Communities Dominate Brands

More Mobile Stories from Developing World, Taxis and Bicycles in Bangladesh

This is second in a series of blogs about mobile phones in the developing world. I wrote about phones in The Gambia helping the disabled find jobs in the first story of this series.

I had the pleasure to visit with Grameenphone HQ two weeks ago, in Bangladesh. They are part of the Telenor Group based in Norway, who hold a very special place in my heart, as Telenor was my first public reference, already 2 days after I started my private consultancy in Octorber 2001. We have always had a warm relationship with Telenor and I often refer to various Telenor statistics and findings, partly due to this long-standing relationship. Like most Scandinavian companies in mobile, Telenor is very open and honest with data and information about the industry.

Now, many might have thought that Telenor were crazy to enter Bangladesh as an investment. The country is incredibly poor, how can it sustain a mobile telecoms market and what can Telenor hope to gain out of this difficult market? Actually Grameenphone has been a shining example of how great a mobile network can be in a developing world country, and they just had a very successful IPO, which was oversubscribed by three times (ie three times more people wanted initial shares in the company, than were total shares available). Grameenphone has 21 million subscribers or nearly half of the total in Bangladesh against its two major rivals. Bangladesh has a total population of 160 million people, and their mobile penetration rate is at 29%.

But, lets talk of some stories from this market. I want to talk about the taxis, rickshaws (bicycle-drawn taxis) and motorbikes.

Lets start with the taxi drivers. A taxi driver had two phones. I thought that seemed a bit excessive for such a poor country, and asked why he had two phones - he said, one for incoming, one for outgoing. He is optimizing his traffic on two of the operators/carriers based on their pricing plans. If we do it in the Western World, and think our phone bills are too high, and get two accounts to optimize, of course for a hard-working taxi driver in a poor country, the proportion of his phone spending is even more out of his total disposable income, than our phone bills in our lives. And then the need to optimize is even more important. The customers in the Developing World tend to be very price-sensitive and very smart shoppers. They have more incentive to seek out the bargains, and with less money to spend, they are even more careful shoppers often, in any industry not just mobile. But yes, from another Telenor market, the Ukraine, we see how quickly second and third subscriptions can spread - the Ukraine is at 140% mobile phone penetration rate already. But yes, I remember early on saying that I was not sure if the second subscription phenomenon would be as widely-spread in the Developing World as it clearly is now in the Industrialized World (half of Europeans have two subscriptions) but yeah, the evidence is becoming overwhelming, from Chile to Indonesia to yes, Bangladesh, that we will find second subscriptions in all markets.

Secondly, just a silly story that is not Bangladesh specific, but I happened to observe this while on the journey from the airport to my hotel. There was a motorcyclist, who was texting. Now, we all know that texting-while-driving (a car) is dangerous and in many places now illegal. But still we do it. And yes, I am not a motorcyclist (Alan is..) but yeah, am sure motorbikers do that too. Perhaps not as often, and obviously not with an iPhone haha, you need a good single-handed operation phone, and obviously be quite good at it, but this motorbiker did send a message, then put his phone back in his pocket and speeded away. I tried to take a picture but he was just too fast to get done with his message, that my picture did not turn out.

Thirdly about the rickshaw taxis, the bicycle-drawn one-person taxis. These are quite remarkable right in the midst of the intense traffic in Dhaka, a city which soon will become the second-largest city on the planet in terms of population, and struggling immensely with congestion. The rickshaw bicycle taxi driver/biker, obviously has quite a horrendous job, pulling the passenger in the heat and humidity of the country, all day, without air conditioning. What a way to earn a living. And obviously at very modest income. Yet they have phones! Why would a rickshaw driver have a mobile phone? It is because it is a business tool. It helps the little entrepreneur get more business. Before the only way to get business was to bicycle around, looking for passengers. That meant biking around, sweating, for often half an hour or more at a time with no passengers. Now with mobile phones, the passengers can call the rickshaw driver, and thus the phone brings in extra business. What a wonderful gift to this hardworking entrepreneur. They love their mobile phones. 

