When I in year 2007 visited both Samsung's and LG's research centres in South Korea, it was easy to see who would be the winners of the era of media convergence. Already then we could see concepts where mobile phone, TV, personal computer and all other home electronics were borrowing features from each others. In addition they would perform tasks together.
Today we are living in that period where portable devices resemble more and more full blood home entertainment systems, TV's opens up to the internet and offers telecommunication services, washing machines are measuring dirtyness of the clothes and suggest you the right washing program, a fridge will check your shopping list against the items existing in the fridge and removing the ones from the list which you already have in fridge - and so on. And new services are just around the corner. Winners of this competition will be the big Korean manufactures who did not amputate "non strategic parts of the company" in the rush of the late 1990's mobile telecommunication technology boost. Nokia did.
Meanwhile Nokia in Finland sells out its TV and home entertainment factories out, Samsung and LG's research and development centres innovated new technologies with all their branches and technologies. While Finnish MBA's were preaching that Korean tactics is wrong: a company should focuse only to its growth area and cut the rest off, Koreans we gradually growing bigger in all of their consumer electronic sectors. As Nokia concentrated to mobile phone hardware and software, Apple came with their service oriented model and wiped Nokia out from the highway. And as we have seen, Apple has entered heavily in to the audiovisual arena with their new services and devices as well.
I argue that visioneers could already in the mid 1990's see that the media technology and content would converge. I even participated in one Finnish Research Centre's project in 1997 to which all the largest media and telecommunication companies took part alongside with Nokia. I believe we developed world's first converged media experience in the world - one's which we now 16 years later use daily with our Tablets.
In Norway my lab worked intensively with the standardisation processes. In Universal Multimedia Access project the target was to develop systems where same media content could be distributed to different devices without hardcoding. The lab had a strong impact on ISO standardisation work such as JPEG2000, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21 and JPEG2000. Yet another example of the fact that the vision and the work to converge different media together were existing - but somehow not in Nokia headquarters.
And the media content industry? Kjell Aamot, CEO of one of the Europe's biggest media companies Schibstedt until 2010, participated to the very same trip to South Korea. He said that using iPhone first time (with French UI) was an eye opener for the possibilities of digital content. Well said by a person who created the world's first profitable internet version of an old newspaper. VG reached break even already in 2003 and is widely considered as the best internet based news media in the world. And I agree.
But somehow, all this slipped out from the sight in an adrenaline boost with a period of world leader in the mobile phones. Nokia forgot it's vision "Connecting people". What else the process of the media convergence is than connecting people? According to Thesaurus the word "Connecting" means:
Incidently Nokia was mentioned in Yahoo Finance's list "The 10 Most Hated Companies in America". The argument in which also Samsung is mentioned can be read here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-10-most-hated-companies-in-america-162927740.html?page=2
apparently the post has not corrected the positive raise of Nokia's value after yesterday's positive warning which boosted Nokia shares in NYC for 18.6%.
This blog entry was written after an incident where the writer almost slipped in an icy sidewalk - and was wondering whether Nokia eventually raises up after it slipped away from the highway of telecommunications.
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| Our group entering to LG Tower in April 2007. |
Meanwhile Nokia in Finland sells out its TV and home entertainment factories out, Samsung and LG's research and development centres innovated new technologies with all their branches and technologies. While Finnish MBA's were preaching that Korean tactics is wrong: a company should focuse only to its growth area and cut the rest off, Koreans we gradually growing bigger in all of their consumer electronic sectors. As Nokia concentrated to mobile phone hardware and software, Apple came with their service oriented model and wiped Nokia out from the highway. And as we have seen, Apple has entered heavily in to the audiovisual arena with their new services and devices as well.
I argue that visioneers could already in the mid 1990's see that the media technology and content would converge. I even participated in one Finnish Research Centre's project in 1997 to which all the largest media and telecommunication companies took part alongside with Nokia. I believe we developed world's first converged media experience in the world - one's which we now 16 years later use daily with our Tablets.
In Norway my lab worked intensively with the standardisation processes. In Universal Multimedia Access project the target was to develop systems where same media content could be distributed to different devices without hardcoding. The lab had a strong impact on ISO standardisation work such as JPEG2000, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21 and JPEG2000. Yet another example of the fact that the vision and the work to converge different media together were existing - but somehow not in Nokia headquarters.
And the media content industry? Kjell Aamot, CEO of one of the Europe's biggest media companies Schibstedt until 2010, participated to the very same trip to South Korea. He said that using iPhone first time (with French UI) was an eye opener for the possibilities of digital content. Well said by a person who created the world's first profitable internet version of an old newspaper. VG reached break even already in 2003 and is widely considered as the best internet based news media in the world. And I agree.
But somehow, all this slipped out from the sight in an adrenaline boost with a period of world leader in the mobile phones. Nokia forgot it's vision "Connecting people". What else the process of the media convergence is than connecting people? According to Thesaurus the word "Connecting" means:
| joining | ||
| Synonyms: | associating, attaching, bridging, bringing together, combining, connective, coupling, fastening, fusing, interlacing, intertwining, joined, linking, mingling, mixing, pairing, relating, tying together, uniting, welding |
Incidently Nokia was mentioned in Yahoo Finance's list "The 10 Most Hated Companies in America". The argument in which also Samsung is mentioned can be read here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-10-most-hated-companies-in-america-162927740.html?page=2
apparently the post has not corrected the positive raise of Nokia's value after yesterday's positive warning which boosted Nokia shares in NYC for 18.6%.
This blog entry was written after an incident where the writer almost slipped in an icy sidewalk - and was wondering whether Nokia eventually raises up after it slipped away from the highway of telecommunications.
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