The Facts-Based Survey of Mobile Money Globally Focusing on the Reality and Numbers - Ignores totally the utterly trivial noise of Apple Pay, Bitcoins and Paypal

Lets do an update on Mobile Payments. I should call this: Wow this is Huge. And like most of my 'definitive' treatments, lets give this an Executive Summary so you know is this worth reading (note update to article at bottom end with fresh numbers from Russia):

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

World has 2.5 Billion active users of mobile payments already in 2016. That is more than the total active user base of Facebook. The value of mobile payment transactions last year was worth $600 Billion dollars. Easily ten times bigger than the total combined value of all app stores, iOS, Google Play and others, put together. Just in tickets sold onto mobile alone, the world saw 11.5 Billion mobile tickets delivered last year. The bulk of those were on busses, trains and airplanes, not movies, rock concerts and lottery tickets. Mobile coupons are worth $30 Billion dollars all by that category alone. All this is discussed in today's blog article. This article sets in proper relationship the various technologies that you probably have heard of about mobile payments such as mobile internet based services like Paypal, NFC based payments like Apple Pay, Starbucks style mobile wallets, M-Pesa style SMS payments, Bitcoins, but also QR codes, USSD, MMS and WAP Billing. This article offers the most thorough treatment of mobile payments in the public domain currently, and it focuses on where the money is. 54% of all mobile payments processed last year went through..... SMS. There are tons of case examples and statistics from all around the world: Australia, China, Finland, India, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Norway, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and USA. There are major corporations and brands discussed who do remarkable things with mobile payments today like Air Asia, Castrol, Coca Cola, Finnair, Lifebuoy, Nordstrom, Rihanna and Tally Weijl.

This blog is written by the man who delivered the keynote address to the first ever conference on mobile commerce; who wrote the world's first book on mobile money and who has written more about mobile payments than any other person in the world. He is quoted in over 500 press articles and more importantly in 170 books written by his peers. Major global players in the merger of money and mobile telecoms from banks like ABN Amro, Bank of America, HSBC and BNP Paribas, to telcos like Vodafone, China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo and Telefonica have said in public that they trust and use Tomi Ahonen to guide them on this journey. That is what to expect. This is a long article of over 10,000 words (about one full chapter in one of my bestselling hardcover books) and will take you about 15 minutes to read. It has more stats and more case examples than any other article written into the public domain about mobile payments. If you want more, you will have to buy a specialist report or book. With that, lets start. I was saying that gosh, this 'mobile payments' story is actually even bigger than I had imagined...

So you thought mobile payments was becoming 'a big thing'. That Apple Pay and Bitcoins and Paypal were important stories. That you probably had to brush up on your reading soon. I have some news for you. You are BADLY behind in your understanding. Deloitte surveyed last summer the consumers in 31 countries on all 6 inhabited continents. They found that in the ‘rich world’ Industrialized Countries like the USA, Britain, Japan, Australia etc, 20% of the consumers were already using mobile payments. That is a big number. Thats 200 million people ! (just in that part of the world). If we assume the rest of the world adds what, half to that, and we’re at 300 million active users of mobile payments - that would be nearly as big as the total population of the USA. Already using a radical new payment method! Any business, literally, any business, has to understand if this many people are using a new payment method.

And you’d be making very reasonable assumptions with those numbers. But you’d be dancing on the deck of the Titanic after it had already hit the iceberg and water was gushing in. Because that same Deloitte study was a global study. Outside of the rich world (where we all have bank accounts and many have credit cards - yes, American readers, even today many adult Europeans do not bother to get a credit card, a banking payments debit card is enough for some; only Americans have that weird addiction to plastic cards). So what did Deloitte find? In the Emerging World (what used to be called ‘Developing World’ or even worse term, ‘Third World’) where 5 out of every 6 humans alive is living - China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Egypt - in the Emerging World the usage of mobile payments is at.... 47% of all consumers !!!!!!!!

47% of the Emerging World population is 2.9 BILLION PEOPLE. Active users of mobile payments (oopsie? I guess this story is bigger than I thought). Yeah. Think again. Now to be precise, Deloitte measured ‘consumers’ so the number is not as a percentage of total population (a toddler is not a consumer but is a human). In reality its somewhat less than 2.9B but yeah. More people are ACTIVELY PAYING with mobile in the Emerging World alone, than are TOTAL USERS of Facebook on the planet! Did I get your attention? More people use mobile payments worldwide than have a credit card! Did I get your attention? Will you read this article? I have the definitive numbers, stats, case studies here for you. This is the must-read article about mobile payments and mobile money, for February 2017. All numbers totally up-to-date current.

Yeah. 2016 reality check. Nearly half of that part of the world that you are not very good in understanding - has already adopted a new payment system. And you somehow missed that. And that payment system is NOT Paypal, it is NOT Apple Pay and gosh, it is not Bitcoin. This article tells you where the money is, shares all known stats about the mobile payment industry - and illustrates with over a dozen case studies the various ways you can join in the fun, and make money with mobile.. money. (All for free.. no registration, no ads to bother you)

DON’T POLLUTE YOUR MIND WITH BULLSHIT

Most articles about mobile payments talk about Apple Pay and Bitcoins and Paypal. And as you read those articles you the reader will feel you learned something. Listen very carefully to what I write: those three cases (Apple Pay, Bitcoin, Paypal) are irrelevant. Not ‘are only somewhat relevant’. No. listen. Carefully. BItcoin, Apple Pay and Paypal. Those three cases are IRRELEVANT to the mobile payments world. If you are putting in the time studying, understanding, adopting, learning, using, copying, Bitcoin or Apple Pay or Paypal, you are WASTING YOUR TIME. I have the numbers to prove it to you in this article. Talking about those three is as relevant to the global mobile payments industry as is talking about the automobile industry today, and using only three of the weirdest examples you can think of while IGNORING Toyota, GM and Volkswagen. Or talking about the airplane industry and ignoring Boeing and Airbus. Or talking about the running shoe industry and ignoring totally Nike, Reebok and Adidas. Its LUDICROUS.

Imagine a car expert talking about today’s global car industry but only mentioning the example of the London Black Cab car, and then the example of the four-wheel tourist twin-seat bicycle-peddaled vehicles, and lastly the cars with driving controls for both front seats (cars made for driving instructors). If this is a story about 'let me show 3 bizarre vehicles' then thats fair. If the presentation or article or book is about 'the global automobile industry in 2017' and uses ONLY those 3 examples - it's utter bullshit. If they talk about London Black Cabs as supposedly the most used cars, but ignore Toyotas and Volkswagens, gosh, its ludicrous. In mobile payments, Apple Pay is like London’s black cab vehicle maker - is a local specialized solution for one country that isn't even their most used type of car that will not be the mass market globally. Bitcoin has nothing to do with cars. Its like counting twin-seat four-wheel bicycles as supposedly ‘automobiles’. And Paypal is a nice solution for online payments in the legacy 6th media internet world (Mobile is the 7th media). But Paypal’s solution works ACROSS both media, it can be used online and mobile (like a car with 2 controls can be used for teaching driving, and also as a regular car). Paypal are a trivial bit-player in the international MOBILE payments world. Like cars made with driver controls for both driver and instructor. They do exist. There is a genuine market for that - but its a joke, a trivial side-show of essentially forgettable relevance. If you write a story about CARS, you talk about Volkswagen, Toyota, GM. Maybe you want to add BMW or even a Ferrari. If you want to talk about ‘specialized’ cars, you can talk about Volvo Trucks or Cat caterpillars. Probably you want to talk about the EVOLUTION in cars, which would be say Tesla. But you don’t devote any meaningful time to London Black Cabs, or haha bicycles, or those weird cars where there are pedals on the passenger-seat side too.