How Can Your Shop Window Engage With Your Customers? Through the phone of course

Here is a simple idea that is free to all of our readers to consider and deploy and adopt and adapt. I mentioned this at Forum Oxford last week and there was a lot of good discussion about it mostly suggesting the idea itself is quite sound. What is it all about? I want to create engagement marketing using the window displays of retail stores.

Normally your retail store window is static advertising. You sell fishing tackle or baby clothes or running shoes or fine whiskies or whatever. The window display shows those items and you hope they will draw some of the passers-by to come visit your store. You change the display every month or so to keep it interesting and attractive.

What if rather than the window display being passive, it became active. I don't mean just adding animation to it (like many Christmas displays, with a robotic santa claus or a little train with the train moving some of your goods around the display. And I don't mean putting in a TV camera and video display to show the faces of the people who stop by your window and use the display as a kind of mirror. No, what if the display could reach out and virtually touch the passers-by and truly engage with them. Discuss with them - and most importantly - to get the passers-by to react and RESPOND to you?

Wouldn't this be magical? If yoru window display could stop passers-by and grab their mobile phone numbers - not without permission, secretly, but very openly. And best of all, out of all who pass by, only discuss with those who really are interested in what you sell.

EVERY ECONOMICALLY VIABLE PERSON

There is only one gadget that every economically viable person on the planet carries every day everywhere, and that is not the wristwatch or the iPod or the laptop or the Playstation Portable. It is the mobile phone. There are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions. That means there is a mobile phone subscription for 59% of the humans on the planet. And your shop-window display can act as your salesperson. To engage with tose who pass by your store.

How to do this? By SMS text messaging of course. You create an interactive display that features something you sell in your store. You make it a game. Give away one item. Something you sell.

First, note that people who pass your store who are not interested in what you sell will ignore your little contest. That is good. You get qualified leads. These people are really interested in your store and what it sells. If I see a store selling fishing tackle or baby clothes or tennis shoes - I walk right past - I am honestly not interested. But that whisky store in London, I'll stop by its window every time.. As to my sister, she'll stop by the baby good store. My cousin will stop at the tennis shoes store and my uncle will stop at the fishing good store. We all have our own interests. That is good. You don't want to bother collecting phone numbers of all who pass by. Only those of passers-by who really are interested in your store.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

So lets make a game. Very simple. Guess this. So lets take something unique and difficult to guess. Lets say you are a jeweller and you sell watches. So lets make it a game to guess the serial number of that specific Omega watch that is in the display this month. You celebrate James Bond and the Quantum of Solace movie, so lets guess the serial number of this Omega watch on display. The person who guesses the closest wins the watch oen month from today. Don't make the display of the contest too big, but just big enough that those who stop by your window see the chance to win that watch.

Lets add one twist. Put two numbers there - one for men, one for women, and let the contestants pick - but only enter one - whether to guess the womens' watch or the men's watch. But they are not allowed to enter both contests. This way you get the contestant to automatically self-select are they more intersted in men's jewelry or women's jewelry. Note you are NOT interested if that person is a man or a woman. You the shop-keeper want to know which type of jewelry the person buys. Could be a single guy buying for himself or a married guy who doesn't wear any jewelry but buys it for the wife, etc.

In your window display, make it clear that the contestant will be charged normal SMS text messaging rates (don't make this a premium SMS scam..) and make it clear in your window display, that the contestant enters your store customer VIP database and the store will send further info to your phone.

Now what do you get? You get the moblie phone number and the permission to market directly to that person. Don't abuse that privilege. But you may set up an automated response SMS to all who enter, so the system send a reply SMS to the contestant, verifying they are entered, and informing them of how many days are left before the gift is awarded. And then include a link to your mobile web page (WAP page) where you have some info about your store (locations, maybe you have several stores), opening hours etc. And some specials and some coupons. And your store phone number obviously. Easy to do but now you have the simple mobile e-business extension to your store.

