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March 17, 2004
Expect Increasing Convergence of Mobile Devices, Says Usina
By Erica Grieder: a Q & A with Nokia's mobile convergence guru,
held during the Austin Mobility Roundtable 2004.
Not that long ago, Tetris was a cutting-edge video
game and a cell phone—any at all, no matter how
big—was a status symbol. Since then, video games and
mobile telecommunication have made great strides.
Games boast dazzling visual and special effects, and
can be played online, in real time, against opponents
on the other side of the world. Mobile
telecommunication devices have lightened up, trimmed
down, and added a host of new functions to their
repertoire.
According to many analysts, critics and
executives, the logical next step in the evolution of
these industries will be the convergence of
telecommunication and entertainment devices. One of
the first companies to essay in this direction is
Nokia, which debuted the N-Gage mobile game deck in
Oct. 2003. The N-Gage is a handheld video game console
equipped with wireless capabilities via Bluetooth, so
it supports multiplayer online gaming. It also
functions as a cell phone, MP3 player and FM radio,
and is able to send and receive email including audio
clips and images.
Nada Usina, the general manager of entertainment
and media in North and South America for Nokia, is
responsible for leading the N-Gage initiative. On
March 11, after her keynote address on the future of
mobile entertainment at the Austin Mobility
Roundtable, she fielded questions about the fate of
traditional devices, the risks of brand dilution, and
what to anticipate in the years to come.
With the N-Gage, Nokia is combining two concepts that
are very big right now--mobility and online gaming.
What’s driving those two trends?
There’s a couple of things. Certainly, the
lifestyles and experiences that people have involve
squeezed time schedules. While there’s twenty-four
hours in a day, there’s the demand to do so much more.
And we see life going mobile with that. Gaming,
entertainment, music, media, access to news, sports,
video, all of that, quite frankly, can happen in a
mobile environment, if the experience is optimized for
that environment and comparable to what one sees in a
traditional fixed setting.
And secondly, I think that the traditional video games
side is setting some precedent with interactivity and
with the competition that exists. The competitive
nature of gaming is a major driver. And, overall, I
think more and more people want to connect with
others. The community experience is, without a doubt,
a major push behind what’s driving this online gaming
experience. Just how robust can that community be?
We’re reaching saturation with cell phones, in
particular, to the extent that a lot of people don’t
even have land lines anymore. Do you think that kind
of stationary device is becoming obsolete?
I wish we were totally at saturation. In some of
the more underdeveloped markets, in Latin America, for
example, the
penetration rate among youth in this market is still
somewhere, depending on what study you believe,
between 50 and 60 percent. Whereas if you walk around
in Scandinavia, you see eight-year-olds with a mobile
phone. There’s a lot of opportunity for growth here,
just within the handsets themselves.
But beyond that, do they become obsolete? It’s
really a function of whether those handsets can give
you an experience that negates a traditional or
connected entertainment experience, or whether they
complement it. And I think you’re probably
always going to find both. No one medium has ever
really wiped out the other per se. Print existed,
radio came and dug into the print footprint. TV came;
everyone thought radio would be dead, but it
continued, so did print. Online came, everyone thought
TV would be dead, it continued, so did print, so did
radio.
And now that mobile’s coming, will it be the death of
internet and TV and radio and print? No, but it will
complement those. It certainly will drive new
experiences that hopefully are shaping the direction
lives are headed, community by community.
You’re trying to bring together two markets—for cell
phones and handheld gaming consoles. Is there a lot of
natural overlap between those two markets?
The dynamics of the video game traditional space
and the business models associated with it are
actually quite different than the traditional mobile
phone space. So we’re determining where those possible
overlaps are or where the opportunities are.
I think there is overlap in the
consumers, who are expanding how they live day-to-day
and looking for experiences in new environments. It’s
kind of a recurring theme, but at the end of the day,
the consumer’s going to decide whether or not products
fly or concepts fly. Is it something that’s needed, is
it something that’s wanted, and does it give you
something unique or complementary? And we’re finding,
actually, both. So there is a little bit of overlap,
but on the business model side, not so much yet…and
that’s where we’re trying to bridge some of the gaps.