We have the numbers. You really think Apple Pay is ‘relevant’? To mobile payments? Outside of the USA? Seriously? Seriously? Apple Pay? That only works on SOME of Apple’s iPhones and doesn’t even work on the majority of smartphones used in the USA? Apple Pay isn’t even the largest mobile wallet or NFC service provider in the world. And what is NFC in the world of mobile paymnets hahahahahahahaha.

Mobile payments, mobile money, mobile wallets, mobile banking, mobile commerce. All that will have more than half of its TOTAL global user interaction on ONE tech that has nothing to do with NFC. Nothing to do with the iOS. Something that works on every phone. In fact the ONLY digital service that reaches every economically viable person on the planet. Did you get that? A digital service that reaches every economically viable person on the planet? Not Facebook haha, Facebook only gets to less than a quarter of the planet. Not email, not the internet, not Google, not Android. The only digital technology that reaches every economically viable person - is SMS text messaging. Not every person who can be reached by SMS will be actively using it (some are illiterate) and some may well prefer OTHER messaging like say Whatsapp. Wonderful yes. But brand new numbers out December from eMarketer gives Whatsapp global count at 1 Billion active users. Contrast that with 6 Billion active users of SMS text messaging!

I am NOT talking about USAGE. I am not talking about the number of messages sent. I a talking about the REACH of a technology. An iPhone can get into 600 million pockets. Whatsapp can get into 1 Billion pockets. Facebook can invade 2 Billion pockets. But SMS sits with 6 Billion ACTIVE users and reaches every single one of the economically viable people on the planet. Duh. So the ‘envelope please’.

DEVASTATING NUMBERS ON MOBILE MONEY

So what is the primary way people use mobile payments? Its not Paypal haha, its not Bitcoin (Bitcoin isn’t even mobile money; gosh Bitcoin isn’t even electronic money, its a gambling instrument). Allied Market Research just came out with their latest count in January 2017 of the total global mobile payments market of 2016. They found the total value of all mobile payments transactions was $600 Billion dollars worldwide.

Lets pause here first. How big is that number? Its more than the GLOBAL TV INDUSTRY. Its twice the size of the worldwide INTERNET industry. Six hundred billion dollars is more than the size of the fixed landline ‘legacy’ telecoms industry on the planet worldwide! Its not just that mobile telecoms is bigger than landline telecoms today, haha (that has been true for a decade) now ONE SLICE of mobile services, mobile money, alone, is worth than the ‘parent’ that gave birth to this industry - ‘fixed telecoms’ 38 years ago (Mobile industry was not born in the USA by Motorola and Ameritech, it was born earlier, in Japan, in 1979, launched by NTT of Japan. This blog deals with facts, not peddling myths).

So mobile payments alone are worth $600 Billion dollars. Now what technology is used for those money payments? Yeah. I told you so. Duh. Not Bitcoins, not Paypal, not Apple Pay. Mobile web payments (one of which is Paypal but they are not the biggest) and NFC payments (one of which is Apple Pay but they are not the biggest) form the ‘other’ category of how mobile payment happen. Only 12% of all mobile payments in the world. happened using these ‘other ways’. That includes the famous mobile wallets also, like Starbucks which you no doubt have often read about. Thats another way to do mobile payments - yes, via an App. That is also a TRIVIALLY SMALL slice of mobile payments! Because you know what ELSE is there in ‘other’? Do you even KNOW what the letters USSD mean? Yet India, world’s second largest country by population - and also second largest market by mobile industry now ahead of the USA (behind China) just announced last year, that their national mobile payment technology will include USSD. And go to a country like say South Africa, and USSD is a staple in mobile payments. Because USSD is not ‘universally’ used in mobile payments, but it has high national successes, I won’t waste my readers time on it here, but I want you to understand context. Hidden in that ‘other’ category are all your favorites like Apple Pay NFC, Starbucks apps Apps, Paypal eCash and yes other far more used technologies like.. USSD.

(And yes, I’m not here to tease you. USSD stands for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data. It is a standard tech feature of all phones and networks and it is best known for the various ‘hashtag codes’ you do with prepaid accounts - to find out what your remaining balance is, type in #22*46 on your phone, or whatever the code might be for your network. That type of technology is USSD. It is used for service delivery, games, as a media platform, even to deliver Wikipedia content etc; and yes, used for mobile payments. If you are ever speaking in say Kenya or India at a conference and you talk about Bitcoins and Paypal and Apple Pay - but don’t know what USSD even is - you wll be exposed as a clueless Westerner who is useless to that economy. USSD powers a major slice of the mobile ecosystem).

So if not Paypal or Apple Pay on NFC or some app (or this newfound weird letter combiation, USSD) What is bigger? In at number two... you readers will be floored because NOBODY else tells you this - is... WAP Billing. Yes. In year 2016, out of all $600 Billion dollars worth of mobile money transactions, the second most used tech was not NFC or internet payments or any other ideas that the West Coast clueless tech press likes to sing songs about. It is WAP Billing. And how much of it was WAP Billing? 33% !!!!! $198 Billion dollars worth of mobile payments worldwide - through WAP Billing. Payments that were collected through the telecoms operator billing systems (including prepaid of course) and most of those who use WAP Billing do not own a credit card!! They have no way of getting onto an iTunes account or to buy from the iOS App Store. But in most countries the operators offer their version of what Apple and Google do with their app stores - by letting local content owners bill via mobile - charge via mobile, send money via mobile - which then shows up on the phone bill (or is deducted from your mobile account). This can be VERY advanced, such as issuing you a ‘disposable credit card number’ on an exact payment account as a kind of prepaid voucher Mastercard. Enter those 16 digits and this expiration date, and then your payment will be accepted at the hotel. But you were CHARGED via your MOBILE account (prepaid account) and this type of payment is done either via Premium SMS or via WAP Billing.

Almost any mobile based subscription service that does not involve approval purchase message every time it is used - is done with WAP Billing. I know you are stunned because your tech writers were telling you about Bitcoins and you were at Starbucks and used their app and you love your Apple Pay on your iHandcuff sorry Apple Watch. Tomi Ahonen talks about WAP Billing why? Because one THIRD of all mobile payments are run through it !!!! Has nothing to do with Paypal style internet payments. WAP Billing enables single-click buying on mobile commerce sites. It is HUGE. How huge? WAP Billing powers an industry twice the size of global radio. WAP Billing powers an industry three times the size of the global videogaming industry. WAP Billing collects four times more money than ALL APP STORE REVENUES, combined! WAP Billing powers an industry six times bigger than the music industry. That is why while nobody else does - I keep harping on and on about this. $198 Billion reasons why. Duh. Come out of Silicon Valley’s silly bubble and taste the real world. Visit Nigeria visit Brazil visit Russia visit Indonesia visit Egypt visit Chile visit Malaysia visit the Ukraine. WAP Billing. Who knew? (My readers knew). But hey? Thats number two. Whats at number 1?

Haha its Premium SMS of course. That is how mobile money was BORN. Apple did not invent mobile money with Apple Pay haha (the first NFC mobile wallet was born in Japan invented by NTT DoCoMo a decade prior - and my readers knew; I was URGING Apple to deploy NFC and give us mobile payments back when many iSheep were insisting nobody will ever pay with their mobile wallet, imagine what a ‘risk’ it would be if you lost it hahahahahahahaha). How do I know its the first? Because I got to see NTT DoCoMo’s Felica and its NFC mobile wallet Osaifu Keitai - before it was launched commercially, in a private demo, as they wanted ‘the famous author’ to know if this technology and perhaps include it in a future book. NTT DoCoMo is of course also a reference customer of mine, so I have quite often been shown their coolest stuff before it is launched. I was literally the first person to write about Osaifu Keitai in the English language, I loved it that much. Now we see Apple Pay - is total iClone of NTT DoCoMo mobile wallet - down to Siri the digital assistant even.