Then one day before your contest ends you send an MMS picture message alert to all contestants, informing them of the results that will be posted in your store window tomorrow - and also results posted at the store mobile website and the winner will be notified personally. And most importantly you inform the contestants that there will be a NEW contest tomorrow at the store window. 

Why new contest? Because now you can classify the customers, identify who are locals and who joined your contest who really doesn't live in your town but just happened to pass by your store last month. Now we do another guessing game. Not a serial number of a watch but say guess the weight of the semi-precious stone on that ring: how many carats is the aquamarine stone on that ring for example. Those of your contestants who also join this second contest, were absolutely definitely at your window display both last month and this month. Either the person lives near your store or has regular need to come there. Maybe goes to school near your store or has a job near your store or visits a close friend who lives near your store etc. Doesn't matter why, but those who join both contests are definitely qualified customers who also are near you. They are not travelling businessmen who attended a conference at the hotel near by and will not return to that town this year.

What do you do with these numbers after you have them? Then you devise clever simple tools to drive visitors to your store. You run campaigns (but rarely, only once per month at most) to introduce offers to your customers. Give them a coupon and announce a special pre-sales day for your VIP customers, who can access the annual sale prices one day before they are announced at your store window. Make any coupons physically redeemable at the store and ensure you capture the phone numbers of those who redeemed coupons. This way you know which of your contestants are also returning to the store. these are your true VIP customers.

Also look for virtual content that relates to your business. If yousell watches, maybe you can find a simple collection of virtual watch face screen saver clocks that can be installed on the phone. Why not sell those too? Contact the owner and ask for a reseller license and sell them on your e-business website. Or for baby stuff, maybe some baby care ebooks and guides, or for fishng tackle, maybesome cool fishnig pictures etc. Jsut make sure you sell something with full permission and royalty to the original owner of the content. Just like you sell goods in your store. Where else is that customer of yours going to go first when they want to decorate their phone on the topic of your store inventory? To your website, not to that of Vodafone or Nokia (unless you sell phones ha-ha)

So there is your idea for the day. Hundreds of people walk by your store window every day. Dozens stop by the window, are interested, but do not walk into your store. You can turn your static display into engagement marketing. The way to do that is with the mobile phone. It can be done with very simple methods, using SMS text messaging. And is this science ficton? No, our friend Agustin Calvo of Movidream in Spain said that their company already does these kinds of interactive campaigns for their customers in Spain. (And Agustin is one of the speakers at the Forum Oxford Conference next week at Oxford University).

Twittering from warzone, US Representative Hoekstra in a bit of trouble

Typical of what happens with new technologies, there are always unforseen issues and backlash. Now with Twitter. Congressman Peter Hoekstra had picked up the Twittering habit and was keeping his Michigan voters updated on what he is doing, on a very regular basis via Twitter (good, we support that, and good use of Twitter too). So yes, so far so good. So he flies to Iraq to visit the war zone and US troops, and then posts those updated on Twitter too. Oops, suddenly he is informing (his followers back home in the USA) on matters that the travel organizers do not reveal about the trip into the public domain. A possible security leak, certainly. Will these happen, of course, and this is now an issue of learning and some guidelines that should be brought to the attention to all who attend such travel. Its not just Twitter, it could also be SMS text messaging etc. If these trips are kept secret for security reasons for the participants, then even users of always-on social networking services should be aware of it, and perhaps do a Twitter comment before the trip, saying I am now joining a silent period for the travel, will Twitter again when its safe to do so..

Interesting to see the developments with new technologies (and still personally with ky Tweets, I am having the hardest time adapting to and embracing Twittering. I always feel a guilty pang that there are a hundred followers who would like to read whats up with me, and I am not diligent about my updates..)

