Mobile Culture Clash

When I started working in mobile back in the late 90’s the industry was always looking to the Japanese and the Scandinavians in an attempt to predict the next big thing. On the face of it, this made plenty of sense as it was in these countries that the first mobile services had launched and at the time Ericsson, Nokia and DoCoMo were the undisputed top three innovators. However since then, there have been a number of examples of failed attempts to introduce concepts which were massive successes in these countries to the wider world. imode is an obvious example which despite been ubiquitous in Japan, never really took off in Europe, despite O2’s best efforts.

All of which brings me to a trip I took to Stockholm the other week where I heard about some really interesting mobile services that the Swedes have that we certainly don’t. One is an SMS service where you text a number plate to a shortcode and get the address and name of the owner texted back - apparently the service is so good that even the police use it for official checks. The second is a real time mobile number directory service, meaning you could then text that name and address to another shortcode and get back the person’s mobile number - handy if you’d like to critique their driving in real-time or ask them out for a drink. I also saw an application running on a Windows Mobile phone that automatically does a look-up on all numbers calling the handset and displays the callers name while its ringing which was truly impressive stuff.

Despite both being neat, the chances of either service seeing the light of day outside the Nordics is virtually zero. While no doubt technically feasible, concerns about privacy and the potential for exploitation would be sure to block them. Although interestingly when I raised this as a consideration with a number of Swedes they didn’t think of it as being an issue. In the UK the mere suggestion of such a service would result in a raft of stories about how it enables identity fraud or burglars to target houses of Ferrari owners.

I guess this neatly illustrates just how much of an impact cultural differences can, and indeed do, have on the success (or indeed launch) of mobile services. I guess they wont be attacking the Google Street View vans in Northern Europe…..