PREMIUM SMS

So Premium SMS? How much of total global mobile payments went via SMS last year? $324 Billion dollars worth ie 54%, said Allied Market Research in January 2017. That is as fresh and as total numbers as you can get. That is explaining who is Toyota or Volkswagen in ‘mobile payments’ and who is ‘the London Black Cab car company’ haha. Did I tell you this? Did I repeatedly say ‘SMS, SMS, SMS’ on this blog, in my books, on Twitter, and in my presentations? Do I not include SMS payment discussion in EVERY mobile payment and mobile money and mobile banking and mobile commerce item I have ever done? But did your other tech writers even MENTION the largest platform in the world used for mobile payments, or were they talking about weird bicycles for tourists that two can peddle and hoping you might not notice that a BICYCLE is not an AUTOMOBILE. It does not ‘auto’-move at all, unless a human POWERS it...

So you say, ‘Tomi we know all about M-Pesa’. Haha, and if that is your response, boy did you need to read this article. M-Pesa is a glorious RECENT example of mobile payments, developed by my dear friend Susie Lonie who won an award for her work too. Susie spoke already at the world’s first conference on mobile commerce haha (where we first met, I did the keynote) which was half a decade before M-Pesa.

So yeah, good that you know what M-Pesa is. I was here writing about M-Pesa from literally its birth and have celebrated it year-by-year (and I have USED M-Pesa myself personally, have you?). But M-Pesa is a late bloomer. Mobile wallets via SMS existed years before M-Pesa. SMS based mobile wallets like M-Pesa were first deployed in the Philippines by the local telcos Smart and Globe. They are MILES ahead of Kenya, over there in the Philippines which has become the first country to do the interconnect of their mobile payments so you could send money from one mobile wallet on one network - to a friend on a rival network. In an American context, you could for example top up a Sprint customer by paying with an AT&T account. That kind of integration happens in the LEADING countries who have done it the longest. (Incidentally, I had USED Smart Money personally, in the Philippines, before M-Pesa was even born).

But the Philippines did not invent mobile PAYMENTS. That happened in Finland. Not by Nokia not by Sonera or Elisa or Angry Birds/Rovio haha. Mobile payments were first invented by .. Coca Cola. They deployed two vending machines as an experiment in Helsinki, one at the airport, to see if payments by Premium SMS might be a viable alternate payment method to paying by cash or credit card. Boy did it ever? Coca Cola reported a few years ago that adding SMS payments boosts the total collections per vending machine by 12%. Same machine. Same drinks. Same location. But 12% more sales if you add SMS to your payments. Because how many times have you been thirsty but then found you did not have the coins in your pocket haha. Apparently that happens 1 in 8 cases and its a global fact, because Coca Cola says this is true in all the regions. Same percent. Add SMS payments, get 12% more money out of the same vending machine. THIS is the magic of mobile. This is why I say Mobile is the ‘Magical Money-Making Machine’. Because nothing else changed in that Coca Cola vending machine, not its location, not its size, not its sounds, not its drinks selection, not its prices. They ONLY added SMS to payment options - and sell 12% more drinks!!!!

I was literally the world’s first person to talk about how you can pay by SMS in Finland. I made my first mobile payment when the only country that was even possible was Finland and only two machines were enabled to take the money (when did you make your first mobile payment?) And I was so honored to have Coca Cola’s Chief Marketing Officer Stephen C Jones write the Foreword to my fourth book (the signature book to this blog) Communities Dominate Brands. That is why I KNOW this part of mobile industry better than anyone else. Its because I saw its birth and its evolution. I know when something is not mobile payments (Bitcoins) or is a sideshow freak (Apple Pay, Paypal) and I can draw attention to the big matters when they arise (like NTT DoCoMo introducing Osaifu Keitai or Safaricom/Vodafone introducing M-Pesa). And I can point out the relevance of the trivial non-players like Apple Pay and Paypal. Now one last bit from Allied Market Research in January 2017 about mobile payments? Where is this market? Most of the money is spent in... Asia (duh). Where is your T-Dawg based? In Hong Kong. I’m not there in Silicon Valley’s silly bubble drinking iCoolaid, I live in the real world where it is happening, and I not only read about it, I see it and use it and experience it. I would be a little bit leery of taking advice about automobile development from a ‘car expert’ who lived in a country that didn’t have cars and everybody used bicycles haha... Silicon Valley is an exciting place but if you want to know what is happening in mobile money - then go where the money is! Show me the money! That means.. Asia. Come here to see it and how it is actually used!

Ernst & Young counted in November of 2016 that China had 410million  active users of mobile payments already. For contest, the USA’s total population is 340 million and some of them might actually not own an iPhone, or use Paypal, or drink Starbucks haha. Which is the Black Cab car company and which is Toyota or Volkswagen? So 410 MILLION active users of mobile payments ALREADY TODAY, and that is not Apple Pay or Paypal or Starbucks (or Bitcoin). Gosh, perhaps we NEED to read Tomi Ahonen’s blog article today...

MOBILE MONEY STARTS WITH.. COUPONS

I promised you case examples so lets do case examples. Not of Bitcoins. Case examples of SMS MOBILE MONEY. Haha. This is the reality. So for context, lets see how corporate-branded money started. The first way ever, that the print industry and the advertising part of it, figured out to literally ‘print money without a banking licence’, was the humble newspaper coupon (20 cents off for shampoo, expires March 31, 2017). The type that our old aunt still clips every Sunday from the newspaper and has a jar full that she always offers us, hey, I think I have a coupon for that (which turns out to have expired two years ago). Well, like anything mobile does it turbocharges it. Coupons today? electronic coupons are the big growth area, digital coupons. And the biggest part of that is .. mobile. And of mobile coupons, yeah. You guessed it. SMS of course. Juniper reported on the numbers last year. Mobile coupons are now worth $30B globally. What is the majority of all mobile coupon delivery method? It is not Facebook. It is not Whatsapp. It is not email. It is not Snapchat or Instagram. Its not Amazon or Paypal. This is not just the ‘largest’ among several. It is the MONSTER among lilliputs. Three out of every four mobile coupons in 2016 was delivered via one technology and that is... SMS!

If you follow my blog or read my books, you knew all about this. But did your tech writer with his or her recent article about ‘mobile payments’ even MENTION mobile coupons? Here’s one case of a mobile coupon. Finnair. Finnair invented mobile check-in 15 years ago. They have since evolved their system and originally it was only done on SMS, now it covers every conceivable tech and offers everything you could hope for in a mobile travel branded solution from an airline of course, from ticket sales to loyalty points. But what about a mobile coupon offer? As more than half of all of Finnair’s passengers have enrolled into their mobile service, and Finnair knows what you’re flying before you fly, they will do an instant, one-time upgrade offer, only on a first-come, first-served basis, only when there happens to be excess capacity - and starting with premium loyalty customers of course.

So, its the flight from Dusseldorf to Helsinki. Flight has closed, ticket sales counter is closed, only these 78 passengers will fly in this Airbus A320 to Helsinki today. There are 3 seats left in Business Class that are not sold. Because the plane is not full, Finnair has no reason to upgrade anyone into those Business Class seats. BUT.. It can SELL an upgrade.

Ticket sales counter is closed. The passengers are minutes from boarding the plane. They have gone through the security check already. How can we possibly ‘sell’ anything to these passengers? Its automatic, of course. We send them an offer. A coupon. We do it the only way that reaches every pocket of every economically viable consumer on the planet - including each of those 78 Finnair passengers in Dusseldorf airport. Remember this is not SPAM, we are not pushing at these customers anything they did not PREVIOUSLY agree to receive. They are our LOYALTY program members. And we had already previously asked them, are they interested in travel-related promotions and special offers. Only those who said yes, are included. We do not spam. So here it goes.