How will you expand the pool of potential gamers?
There’s always been the stigma attached with video
gamers of, you know, the male sitting in a basement
playing games for a bazillion hours. This whole
community and social aspect has certainly broadened
that. We find people who are actually meeting one
another, and if you think of the experience of N-Gage
over Bluetooth, you’re playing within a short range,
thirty feet, which is a very social type of
experience.
So we’re trying to broaden the spectrum of titles and
experiences. We’re bringing different types of games
and some of the titles we’re bringing out now, like
The Sims, are appealing to different audiences,
whether it be youth or female. We are also tapping
into different gaming experiences: If you’re a casual
gamer, maybe you have Java games or embedded games; if
you’re an active gamer, you have some of these truly
rich console-quality type games in a mobile
environment. Or if you’re a very immersive gamer, you
can get these deep, even potentially mobile massively
multiplayer online role-playing games, which haven’t
existed before.
As far as cell phones go, just a couple of years ago,
the focus in growing a cell phone company was, “Our
phones are smaller, lighter, prettier.” And now it’s
become, “Our phones take pictures, they have this
functionality.” Do you think there’s room to grow cell
phones based on what they do just as cell phones or is
the future going to be about what they can do in
addition?
I think that’s a great question. It’s gonna vary
market by market. If you look at certain developing
countries, voice or location-based service may be that
critical factor. If you look at more developed markets
where corporate day-to-day life is that big driver,
they are looking for converged devices. As youth is
more and more on the go, they’re looking for converged
entertainment devices. So we actually see that there
are
opportunities for both.
What about branding N-Gage and branding mobile devices
in general? With mobile devices right now, it
sometimes seems there’s so much
bundling that goes on—you get this phone with this
provider’s service—that you don’t really think about
the brand of the device you’re getting.
Nokia is the number five global
brand [of all products]. We’re five or six over the
past two or three years as far as brand awareness and
recognition and preference and all of these types of
things. Which very significantly plays from market to
market.
There is fragmentation in this market, and it is quite
interesting how to differentiate a product when you’ve
got so much confusion among plans. I think we’re
starting to see some consolidation in the carrier
industry which will potentially allow for more
value-based selling as opposed to pure acquisition of
new consumers. It’s just not as mature a market yet.
Particularly for our brand, though, to stand out, you
know the iPod hip factor—we are looking at N-Gage
specifically like that. It’s the first sub-brand we’ve
ever launched. In fact, when you have a #5 global
brand, to start a new brand within that is quite a
risk. But we needed to identify with this segment in a
different way than you would in the very mass-happy
world of mobile phones connecting people. Now we have
N-Gage anyone, anywhere.
So we’re certainly exploring growing brands and we’re
probably going to start to try to capitalize on the
content. On the mobile phone side, it’s been very
much, “Here’s the technology, here’s the wireless
plan, here’s the technology, here’s the wireless
plan.” Well, what if it has, Tiger Woods 2004 in a
mobile multiplayer mode. Do you really care about some
of the other stuff? Maybe not. I think you’re going to
start to see that type of brand-building around the
content side. Many people will argue that content is
king, and I don’t know that the mobile phone space has
experienced that yet. But it will start to. Imaging is
a great example, whether it’s content that’s been
pushed to people through multimedia messaging or the
content that you’re creating and sharing with your
parents. You can say, “Here’s my dorm room, mom,” or
“Here’s little Joey, he just took his first steps,”
and send a video. The content will be the reason
people start to want certain devices, want certain
plans. That’s really where it’s going.
Are you developing games you can only get for the
N-Gage?
Absolutely. We’ve got many 3rd-party published titles
from the best publishers, the EAs, the Segas, the
Activisions of the world. But in addition to that, we
are creating Nokia first-party published titles. We’ve
got three launching this summer. One is Ashen. That’ll
be our first title; it’s a first-person shooter, kind
of a horror-based environment. We’ve got Operation
Shadow and Pathway to Glory. Pathway to Glory will
probably be a really compelling experience that starts
to showcase in a major way some of the features and
capabilities of a platform like N-Gage. So you’ve got
to have certain showcase titles, which we believe
could come from third-party publishers and developers
or directly first-party, and we will explore those
directions.