Update on the mobile phone check-in: Finnair finds half of passengers using it

Finnair was the first airline to introduce mobile phone based check-in back in 2001. Now we have updates that up to half of Finnair's passengers on some routes already check in with mobile phones.

I liked the idea and discussed it in my 2002 book, m-Profits. The concept spread and I've occasionally returned to the idea, from reporting that many other airlines from flag carriers like JAL in Japan to Lufthansa in Germany and even discount airlines like Ryanair and Norwegian adopting the concept. I've also given updates from time to time on the Finnair pioneering mobile check-in. And I made it the seventh case study in my current hardcover book Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media. There I report that on some of Finnair's busiest short-haul business travel routes (that have a high percentage of Finnair's frequent fliers, obviously) up to 20% of passengers use the service.

Well, I heard from Book It CEO, Jukka Salonen in Finland. Book It is the company that has developed a more intelligent SMS based interctive system that deploys many innovative services. And they run the advanced version of the Finnair mobile check in today. It has evolved a lot since the first SMS text messaging based mobile check-in that I reported about in 2002, and today includes MMS messages and 2D barcodes and is operational in several airports outside of Finland as well, such as Stockholm and Copenhagen. But the most amazing numbers. Book It reports that now on some of Finnair's busiest business routes, over half of the passengers use mobile check in. Yes! Magic. Wonderful. This is the future, and it is spreading. Coming soon to an airport near you... Thank you Jukka for the update. If you want to read Book It's press release about the latest in the mobile check in for Finnair, see this link Finnair Introduces 2D Barcodes.

Free mobile phone based guides like Guinness at Sevens and Virgin Festivals

One of the mobile marketing and advertising related ideas that I discuss in the new eBook (Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising) is the free guide to a given event. This is a good instance of engagement marketing, and a more intensive and yet more useful and more practical way to do marketing on a mobile phone, than basic banner ads and spam text messages.

The service in the eBook that is a current Pearl, is the Virgin Festivals application, that was developed by Tiger Spike in Australia and used for the first time last summer with the Virgin Festival in Australia. The application was a simple download compatible with 250 phone models in Australia, and included a map of the festival area and the schedule of the artists that were performing. These could be on any printed guide, so very predictable. The more innovative parts were that they had alearts to let the fans know what artist would perform next and offered a mobile commerce site, to allow fans to purchase festival related merchandise including that of the various artists who performed. The Virgin Festival Buddy was described at MobiAd News. This is one of the last Pearls in the book (Pearl number 48 out of 50).

The service has similarity with the Guinness Sevens application from the spring of 2008 and developed by OgilvyOne. The Sevens is a rugby tournament held in Hong Kong and Guinness offered a tournament-related tourist guide to Hong Kong. It gave the obvious Sevens related info like schedules and scores, and yes, the obvious Guinness parts to Hong Kong tourists - helping tourists find the nearest pub or bar that served Guinness of course. But it also included a very clever translation utility, of short phrases spoken in Cantonese, so the English-speaking tourist phone owner could make very basic statements to those in Hong Kong who don't speak any English (like taxi drivers). The Guinness app was described at Marketing Interactive last March. Obviously as these two services were so similar, I did not include both in the eBook.

I expect we'll see more of these kinds of engagement marketing initiatives during 2009. We'll keep monitoring them. If you'd like to sample a few pages and Pearls from the new eBook, stop by at this link: Tomi's new eBook, Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising.

SMS saves boy's life as doctor in Africa gets advice from doctor in London via texting

It seems so many of the best stories in the high tech industry come from the least developed parts of the world, where the simplest technology can be a lifesaver. In this case quite literally, saved the life of 16 year old boy in Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The boy was in hospital supposedly because his arm was bitten off by a hippopotamus while fishing. The UK based doctor, David Nott, who was in Congo through his volunteer work with Medicins Sans Frontieres, suspected the 16 year old boy had in fact been shot during the civil war that rages in the country. But the arm was badly infected and gangrenous. He would die in 3 days.