30 minutes before boarding commences, the 3 Platinum-level Finnair Plus loyalty program members feel their phones buzz. They receive the message ‘we have a few seats left in business class today on your flight from Dusseldorft to Helsinki. we noticed this time you are flying in economy class. Would you like to upgrade yourself to Business, because you are a Platinum level frequent flier, we will make you a one-time offer of 100 Euros for the upgrade that normally costs 500 Euros.’

It includes a ‘Click-to-buy’ link. One of the 3 takes the offer, and the system sends the new boarding pass to him, onto the phone, with his precious seat 2D in the front of the plane. 15 minutes later, the Gold Level frequent fliers receive a similar offer, but now at 200 Euro cost to upgrade. One takes the offer. Next the boarding starts, and as some Silver level Frequent Fliers take advantage of the fact that they are allowed to board early, even when travelling in econmy class, he suddenly notices his phone getting a message, and its the upgrade-offer (but now for 300 Euros). And out of the two dozen Silver level Frequent Fliers, the first to take this last seat, gets it and another was too slow and gets the message apologizing that he was not fast enough...

The same 78 passengers will fly on this Airbus A320 from Dusseldofr to Helsinki today, no matter what happened. They have paid their tickets, their luggage is stored, there is no way to try to sell them anything else. But an automated system can now extract MORE PROFIT from this group of passengers by moving a few from economy class to Business Class. And the consumers do it themselves, and they PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE.

This is PURE PROFIT for the airline. So do the passengers love this? 23% of all Finnair frequent fliers who have been offered a paid upgrade - have already used that facility at least once !!!!!!

This is the power of mobile. This is the power of mobile PAYMENTS. This is the power of SMS text messaging!!! This is a COUPON.

END OF HUMANS IN RETAIL? AIRLINES

So if Finnair started that revolution where is it headed now? Come to Asia and see. Air Asia, our largest low-cost airline has shown what is next for money. They have ended human check-in. At their largest hub in massive Kuala Lumpur airport KLIA-2 terminal there is no more human service for check-in. They discontinued human check-in. There are check-in kiosks. You can do check-in online. But most of the check-in is done... on MOBILE. Duh. How is the mobile boarding pass sent to you? Not by email. Not by app. Not by NFC. And not by SMS. It is sent to you via... MMS. Yes. The boarding pass is sent via MMS to your phone. And most consumers are blissfully unaware that this technology even exists on their phones, they just think its a pretty picture on that ‘text message’ that they received. They think it is an SMS-with-a-picture. It carries of course the QR code to offer the travellers unique boarding pass so that the ticket cannot be duplicated in some way. But back to mobile payments. THE END OF HUMANS at the cash register? It is coming. You saw it at KLIA, Air Asia is the first airline to have ended the human interface on Check-In and you have to have a mobile to get on the plane (or use a kiosk or go to an internet cafe, use the web version, and have that boarding pass then printed out if you want).

Mobile will kill cash. Mobile is already doing that in small ways, in many areas. I’ve reported on things like parking in Estonia (SMS) and bus tickets in Sweden (SMS) where you can’t do cash anymore but you can do mobile. Now .. an airline. Now it doesn’t seem that bizarre anymore, to be reminded that several countries are in a race to eliminate cash in our lifetimes - replaced - not by Bitcoins, not b Apple Pay, not by Paypal - but replaced by mobile money. As I wrote on this blog years ago Turkey was the first country to throw its hat into that ring.

But lets still stay on the mobile coupon just a little bit longer and have a sip of wine. Again, that logical evolution. From SMS to MMS. If you are doing a coupon, then do it properly and that means MMS. In Australia Cracka Wines will let you send a bottle of wine to a friend, delivered as a coupon to their phone. Via MMS. Friend picks up the wine at the store, at the check-in they just scan the code from the coupon and the wine is paid. Eesy-peasy. THIS is how it SHOULD be done. Any gift coupon or offer - gosh, that HAS to be mobile (and increasingly that moves from having been done on SMS to now doing it properly on MMS).  Its not just coupons that power mobile money. Immediately next after coupons, come the tickets. Juniper reports that in year 2016 worldwide a total of 11.5 Billion mobile tickets were delivered. Most were not movies or concerts or lottery tickets (even though those too exist on mobile). Juniper reports that the three largest groups of mobile tickets consumed today are for bus, train and airplane.

MORE THAN HAVE TOOTHBRUSH

Those who have followed me for a long time remember the toothbrush story. Cisco last year gave an update on global numbers. The planet has 7.4 Billion human beings who have 7.9 Billion mobile phone accounts active currently (107% global penetration rate across all humans alive, not just ‘household penetration’ or ‘adult’ penetration). This is no surprise to us, I was the first to report on these numbers. But that toothbrush number? Cisco mentioned that only 3.5 Billion humans (only 47%) live in a household with running water... That makes you pause, doesn’t it? Yes 4.4 Billion humans (53%) do not have running water at home (and I am not saying ‘water safe to drink’ haha, some areas do have running water which is not safe to drink and I am not talking about only the desolate areas of Republican-run states in the USA like in the town of Flint in Michigan) But seriously. More than half of the planet’s population does not have running water at home. Think about cooking, about cleaning, about the toilet, etc. And then toothbrushes too. Haha, we are far past the point of ‘more mobile phones than toothbrushes’. But lets show what mobile can do for our hygiene, in a positive way, via mobile (and today’s topic, mobile commerce haha).

INDIA SOAP

Then lets wash our hands. Lifebuoy is a soap brand. They did their ‘Wash Hands before Meal’ polite reminder to help sell soap. Its not to remind adults to wash hands, its to remind adults to TELL THEIR KIDS to wash THEIR hands (before meal time). And then it gets really really REALLY clever. So first, there is a target audience with a need. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan includes a daily fast (no eating). Then there is the eating period which is marked by something called Iftar. And then the weird bit - Iftar apparently starts at a different time every single day (don’t look at me, I didn’t invent this religion haha). No seriously, there is a ‘calendar’ that tells every day at what precise time Iftar commences (and you may start to eat after fasting all day and you are by now very hungry).  

So Lifebuoy knows first off, that may kids forget to wash their hands before the meal. And that dirty hands spread all sorts of diseases and parents are worried. So good timing. And Iftar is different every day. So they did an OPT-IN ad campaign, to offer free short video reminding of exact Iftar time every day, sent 5 minutes before Iftar starts. And it of course included a video to remember to wash hands before you eat. What was delivery mechanism you ask? YouTube? No. MMS. Yes, MMS can do short videos. And remember this is India, most people do not have smartphones. And much of the nation is not on high-speed networks. MMS is a nice short video platform for that need. And did this work? Lifebuoy increased market share 15% !!!!!!

They did not even include a link to SELL the soap. It was just ‘hand-washing reminder’. But with Lifebuoy branding - and helping with the exact timing issue of Iftar. BRILLIANT and did great help in boosting Lifebuoy brand preference among the Muslim segment in India.

ELECTRICITY AND CONNECTIVITY

Sorry, I got side-tracked with the old toothbrush story out of that Cisco update in numbers. There was a new number last year that Cisco gave us (or at least new to me). The number of people living in households without .. electricity. So 7.4 Billion people alive, 7.9 Billion mobile accounts are live, 3.5 Billion have running water, how many have electricity at home? 5.3 Billion (72%). And that means 2.1 Billion human beings live in homes with no electricity (28%). Gosh that does make one appreciate how lucky we are, those ‘rich’ enough to be reading this blog (or writing it). More than one in four humans still lives in so great poverty and so little convenience, they do not have a light bulb in their home to turn on the light at night - because their home itself is not connected to the electrical grid.

