I’ve been taking a better look at Nokia’s Sensor, which perhaps I should have done when they launched back in May. But prompted by articles on Net Imperative and Tech Dirt, both of which have slightly different takes on it, I had a look at the Sensor site itself and I find it quite exciting.
My first impression of Sensor was one of those MoSoSo concepts (Mobile Social Software). You know the kind of thing – you put in your “profile” (and in this case, create a “home page”) and your phone beeps at you when you’re in the vicinity of someone who matches. This can be for social, dating/sexual or business networking reasons. I’ve written an analysis about this before.
On one level, that is what Sensor is and that’s certainly the way Nokia is presenting it. Why they’re presenting it like that will become clear.
But that’s where it gets interesting. Because, firstly you can exchange messages with each other – via Bluetooth. Admittedly, this will only work within Bluetooth’s current range of 10 m or so and conventional wisdom is “why would I want to exchange a message with someone close enough to talk to?”.
So, have you never sent an email to someone in an open plan office, sitting within hailing distance? There’s many reasons why you don’t want to speak out loud to someone – it might be confidential, to make an assignation (“meet me in the board room in 5 minutes”), to exchange a bit of company gossip, a joke or to comment on someone’s appearance (“doesn’t Gladys know that beige is sooo last year. Especially for a moustache”).
And just watch how kids use their mobile to text each other in the same room. It happens all the time for much the same reasons as the “adult” usage above. But also to share an in-joke to the exclusion of someone else – say, a friend, a teacher or adult.
Local messaging is already happening, big time.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know I’ve been writing (actually since January 2004) that Local Free Messaging has already been happening using a kind of adapted Bluejacking methodology. So it’s really interesting for a giant like Nokia to put their muscle behind it and make it official.
I’ve also been talking for a similar timespan (actually it was one of my big predictions for this year about local free file sharing and hey! Nokia’s Sensor supports that too.
Once you’ve found someone to chat to, you can swap files, assuming that they’re not DRM’d. This has very important implications for not just the operator community, but also all content “owners” from record companies to image sellers.
Imagine the scenario. Romeo is sitting in the school canteen with girlf Julia. She tells him about a really cool band she heard on the radio and subsequently downloaded their new album’s title song onto her phone (via a free online P2P network). She asks him if he’s like a copy and transfers it by Bluetooth to his phone for later listening.
They wonder if anyone else in the school is into the band. Romeo fires up Sensor and scans the area. He finds two people in the canteen who have the band listed in their profiles. He messages them both to see if they have any files to share and one replies by sending across two new tracks.
Now, let’s look at the implications of all this:
1. The biggest is that there’s no revenue generated by the operator or the content owner. Zilch, nada, nothing. No wonder Nokia is keen to spin this as a backwater MoSoSo.
2. When Bluetooth extends its range to say, 100m or even a kilometre, this is going to get even more powerful. In that instance, free messaging and filesharing over larger distances makes this a major revenue threat to operators.
3. The golden goose of mobile content in the last few years has been overpriced ringtones. With Nokia actively encouraging make-your-own ringtones and the means of distributing them for free, this could mean that the market implodes pretty damn quickly, especially when we take into account other products such as Apple’s iTunes Mobile.
If you work for an operator or record company, this is another thing that should keep you wide awake at night. Bearing in mind that this is happening and you can’t stop it (unlike online, you can’t even track people doing it and sue them!) what could you do to work with it and leverage it to your advantage? As online P2P proved, denial isn’t a successful business strategy, just a half-arsed coping mechanism.
So how are you going to try it differently this time?
—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
