Nokia said this week that its Nokia Life Tools project which we wrote a few lines about it last year, will launch during 2009 with new, specialist devices. Nokia came up with the idea to help rural populations in India keep track of crop pricing at their local markets, help them learn English as well as feed them up to date weather reports, all using their mobile phones, since they can’t get this information from other sources.
As a result, agricultural workers in India have had advance information about weather, news and crop advisory services and information about probable crop diseases, weather based disruptions and tips for more successful harvests. This has meant that farmers in India could plan labour, sowing, harvesting and sales better, and with more predictable results. Nokia will now take this to a commercial launch in India some time in the first half of 2009.
It was available to anyone to go and do this, a cellular operator, a satellite broadcaster, or an existing fixed line telco, but in the end Nokia has stepped up for two key reasons, one is because cellular networks have stretched over more areas of India, sooner than other networks so this is the right media, and the other is because Nokia wants to protect its 80% handset market share in India, as all of the world’s handset makers look to erode its market lead there, as the Indian economy explodes over the next five years.
Nokia Life Tools will be enabled in the Nokia 2320 and Nokia 2323, devices which will soon begin shipping, and on more devices to be announced later in the year. The creation of Nokia Life Tools was from the ground up, built by a team which immersed itself in the rural conditions and did extensive research to understand how people led their lives and improvements they wanted to see. We think someone should do that in every country.
If a handset vendor can reach that far down into the lives of people in rural India, then how many other moves of that type could a handset maker which has a knack for web services integration, enable in European and US economies? Certainly other poorly served economies which have low penetration of broadcast networks and wired telecommunications will have applications that are crying out for this type of approach.
Learn English and General Knowledge subscribers all claimed confidence and empowerment as key motivators and benefits for the services in India, so what about attacking adult literacy in the modern world in the same way? Someone will do it if not Nokia. Adults who can’t read in Western Europe and the US who cannot read, all have mobile phones, but rarely have access to a PC, so it’s a similar situation.
The pilot program of Nokia Life Tools in India was launched in December 2008, with services in Agriculture, Learn English, General Knowledge and of all things Astrology, which they take very seriously in India.