Now wait a moment, there, Mr Expert-Consultant Mobile Guru-man? You said mobile penetration rate was 107% but a quarter of humans live in homes with no electricity? That math does not square up! Ah, good point my dear reader. We have seen this phenomenon too, and met it in the mobile industry long before the other tech like personal computers, TV sets, radios or even electric light bulb industry bumped into this class of consumer. The answer is partly public opportunities to recharge, and very importantly also: the battery life. So increasingly various public places offer not just free WiFi but also free charging stations for mobile phones. I thought the airport in Nairobi Kenya was pretty clever with this a few years ago, where they made it a marketing opportunity, and had Samsung do the sponsoring of the free electrical charging stations. Then we do get the extent of human ingeniuity about it, from various recharging solutions from solar energy to diesel electricity generators to long-lasting battery power stations (with USB power connectors) to even the bicycle-pedalled phone recharging etc. I had a lovely portable spare battery pocket power USB gadget that was solar-powered. Like a spare battery in your pocket, but leave it at the hotel window for the day, when you come in to the room after the conference and your phone battery is nearly dead, and you need urgently a recharge but have to rush out with your colleages to those drinks, you pick up the fully-charged recharger, plug in the phone, put both in your pocket and by the time you next need your phone, its nicely recharged again. And all by solar power. And if you writer was not such a clutz, that battery recharger would not still be sitting at some hotel window in some forgotten country, still collecting solar power and wondering why is it no longer loved...

But yes, electrical power? Schools in Africa let students recharge phones while they sit in class - parents in areas where there is no electricity typically send their phones in with the kid, to get a full charge every few days (note, these are obviously the type of basic Nokia phones that have batteries that go on for many days). In Pakistan there is a wonderful story across the often-fought border, where some send phones from the village across the border, on the India side, where they don’t have electricity in that village, to the town on the Pakistan side, where there is electricity. And the phones are charged there and then sent back to India for those villagers. Because the mobile phone handset itself is so easily portable, and has a rechargable battery, that makes it possible to expand the reach of mobile far beyond the reach of electricity. But think about YOUR clients and customers. Can you serve them by for example providing free electrical charging right now? How much will that ‘hurt’ your total electrical bill? And how much greater utility will that give to your customers? Because all consumers use their mobile phones all the time and everywhere. Especially when they are shopping.

RETAIL AND MOBILE

A survey of 9,000 consumers in the USA by Connexity last year, found that 63% will use their phone INSIDE your store, to compare your prices to those they find elsewhere! And what about your OWN online store? 58% of consumers will compare YOUR in-store price, against you OWN online store price - while they are in your store. Gosh, why would you EVER have a different price online? Thats is BEGGING for your consumers to turn against you and hate you. Learn about mobile! Learn how to USE mobile. How you make more SATISFIED customers with mobile and how you drive foot-fall to your stores, with mobile, and how you bring SPECIAL value to your BEST customers with mobile - and your mobile sells ON YOUR BEHALF.

Martin Lindstrom offers a great example in his new book Small Data. In Switzerland the clothing store chain Tally Weijl noticed that teen girls would regularly use their phones to share clothing opinions while in the store. So for example when deciding what to buy, they’d snap pictures of the various outfits and post onto their Facebook page and ask friends for opinions, etc. And without attempting to become Switzerland’s answer to Facebook and try a massive retailing social media website launch, Tally Weijl figured a far easier, simpler, cheaper way to connect with those girls. They installed WiFi at their dressing room area, so girls could easily - and more importantly, without mobile network charges - connect and do this sharing of the pictures. We see that kind of development all the time, Hong Kong was one of the early countries for example where all local retail banks (as distinct from haha, private banks for the super-rich and commercial banks which Hong Kong is littered with) started to offer free WiFi in their lobbies. If you have to stand in line to see a bank clerk for some banking transaction, and that takes 15 minutes in the busy period of lunchtime say, then its a huge convenience if at the same time at least you can go surfing online - via WiFi and free. On your smartphone of course. The Hong Kong subway offers various spots of free WiFi too for the commuters as they wait for the subway train. Do we care about mobile when we’re hungry? UK survey by xAd last year found 51% of British consumers go to their phones before deciding which restaurant to go to.

EUROPEANS FAR AHEAD OF USA

And don’t look at that laggard USA for any gosh ‘leadership’ in mobile PAYMENTS. In October, Visa reported on their survey of European use of mobile payments in 19 countries last year and found that already 54% of Europeans are using mobile payments. If the global average is 20% for Industrialized World and Europe is at 54% then the North Americans and Australians are quite far behind, to make the math work out. But where do you go to learn about mobile payments in Europe? You’d think Britain (banking leader) or Finland (mobile payment launch country) and yes Visa said they are also high on the list but the two LEADERS in Europe may surprise you. They are Turkey and Romania. Ah, yes. Who talks about THOSE countries to you? Oh, my readers knew. Turkey, haha, I was again, literally the first person to write about Turkey’s ambitions to end cash, replaced by mobile money. I speak in Istanbul on a regular basis meeting with all sides of the mobile industry (and was just in Romania last Spring).

BUT 220 MILLION ONLINE STILL ON FEATUREPHONES

Yet we have to understand the global market. Opera released their latest count of their browser active users last year at 350 million users. And in the context of roughly 2 Billion mobile web users globally, that may seem like a relatively trivial number. The point some took out of their announcement is that 130 million people with smartphones use the Opera browser. What most pundits and analysts missed was the obvious corollary. It means 220 million people in year 2016 were active users of the mobile internet who DO NOT HAVE A SMARTPHONE. Yes you may well think every consumer has an iPhone or at least a Galaxy and a big touch-screen device on 4G and watches your ‘cool’ YouTube interstitial advertising. But about one in ten internet users who use the mobile phone to access the internet does so from a DUMBPHONE. What is known as a ‘featurephone’. And they often do not have even 3G connectivity. They often do not have touch screens. Their network coverage on 2G standard low-speed high-cost and often patch networks can be atrocious. Yet its their only way to connect to the internet and they are using it (happily). Did you test your online services on how they seem on a basic 2G dumbphone with a 2.6 inch screen that is operated on a KEYPAD and does not have touch-screen? All smart companies do this, they make sure all their websites are not only ‘mobile first’ optimized for mobile, but that they will work on very slow networks and very small screens even without touch-screen input. Yes, in Africa, India etc, that means even still supporting WAP the very rudimentary and rough ‘mobile internet’ in its first iteration that we rich nations have moved beyond a decade ago.

MAGICAL MEASUREMENT MACHINE

I have been teaching in my workshops and seminars for ages, that Mobile is the Magical Measurement Machine. And we are seeing ever more smart uses of this ability. So consider Castrol motor oil. They developed a special oil to work with ‘Tuk-Tuk’s that run all day in hot climates, to keep those engines running better. They are 3-wheel motorcycles that are omnipresent in most Asian cities. Now how do you MARKET to the segment of ‘commercial’ drivers who do ‘truck delivery’ services using a Tuk-Tuk? A nasty job involving all day of sitting in the polluted air of megacities, in the noise and exposed to the elements, and rushing from one job to the next. Like taxi providers but even less glamorous. Castrol noticed in India that they cluster at night, park in the same areas (where Tuk Tuk parking is free, obviously) and near their homes (so far from the expensive city center locations).

But not everybody parking there is a Tuk-Tuk truck driver. Then they monitored the traffic of all phones that spent their nights within walking distance of these big Tuk-Tuk parking lots. Now they had the initial target group. Next, they weeded out non-drivers. Simple test: do you SMS during the day. Anyone who did a lot of texting, is not driving a Tuk-Tuk and those were eliminated (yeah some do it, but this is rough segmentation work, follow me on the logic, don’t get caught in the argument on the one exception). Out of remaining mobile phone numbers who sleep in walking distance of that parking lot, they did a week-long monitoring of their movement. If mobile phone did not move from that zone - its not a Tuk-Tuk. Eliminated all the housewives and others who lived in walking distance who otherwise were not SMS users. Next look at movement pattern, if the person moved on the same pattern every day - went to work in the morning, came back in the evening, clearly used a bus, sat at an office all day. Thats not a Tuk-Tuk driver. A ‘van delivery’ type of driver is like a taxi-driver by pattern - all day driving, and in random patterns. Very quickly they had the sub-sample of all who were within walking distance of that parking lot - and who also drove all day.

