I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a conversation I had with Mark Selby, the vice president of sales and industry collaboration for Nokia, during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (that I attended courtesy of Nokia). But I returned to the U.S. with a cold, so I haven’t posted this as quickly as I’d hoped.
Selby was one of several top Nokia executives with whom I spoke during the conference. He was one of the most interesting.
I (and two other bloggers/journalists) asked a fair number of questions about high end cellular capabilities. But the discussion that especially stuck in my mind was about a, well, “primitive” use of cellular — for plain ol’ voice communications.
Radio community networking
While I was asking about such features as mobile television and live video streaming, Selby discussed how a radio station in a developing country was using cellular. Relatively few people have cellular phones (or landline phones, for that matter), so the radio station drove into the countryside, with a tuk-tuk, and recorded audio interviews with residents over a week or two and would use those interviews as part of a “talk” show.
Residents who had cellular phones or people who borrowed phones would call into the program, live, to discuss those recorded audio interviews. The talk show host learns the voices and names of the people interviewed and the people calling and creates a very social environment.
By the way, Selby did an excellent job of detailing the advantages of Nokia’s new N82 five megapixel camera phone (that I hope to receive relatively soon) in a video shot with the N82 (see left). Lots of good information about the handset’s camera phone capabilities, that Nokia is promoting (see below).
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