The background image on Marko Keskinen's imaging capable phone is that of his son, who turned two the morning he met with Tradelink Talk, Tradelink's quarterly publication. By the time we spoke with Keskinen, Head of Marketing, Technology & Architecture at Nokia he had sent the image to his colleagues' phones and emailed it via his phone to friends and family who did not have a multimedia messaging service (MMS) capable phone.

MMS may sound like a lifestyle product or flashy add-on, but in fact it's a step in the right direction for mobile operators in terms of new revenue streams. With mobile operators investing large sums of money in new-generation licences and infrastructure, mobile Internet and mobile commerce initiatives could well be a valuable new source of revenue. And, while the primary consumers of imaging are private individuals, corporates are quickly catching on to the relevance of MMS capable phones. Real estate agents can send images of properties back to the office or merchandisers can record images of products at trade fairs.

In a developed market such as Hong Kong with a high penetration rate of mobile phone subscribers, about 89% of the population as of November 2002, people are looking to upgrade to their third or fourth phone. "In some ways Hong Kong is more advanced in commercialising mobile services, for instance MMS, than in Europe or the US," says Keskinen. "If you're so advanced in the technology adoption curve then clearly you are not only making voice calls, you're taking pictures as well." Hong Kong's MMS interoperability encourages further use of the technology as you can send text or audio from any network to another network which for the consumer is as seamless as SMS.

Realised Potential

Nokia's suite of mobile phones are concentrated in voice and text messaging but since mid-2002 most of the new models launched by Nokia are image-enabled. This is an exciting potential growth area for the company, as are entertainment and business applications. But it takes more than one player to make it happen. In all these areas the industry as a whole has to come together and work towards making progress, particularly in mobile commerce.

This technology lets you make monetary transactions using a wireless device and a data connection. It is an area where both mobile operators and services such as banking, payments and ticketing benefit.

The Nokia 6510 phone was enabled last year with the wallet application, which is a password-protected area on the mobile phone where personal information like credit card details can be stored and wireless identity module (WIM) is used for the digital signature.

"It is already safe to conduct mobile transactions but as we know there is still a lot to do when it comes to merchants, banks and application developers. All these need to be engaged so that we can create something meaningful before m-commerce takes off," says Keskinen.

The company is now looking to put in place wireless profiled TCP-IP in addition to wallet applications and WIM. It's the end-to-end security needed for mobile transactions, notes Keskinen.

Far ahead of their peers in Asia, Nokia and Octopus Cards Limited have partnered to create a new Xpress-on cover that transforms the Nokia 3310 and 3330 mobile phones into m-commerce devices. Available only in Hong Kong, the specially-designed mobile phone cover integrates a mini Octopus card into the cover. The first company in Asia to integrate a smartcard into a mobile phone, Nokia tapped into the potential behind an estimated seven million transactions everyday via Octopus cards. By integrating the cards into the mobile phone, Nokia is making m-commerce an intuitive element in mobile communications.

Expanded Mobility

As m-commerce picks up momentum, another area which needs more work is the mobile Internet. The future Nokia envisions is one where people are swapping applications or seamlessly update or exchange data between mobile phones and networked devices like the PC and PDA. And, we're not far from this. The major players in the industry, Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Panasonic, have teamed up to develop Symbian OS, the standard operating system for the mobile Internet.

This open software and hardware standard is the result of hard lessons learned from the problems surrounding the first mobile Internet, Wireless Application Protocol. The Symbian initiative is an important step towards ensuring volume use of the mobile Internet in a standardised and non-proprietary way giving users consistency and user-friendly digital content. This will be the move that transforms your phone from just a device for calling to an organiser, a financial planner, a games platform and even a browser.