Now they launched their ad campaign as a voice ad - voice ad that a driver can listen to without having to look at the screen (And with language issues - India gosh, how many hundred languages do they have) and literacy issues - not everybody can read - they made an ad offering airtime for the ad to be forwarded. But the ad only talked about benefits to Tuk-Tuk drivers who drive all day. These ads were placed in the parking lots where they knew the Tuk-Tuk drivers go to park. And because they had measured the total target audience, nobody could cheat the system by referring the ad to their mother, and get more airtime. Only those ads that reached Tuk-Tuk drivers would yield the airtime beneifts to those who shared.

But the kicker - of COURSE a sample of all Tuk-Tuk drives in a city, will know ALL OTHERs who work in that field. So very soon Castrol had achieved viral spreading of their voice ads to essentially 100% target market penetration... They reached 1.8 Million Tuk-Tuk drivers in India and Castrol sales.. up by 30% !!!!!!!!!!

This is the power of mobile commerce. This is the magic of mobile. This is HOW you do it. This is why we do mobile. This is why mobile money is inevitable. Mobile is the magic that merges advertising with .. MONEY.

CLICK TO BUY

And the ultimate merger becomes possible with Click-to-Buy. The merger of money and marketing will happen through mobile. Mobile is the magical money-making machine. So why wouldn’t every single advertiser go into using mobile? And mobile is the magical measurement machine, so anyone doing a coupon or offer will love the power of mobile, doing it. So lets see an example. In the USA, a digital music store ‘The Edit’ will have a typical type of music catalog like any music store from Amazon to iTunes (maybe a bit more smart, The Edit also does its music store via messaging including various messaging platforms including.. haha.. yeah, of course MMS !!!!) So you see the album cover art, the name of your favorite rock band, the songs on the album, the ratings by fans, etc etc. And what sits there on the bottom of the mobile page or MMS message? A ‘click-to-buy’ link! Buy instantly. Every single mobile advertising campaign should do ‘click-to-buy’. I wrote about click-to-buy literally in my books 15 years ago! But increasingly we see these now. Excellent. And imagine the power of ‘To buy it, reply YES’.


UPDATE - NUMBERS FROM RUSSIA 

This update paragraph added 19 Feb 2017. Our dear friend Dave Birch (David GW Birch the famed author of digital money books) was on Twitter about at the same time as I was writing this blog article. He Tweeted fresh numbers out of the three large mobile payment providers in Russia. His Tweet said that Yandex has 30 million mobile users on SMS based system; SberBank has 28.9 million users on SMS; and Alfa-Bank has 2.5 million on.. USSD. So that is the 'facts' part of this added paragraph. Now the 'analysis' part by me (not from Dave's Twitter feed haha, don't blame this on Dave). This is not everybody out of Russia's mobile payments opportunity. But it gives us some scale of the magnitude. We cannot add those numbers together to get a Russian total, because obviously some people have accounts in multiple systems but this does give us a range. Russian total mobile payments number is definitely more than 30 million, and on these 3 systems, is somewhere between 30 million and 61.4 million. A fair guesstimate would be that something like 45 million Russians use mobile payments on these three systems. And its mostly SMS with USSD also being used. Because this data came in right as I was posting the blog, I wanted to add this update to the blog for my readers and to thank Dave for sharing that info from Russia.

SMS VOTES

The power of SMS is not subsiding. Do not mistake the enormous growth of FREE person-to-person messaging on Whatsapp, for any kind of decline in the BUSINESS use of SMS as the planet’s only way to get into every pocket. Look at the Country Music Festival last year in the USA. They offered the massive live concert audience a chance to send requests to the DJ, for the music to be played between the live band performances. The audience could vote. Two ways to vote, via Twitter or SMS. And was there any interest in asking an audience at a rock concert of what should we play next? Gosh yes. 25% of the audience voted. Wow. Imagine that. Imagine a car race or football game or whatever audience event you arrange. Why NOT ask the audience to participate? And if you do, make sure you offer them the chance to do it with SMS. Don’t make them download your app. Thats silly. Let them use SMS. They will. And they will love you for it.

While we’re on music, lets look at the superdiva Rihanna and what she did. They offered a puzzle, via an app and series of videogame-music-video things. It was a game. If you managed to get through all 8 parts of the game, you received Rihanna’s brand new album totally for free - downloaded directly to your phone. 1 Million won the album (13 million played the game). But along the way, you heard 8 of her songs. For those who didn’t win the game - almost all are Rihanna fans - they heard part of the music - and I am certain a good bunch of those went and bought the album. And all were engaged with their favorite artist far more deeply than any other album launch ever before. This is the power of mobile. We can do magical things. We can do radical new things never done before. And every time we can include the ‘click to buy’ links.

TAXES AND SMS

Submit your tax return in 5 seconds? So now many countries will already let you file your taxes via mobile (that was invented in Norway). We have a cool development from just across the mountain chain in Scandinavia. Sweden not only lets you send in your tax return by mobile, they will send you the summary of their official government tax office automated count of your taxes, that they will accept as your full and final tax return if you want. That pre-filled tax form comes in the form of an SMS text message. Here is the truly amazing part. You can file your total annual tax return legal requirement - by replying ‘yes’ and you are done. The appropriate final documents will arrive in your home snailmail at a later date (need no further action like signatures and sending documents). If you are a devious Bond Villain with tax-dodges in every Trump-friendly nation, then perhaps this is not for you. But if you are a regular Swedish salary-earning worker, or a student or housewife or retired, you have no exceptional tax filing needs. A simple calculation of ‘this is what I earned’ and based on the tax table and various deductions ‘this is what I was supposed to pay in taxes’ and you see how much taxes were already deducted from your income, and there you go. Its a couple of hours of paperwork for most taxpayers if they have their documents in reasonably good order. But the government already has all this info. So to stop the normal taxpayers from doing hours or pointless accounting, the tax office precalculates the tax rate (many countries do this already) and now the coolest part - that proposal arrives via SMS and you can accept it by responding ‘yes’ this is what I agree is my tax return. And assuming you don’t have to make any new payments for taxes due, haha, at that point, you are done for the year. Filing your taxes in 5 seconds, tack so mycket Sverige! That is brilliant. Jattebra, heja Sverige.

EXCLUSIVE PERSONAL PREVIEW OFFER

Ok, most will not want to end on a note of celebrating the taxman. So lets go for something at the other extreme. The personal consierge sales rep. Nordstrom is a premium retail chain in the USA. They send exclusive personalized recommendations to their loyalty program members. This way loyal customers are first see the new colors, new fashions, new designs first, before they go to the shelves, and haha, yes ‘click to buy’. The offers are sent as ‘picture text’ messages. (ie its MMS but Nordstrom doesn’t want to confuse its clients). The customer can simply respond by SMS and the store has your size already, they will keep one for you to come pick up from the store, or they’ll send it to your home. They have your payment preference stored so they’ll charge you by whatever is your preference to pya. This is the POWER of how to sell by messaging. And the power of mobile payments. And how much MMS can accelerate sales compared to SMS. We learned in December that Nordstrom now makes 20% of all of its sales through its online stores and 67% that is via mobile messaging; all other digital sales combined, online and mobile, apps and web, when all added together, form one third of the online store sales. Duh. What did I say?