Dr Nott knew that this required a very special type of amputation - because of the enormous blood loss when an arm is removed - and he had never done such an operation. But Dr Nott had his mobile phone, and knew a specialist in the UK who does this type of amputations (they do 10 of these per year in the UK, typically to some cancer patients). So Dr Nott contacted Dr Meirion Thomas at the London Marsden Hospital - and Dr Thomas agreed to send the amputation advice via SMS text messages to Dr Nott.

The boy survived. Imagine that, a life-saving operation, done by a surgeon who had never done that before, and being advised only via SMS text messaging. How wonderful. The BBC covered this story on the news today, and have the story with pictures at the BBC website. Thanks to our friend Alex Kerr for covering the story at Forum Oxford.

For location-services to succeed, need easy as SMS texting. Meet Puskaradio from Finland

I loved this simple idea.

I learned from it from my friend Tuukka Ylalahti. Their company has developed a very simple service for any Symbian Series 60 device which has a GPS receiver. You load the application to the phone, and after that, it is literally as easy to send your location to anyone, as it is to send an SMS text message. They say it is really so easy to use, that their own mothers picked it up in a moment and started to use it. The beauty is that the receptient need not be an S60 phone, can be any phone with a browser or indeed a PC with a browser. The service sends a page which opens up at the other end, which gives a map with the positioning. So it is that easy to help people find you.

To see more, check it out at this link www.puskaradio.com

I think these kinds of simple apps are needed to teach people to use location-based services. Very good idea..

Nuggets and Tidbits from Asia Digital Media and Entertainment Forum

I spoke at the Asia Digital Media and Entertainment Forum last week and took notes on several interesting tidbits.

Taiwan Public Television Network gave an interesting presentation and discussed High Definition TV. The interesting number for readers of our blog - 60% of Taiwanese HD TV viewers never view ads (ie they skip ads). 30% view ads sometimes and only 10% view TV ads regularly.

MediaCorp Singapore gave a great presentation about digital radio, and of services that go "beyond radio". A good example was using the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) technology to update digital "e-billboards" that we see a lot here in Asia. The idea is, that you don't need any physical cable connection to the billboards, yet they can be updated remotely, simultaneously, and in real time. An interesting angle to DAB that I had never thought of. Also the idea of updating car mapping info - where are the roadblocks and traffic congestion etc. Yes, that can be done on cellular networks ie 3G data, but that means each car mapping service will consume some telecoms traffic bandwidth every time there is an update. DAB (and other broadcast digital technologies like DVB-H, DMB etc) can be used for this in a far more efficient way. Interesting..

China Netcom was at the Forum and spoke of digital convergence. One of the points they made was that also in China (as we've recently seen in many other countries) today SMS text messaging is the most used service on mobile phones - ie no longer voice calls.

As to me? I spoke of the Seven Mass Media and gave examples where legacy media are gaining new abilities through digital platforms and through convergence; and then discussed the sixth mass media channel - internet - and the seventh - mobile - and how they are now innovating in the media space. The event was very interesting.

Seize the day, or walk this way.. feeling green? use Carbon Diem

I heard of this via our friend Steve Epstein and this sounds like a pretty clever way to bring green values into daily life, and using location-based info of the phone.

The idea is that this new service, Carbon Diem, will monitor your movement. It then uses a clever algorithm to determine your method of movement and its impact to carbon. If you move walking speeds or bicycling speeds, you don't burn carbon. But if you move in say car speeds, lots of carbon. And I guess (I don't know) that it knows from the pattern, if you are in a train or bus (lots of regular stops, and obviously a regular route) and then calculates a smaller carbon footprint. And if your phone disappears at one airport and two hours later appears at another airport in a city a thousand kilometers away, it knows you've been burning some serious carbon in the jet you took...