For people who aren’t gamers, is this technology of
interest? Will there be implications for non-gaming
usage?
Absolutely, for community. The idea of entertainment
communities can expand well beyond that of games.
There are companies out there that are starting to
build communities out of celebrity sightings and
people that are chatting about their favorite sports
teams and whatnot. The same idea of connecting with
people exists in a mobile environment, and that could
be around music, for example. We launched a 3300 music
phone, and then we did an iteration with Jay-Z. It was
the 3300 Jay-Z black phone. So his album was actually
embedded in the device. So, it had limited
distribution but a community that builds around it
when Jay every week is sending a message to you
saying, “Here’s where I’m going to be this week,
here’s what I did last night, or here’s the club I
went to; I’ve got a tour coming to your city, you can
actually get bumped to the front of the line.”
There are many, many applications, and everyone’s just
got to figure out for themselves how and why they’re
going to use it. The imaging space is an interesting
one, where you’ve got the sharers and the keepers, the
moms that will put pictures in shoeboxes, the
traditional way: what is their environment with the
mobile camera phone? They’re getting a lot of
snapshots; where are they putting that? How are they
sharing that in the mobile community? Do they send it
phone to phone? Is it phone to web? Is it phone to
kiosk and so they can print it and put it in an album?
We’re going to see, I think, a lot of different types
of things. All sorts of communities built around it,
as you can imagine.
Among early adopters of the N-Gage, how’s the response
been, once consumers have been able to have their
hands on it?
Actually, we’re extremely excited. The actual feedback
from users who own the device has been as high if not
higher than any other device we’ve ever put out. It’s
a passionate group; they give tremendous amounts of
feedback that we’re listening to and learning from as
we continue to evolve the platform. And I think one of
the most interesting things has been how they’ve
discovered, “Oh, this device also is my calendar? And
it syncs to my PC suite? It’s a FM radio? And—oh my
gosh—I can also do video streaming on this device?”
And they start to really get in-depth on the device,
and understand how loaded it is.
Part of that education process is you cannot overload
consumers on the front end; otherwise, their brains,
will go into overdrive and, who knows, explode or
something. But the consumers have been so stoked to
find out there’s all this other stuff packed in. And I
think that’s starting to be consistent around mobile
devices. As people start to explore, and particularly
with such a new product, you get some of these early
adopters who are explorers—they are trying to create
features and understand and hack around, and many of
them are even developers, and they’ll come up with new
applications and ideas.
There’s all sorts of really cool stuff coming out.
There are applications like, world travel mate where
you have weathers that are preloaded, currencies are
preloaded and it’s constantly updated. Really just
killer things. Maybe I’m a 30-something guy who’s been
playing video games my whole life, but I totally am
excited about the opportunity to have a device like
this, but I’ve also got to be a grown-up and have my
calendar, and understand where I’m traveling, and what
is the pound worth these days. These are the types of
devices that allow for all of that.
And multiple-device ownership is one we haven’t even
touched yet, but you may start to see that now, where
you have a weekend phone that you put in your
pocketbook when you’re going out to a club or
whatever, you may have your power business device, you
may have your playing device. So we’re seeing people
go different routes, and it will be quite interesting
to watch how that works over the next couple of years.
And let me ask you a sort of devil’s advocate
question. Obviously this N-gage is much smaller than a
laptop. But laptops are getting smaller and lighter
all the time. In the longterm, as these are getting
smaller, is there still going to be a role for a
device that’s much more functional than a cell phone,
but not as functional as a computer?
We have a line of products on our enterprise line of
products called the Communicator. It’s an extremely
popular product in Europe, and if you think of it as a
mobile phone, you’d say wow, it’s a really big mobile
phone. If you think of it as the world’s smallest PC,
you know, you’d be really surprised. I think you’re
definitely going to start to see size happen from both
ends, and functionality is going to be the true driver
for people. And that’s the true [mark]—there was a lot of
buzz around convergence a few years ago, but the
market wasn’t ready, the applications weren’t ready,
and the devices weren’t ready. Now, it’s definitely
ready. Five years from now we’ll look back and think
we were primitive, but it’s a lot further along.
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