BRANDED CURRENCY

So where is this going next? I think we should keep an eye on the country that launched mobile - Japan - and the company that invented mobile payments - Coca Cola and perhaps what Coca Cola Japan is doing. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. So Coke Play. This takes the loyalty program like Finnair Plus, adds the gamification we saw with Rihanna, and the integration with other payment platforms like in the Philippines and voila! A Coca Cola currency. This idea was first deployed by Coca Cola in South Korea. You earn Coke Play points when you buy Coke products. You also earn Coke Play points by watching their ads. Any one ad can only deliver one set of points, but for example if its a poster-size ad on a bus stop, if you see ANOTHER bus stop with that same Coke Play ad, you can go THERE to get another top-up to your Coke Play points. (see the Gamification part? - explore the various Coke ads across all media - be rewarded for that).Then the redemption. Buy Coke products, duh. Drinks. But also other branded stuff like T-shirts and hats. Ok that is to be expected. Until... you do the integration bit, and suddenly Coke Play points can be used... to buy OTHER things from OTHER providers! Like to pay for airtime on your phone (telecoms services) or buying songs to download onto you phone, or to watch a movie on the phone. .WOWZIE !!!! This is the FUTURE. Coke has in fact launched a branded currency. It is a currency because it works beyond Coca Cola's own domain of its own products. They are LITERALLY printing money !!! Make money by making mobile money !!! Thats whats happenin' in Japan, dudes and dudettes. Yeah. Gotsta luv Mobile. Oh, Coke Play? You can also earn points by dancing (they have a dance contest too, best dance routines as voted by viewers, earn Coke Play points.. yeah. This is EXACTLY the way mobile should be - Fun, Personal, Playground). Are you learning anything today? Was this blog worth your while? Tell all your friends to stop reading about Bitcoins and come here to study what REAL mobile money looks like!

TWO AND A HALF BEES

How big is mobile payments today? Back to Deloitte’s global survey from last summer. If we take the population-adjusted average of what they found (20% in rich world, 47% in Emerging world) we get an estimate of 42% of all consumers on the planet are already today using mobile payments. What is the proportion of kids too young not to be counted as consumers, to remove, I am not enough of a sociologist to know the exact number but in round terms, that gives us 2.5 Billion active unique human beings already today using mobile payments worldwide. Larger than Facebook. Active users. Most of them use SMS, the second most used mobile payment method is WAP Billing. I showed you how to you can get into the mobile money game, and make money with mobile. If you want to read an actual book about Mobile Money that does NOT waste your time on Bitcoins haha, or Apple Pay but has 50 CASE STUDIES of the success of mobile payments, then go get my Pearls Vol 3: Mobile Money. At 10 Euros, its about the value going in understanding this, the most dynamic part of the global economy this year, 2017. Why would you read anyobody else’s book first? I was there to literally see the start, and I was the first to report on the origins and the evolution of mobile payments. I will not mislead you with nonsense stories like Paypal. Almost every case study in the ebook is valid today for you to deploy, copy, take advantage of. See more about Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 3: Mobile Money here.

And then one more plug. As Mobile Pay is growing, it has now reached the size it no longer can be kept as one slice of a chapter in my Almanac series. In the brand new 2017 Almanac, Mobile Money will have its own chapter and series of tables & charts and analysis. That ebook is not yet out, it will be in some days, but as always, just before the new Almanac comes out, I make a special deal with the current edition. See the 3-for-1 bundle and 4-for-2 bundle offers here. For literally the planet’s best stats and numbers on the Mobile Payments slice of the mobile industry, now in February 2017, you need the brand new TomiAhonen Almanac 2017. Be the first to get it (out in a few days). See more here.

 

Comments

[Winter]

@Wayne Brady
"We do have credit cards and mobile payments will not be delivered by SMS in America like in Zimbabwe. "

I wonder whether the SMS mobile payments in Africa are as expensive and prone to fraud as the US card system? I could hardly believe so.

It is amazing how the US are able, time and again, to build mediocre to bad infrastructure for record expenses.

Be it a mess of mobile standards, a misserable phone market, horribly expensive, sub standard internet, an expensive, totally insecure credit card system, or the most expensive health care system in the world that does not even give coverage.

One cause of these repeated failures would be the inability to learn from mistakes.

As the proverb says: Stupid people learn from their mistakes. Smart people learn from other people's mistakes.

The US does not even learn from its own mistakes.

[I'm still using a Nokia Lumia]

You can pay for google play and other stores via carrier billing.

[Winter]

Here is an article about Kenia

Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?

A convergence of factors, some of them accidental, explain Kenya's lead
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-18

[Per "wertigon" Ekström]

In my country, some laws were enacted that basicly made SMS payments useless for most purposes.

So yes, SMS is a wonderful way to pay... Just not here. :(

[Abdul Muis]

http://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/almost-half-mobile-users-still-talking-texting-finds-new-gsma-mobile-engagement-study/
Almost Half of Mobile Users Still Only Talking and Texting, Finds New GSMA Mobile Engagement Study

The GMEI report published today offers a number of insights based on the latest research:

* South Korea, Qatar and the US were the three highest-scoring markets in terms of mobile engagement
* Traditional SMS is still used more frequently than IP messaging in several mature markets, including France and the US
* ‘Millennials’ are not necessarily more engaged mobile users than older generations; in markets such as South Korea, more than a quarter of smartphone users are ‘baby boomers’ (aged 51-69)
* There are some markets, such as Myanmar, where smartphone ownership is relatively high but user engagement is low, due to digital illiteracy and a lack of locally relevant content
* There are several African countries with high mobile user engagement in financial services; for instance, in Kenya and Tanzania, around four in every five adult mobile phone owners use their phones for mobile money services
* More than 70 per cent of smartphone users globally watch free online videos on their phone (e.g. YouTube), and one in two smartphone users watch or replay live TV programmes on their device
* More than 70 per cent of smartphone consumers use their device to research information about products and services, but only one in two use it to order and purchase goods
* There exists a gender gap in mobile internet usage in several markets. In India, for example, female mobile phone owners are 43 per cent less likely to use mobile internet services than males

Full report: https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/research/?file=e4549aeda553ac832ff9126c7d6c0861&download

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Wayne, Winter, I'm, Per & Abdul

Wayne - thanks. Haha yeah I have to do 'sometimes' these articles that don't discuss the handset market share race, eh? Its a huge industry, 1.8 Trillion dollars in value and handsets are only a quarter of it. So yeah. M-Pay now so big, will get its own chapter in the Almanac for 2017. Also good point about talking about what your readers are interested in, yes, domestic US tech is full of various solutions that then don't become global standards but rather become dead-end paths in tech. And that's not unique to the USA, haha, many tech races have that phenomenon (just look at Minitel in France haha). And I never thought of it in that way, that yes, this gives me quite a nice opportunity to talk about the global view with very little actual competition...

Winter - haha good points and I agree. A mobile related comment on how archaic is the US banking system. The US banking system still uses printed paper cheques. So consumers like you and me, would get a 'check book' issued by the bank and you write on the check the amount of money you want to pay, and you send (or give personally, hand to hand) that check to whoever you want to pay - like say the electricity bill for your home. And the banks then process this ridiculous archaic method of payments - with incredible delays and huge costs - as the PAPER is being processed. The check has to be physically written by the consumer, paper and pen, to send the money. The check has to be physically delivered (ie by the Post) which adds two days to the payment delivery. Then someone at the receiving end (low-level accountant) opens the envelope to discover the check, who made the payment, and processes it as money sent in to that company. It is not real money (yet) that same check has to be processed onwards TO THE BANK. So that company (say electricity company) now has to take the physical check and mail it to the bank. In reality today this is all automated and a scan of the check is sent to the bank. But note - the bank has to verify there is money in that account and approve the payment (else the 'check has bounced'). And yet more systems keep track of whose money was deducted from which account, send to what account - and then do this across all the banks, etc... Any one human error along the way - spelled the name incorrectly - will cause delays to the system.

Well, one, gosh. Idiots. Get with the program. We in Finland had abandoned checks in the consumer banking business in the 1970s and went to FAR more efficient electronic banking methods.