Clever idea. Check it out at the Springwise site where the press release is featured. Thanks Steve!

Fascinating, Captain, fascinating.. as Spock might say of the smartphone today

I am obviously also a big fan of science fiction and have occasionally returned to famous themes from science fiction that have become fact, in my books and here with Alan on this blog. Our friend Faith McGary of Infonxx (which is now renamed and called KGB) the phone information providers ie 118118 in the UK etc, posted a funny comment at Forum Oxford last week, that had me thinking.

So, lets go back to the late 1960s. The first serious science fiction TV show is on the air in America, Star Trek (the original series). It ran three seasons only and was cancelled due to poor ratings (but has had a remarkably long career in reruns and syndication globally, ever since; not to mention spawning 4 follow-up TV series each longer than the original - rare for a spin-off to outlast the original - and also a lucrative movie franchise).

But yes, back to the 1960s. Star Trek popularized many science fiction concepts that are quite common today in most Sci Fi stories, from hyperspace drives allowing spaceships to travel faster than the speed of light, to teleportation, a handy way to move TV actors from the orbiting spaceship to the planet of the week down below, without very expensive special effects of shuttle crafts landing on the planet..

But yes, then there were the three standard gadgets that Captain Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty would carry on their missions to the uncharted planets. They would typically carry three technologies, the phaser guns, the communicators, and usually only one of them - likely to be Spock - would carry the most complex portable gadget they had, the Tri-Corder.

I was always fascinated by that device. Three functionalities, it was the recorder-computer-scanner. And by scan, please don't limit yourself to thiking today's PC industry flatbed scanners, remember that the Star Trek ship had long distance scanner arrays - to scan planets for lifeforms, etc. So when thinking scannner, think camera, X-Ray etc. Not just flatbed scanner..

And this portable, not quite pocketable device was a combination of recording (cool), computing (very cool) and scanning (ultra-cool).

Lets put it in context of 1960s technology. The cassette tape recorder was just being invented by Philips. So most people who would have any kind of mechanical recorder, could only record voice, onto open reel tape recorders. The most portable ones at the time were the size of a small shoe-box. The Star Trek Tri-Corder was smaller than that.

In the 1960s there was no mass market video recording. The first home VCR would appear five years later launched by Philips in Europe, in a machine more expensive than the largest colour TVs and in size they were - I am having a hard time to imagine anything in modern life that is of the size of that first Philips VCR. Don't think of the oldest Betamax or VHS recorders, this was even bigger. The video cassette alone was a huge bulky thing as thick as 4 DVD cases..  now I know, a suit case! Yes, that first video recorder was literally the size of a small suitcase, you know the size, larger than a briefcase. The largest size small suitcase you can get onboard an airplane. THAT big. That was the first mass market video recorder in the summer of 1972, released in Europe a couple of years before Sony rolled out its Betamax in Japan and globally.

And this Star Trek Tri-Corder would do recordings. Not just voice but also video. And wait - that first Philips VCR has no camera, only the recorder part. The Star Trek Tri-Corder also included the sensor (scanner) to capture images and video. Wait a moment. There were no portable video cameras for us in the 1960s. Video cameras were enormous robot-like gadgets on heavy wheeled dollies, used only indoors in studios. The first ikegami and Sony and Panasonic shoulder-portable professional video cameras were starting to emerge in the 1970s, and cost - literally - a million dollars per unit.

Today pocketable video recording is nothing amazing, as any cheap cameraphone includes picture and video recording ability (well, most of them except the iPhone ha-ha). But in the 1960s, this was a "magical" invention. FAR beyond what was on the production line of any electronics maker. Remember there were no digital cameras. So 1960s camera technology was film based cameras, and a Polaroid was the best you could hope for in (near-)instant photography.

