nokia is working to improve the lives of their third-world customers.  They are including English language tutorials on their least expensive cell phones and even software that will help farmers in Africa better negotiate crop prices.

I also had an opportunity to meet with Pia Erikinheimo-Mennander and a number of Nokia’s marketing experts.  They are working on evolving Nokia’s online and offline efforts.   They are thinking about how to use mobile devices in social networking gaming and even virtual reality.  My visit to Nokia was both educational and truly inspiring.