The Tri-Corder also had an enormous capacity to store information (recorder) as in memory and storage on a computer today. We didn't really see much the limits of how much of this capacity was assumed into the Star Trek device, but it was a lot.

Then the second ability, the computer. I was lucky to see a real computer in person when one of my relatives took me to see one, as an 11-year old. A real computer. It was enormous, filled two rooms. It was running, but there were no lights. It was processing a programme that would run all day and night. I was very disappointed that it was so silent and there was nothing exciting about it. Some big tape wheels would occasionally hum to action, roll a bit, and stop. Nothing else. And the room was chilly, as the air conditioning kept the room at very low temperature. This was 1971, still the time when computers were literally programmed using punch cards..  Oh, this was one of the most powerful computers in Finland at the time..

So, Star Trek was made years before this level, and a combination device had managed to squeeze a computer into that portable casing. Regular readers of our blog know that a modern mobile phone is a very advanced computer. To put it in context. The cheap mobile phone today is more powerful than the world's most powerful computer in the time of Star Trek. And more amazingly, any one standard smartphone today, is more powerful than - all the computers of the world, in the 1960s, put together..  If you have an N-Series or iPhone or Blackberry etc, in your pocket is more computing power than all computers of the world, in the 1960s, put together.

Fascinating, as Mr Spock would say..

Now to the last part, the scanner ability of the Tri-Corder. I mentioned video scanning and image scanning. Fine. Any cheap digital camera can do that. But also, the modern phone has a voice sensor. We can capture voices and real-time soundtracks to videos. Again for context, when outdoor film crews would shoot for TV shows in the 1960s, they had separate film cameras, and separate sound recorders. These were then merged in the studio later. It is not inherently obvious that sound and video go together in video recordings as they do today. 

Then the more amazing scanning abilities. The 2D Barcode reader, and the macro mode scanner. Did you know if you have a current high-end smartphone, like my Nokia N82 with its 5 megapixel camera resolution and macro mode, it can take sharp pictures of newspaper text, that can be read on the phone screen. Amazing..

And there are a bunch of other sensors and receivers, from the FM radio for entertainment and news, and GPS receiver for geographic positioning (obviously only on Planet Earth, ha-ha, not much use on another planet without a GPS satellite system in orbit). My N82 also has motion sensors (similar to an iPhone, if you tilt the phone, the image shifts from portrait mode to landscape, etc). And there are many communciation methods from Bluetooth and WiFi to all forms of cellular technolgoy and even infra-red transmission. There even are some software applications that let you convert a PDA or smartphone infra-red transmitter to send TV remote control signals, so you can change TV channels with your phone..

But yes, returning to Faith McGary's comments at Forum Oxford. Then we have the auto-focus sensor on the phone. To measure distance.. Yes, our smartphone has even a wireless tape measure built-in. How far to that alien, Mr Spock? Set phasers on stun, at my command...

Ha-ha, yes, it was not attempting to become a "scientific instrument" but our basic pocket phone is gaining more and more of those features that 40 years ago were very strictly impractical "far future" science fiction.

Fascinating, as Mr Spock would say.

The modern smartphone is not a complete Tri-Corder, it does not for example scan for various chemicals - although - these may be coming, from early experiments with some phones with the breath-analyzer or the pollution meter or the bad-breath warning etc - which are scanning for chemical compositions of gases.. But yes, Mr Spock would certainly approve. Our pocket device is potentially a very powerful scanning-computing-recording device. In only 40 years. Truly amazing..

PS - also there are many suppliers who provide various Tri-Corder related applications or even custom devices, to provide more accurately those functionalities of the TV series. But yes, from the Maxwell Smart shoe-phone to the Star Trek communicator form factor (ie copied in Motorola's StarTac flip phone in 1996) to James Bond's moving map in the car seen first in Goldfinger, we've seen a lot of that science fiction become fact. Now, what I really need is that Star Trek transporter to teleport me to my customers rather than taking those 12 hour flights...