But two - the mobile angle. Because checks are still being used, the USA has that peculiar phenomenon where banks 'innovated' with cameraphones - that you can take pictures of checks that have been paid to you - and process the payment by sending in the image of the check, via mobile instead. Faster at that stage (and the bank doesn't need to do the opening of the envelope and scanning of the check). This DOES open up some chance of fraud with forged checks (but that existed before also) but because the money is not credited to your account until it has 'cleared' from the issuing bank and their accounts, this type of scam would typically not run very long if you tried to create fake checks haha. But yeah, using cameraphones for banking to scan checks. Nice. But why are you still using checks in the first place (dumb!).

I'm - yeah, true. In many countries but not all. That is of course mostly WAP Billing (as I discussed in the article). And here's the kicker. So some of the big app revenues reported by Apple and Google in their app stores - were actually processed via WAP Billing ie carrier billing and some of the wallet funds and payments counted in their mobile wallet solutions - actually would be double-counted as the original money was taken in via WAP Billing haha. The non-WAP part of app stores (and to a modest degree also Apple Pay etc) is less than what is the aggregate part. If we wanted to be pedantic, then it would take out a fraction of what was small single-digit number of the total mobile payments slice anyway. But thanks yeah. Carrier billing is used in many but not all countries to allow payments to app stores.

Winter - thanks. Although did you notice, that is quite an old article by the Economist. I do remember that article, very good.

Per - alas yes, some countries have silly laws :-)

Abdul - Thanks for the link! That is once again excellent data from GSMA, they do a lot of it and this is their first-ever global consumer survey. They did 56 countries that cover 70% of the planet's population (all the big countries are there). All 6 inhabited continents. Truly global survey of 56,000 consumers interviewed (one of largest surveys in mobile industry history). And very VERY rich in the findings they discovered. And yes, haha, top-line - even smartphone users still use more SMS than they use apps or mobile web. Even smartphone users yes. Even smartphone users also use more SMS than various OTT Instant Messaging services like Whatsapp. Haha, even smartphone users yes, and we know, half of all mobile phones are still dumbphones - all that can do SMS. I urge all to go download that report (get the 'full' version) its free.

Thanks for the comments, keep them coming

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Abdul Muis]

A fans concept of Nokia 3310

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT97z9r98uI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcuBPNvknyY

[Hilkka]

More details leak from India: Nokia 3310 will use refreshed version of Symbian.

https://tekniikanmaailma.fi/elektroniikka/villi-huhu-3310-tajunnan-rajayttava-kaunis-kayttaa-symbiania/

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Thank you Hilkka

Wow, wild rumor yes. I just posted the link - and thanked you - on Twitter

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Ok lets talk Symbian

Thank you Hilkka and wow, what a rumor.

First, to all non-Finns reading this. The magazine Hilkka quotes is 'Tekniikan Maailma' which is the gold standard for technology magazines in Finland. The only Western equivalent in English Language would be 'Consumer Reports' in the USA, as TM does the most trusted and 'scientific' comparisons of all sorts of tech from cars to microwave ovens. It comes out I think once every 2 weeks or so (or used to, back in the day when I still lived in Finland 2 decades ago haha) and this is definitely the 'most trusted' tech source of any Finnish publications.

Secondly its a rumor and troubling to me, when I went to the link TM provided to their 'source' - a news site in India - that had half the story TM mentions ('mindblowingly beautiful design') but does NOT mention Symbian. So the way I read it, the rumor is 'stronger' on the issue that the new 'retro' 3310 would be a strongly revised design - similar to how new Mini car, or new VW Beetle were resembling the basic aspects of their namesakes but in a modern interpretation. This to me makes far more sense than if the 3310 were to be a relaunch of the 20 year old phone haha (physically). And then the oval shape makes sense, Nokia was 'into' elliptical shapes a lot and a 'retro' Nokia design approach would be to depart from any Stephen-Elop Lumia-Windows visual appearance, and thus the old trusted Nokia oval/elliptical shapes makes sense.

If you are on Twitter, I just posted a picture of a screen-shot from me speaking on the Nokia DVD promoting 3G, where there is a concept phone Nokia 3G handset in the background, and its one of those elliptical shapes we saw a lot around year 2001 from Nokia PR. Actual phones didn't turn out quite that 'exotic' in their appearance, they turned out quite 'square' bricks in the end (with a few exceptions).

So the 'mindblowingly beautiful' handset in elliptical design and coming in tons of colors and priced in a 'below US $44 price point' parts of the rumor - those are in the India tech magazine original article too. What TM magazine adds, what is not in the original India article (or may have been in the original, but since perhaps edited out as a mistake....) was the Symbian issue. THAT is interesting.

I'll do that in a separate comment now

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Tomi T Ahonen]

What would be the prospects for SYMBIAN?

First, for a CHEAP smartphone (especially one not using a touch-screen) Symbian is VERY well suited. IF really all you want is some basic internet access to Facebook, and very modest suite of basic 'smartphone' functionality for the camera, messages, media player, file storage, and the ability to install some very basic apps - yeah. Symbian WOULD work (well). This was the original plan back before Windows. Nokia was headed to a fully touch-screen run smartphone world on the MeeGo OS, but Symbian was to live a long transition-period to bring the lower-cost phones into the fold, and eventually then the lower-end smartphones would be migrated to the 'low end OS' on Linux, as a cousin to MeeGo, which was to be Meltemi. This was the plan BEFORE Elop started. Symbian was already then on its way out, and its primary purpose after year 2010, was to become the low-end mass market basic smartphone OS, while the flagships and then premium phones would get to run on the new powerful MeeGo OS. (And all apps would be sold in the Ovi store, and all Nokia developers could use the Qt developer tools to develop once for all different Nokia OS platforms - as well as for Blackberry, Android etc).

So it may seem ludicrous to think 'Symbian, today'? But its not THAT far out, if the intent is lowest-end cheap smartphones. As you recall, I suggested Nokia should prepare this generation of 3310 buyers for the eventual move, where their NEXT Nokia phone will be a smartphone on Android...

Second, Nokia owns the OS. It has/had the competence to use it. The Symbian OS was DESIGNED and DEVELOPED to be a smartphone OS (with the help of many of the best minds in the world, its roots go back to Ericsson's OS for its smartphones; and Symbian powered the super-'featurephones' of Japan back when only Japan did NFC mobile wallets and had digital assistants like Apple's Siri today). Symbian by year 2010 had all its faults fixed, even eventually its lacking parts in touch-screen operation. But thinks like alarm clocks haha, things like security on the screen, things like display, the clock, things like folders for files, all that kind of stuff - what Apple spent YEARS trying to figure out - Symbian had fully fixed seven years ago - and Windows managed to mess up still in its launches and relaunches in the next years (101 Faults etc).

It is NOT a modern OS. It was NOT designed 'from the ground up' to be a touch-screen OS. But as I suggested, the 3310 should not come with a touch-screen, it should be optimized to run on T9 for all those users who hate touch screens and who love their old Nokia featurephones/dumbphones. BUT it COULD run Symbian, even with a keypad entry (clumsy) way of using the internet and apps.

Now APPS.... Tizen from Samsung is struggling to get any kind of app catalog up and running. Symbian HAS an ancient catalog of apps that mostly have been abandoned - but in some COUNTRIES where the OS was very strong (and often where the language issues also matter - haha like India) there is a modest and still semi-viable app ecosystem. And a bunch of developers who DO have the Symbian skills. And they've found a way to make a little bit of money in that local environment with their own language and perhaps own alphabet and local currency - which often Nokia had also arranged carrier billing to support - its like a 'mini Apple App Store' that still survives in a small corner of say Bengaluru haha. Why kill it? A local accountant uses that whatever-local-accounting app that runs on Symbian on the old Communicator that the boss still uses and the app serves a dozen old Nokia Symbian smartphones for the accountants or whatever.

That ecosystem is not big by any means. But it has tens of thousands of developers with thousands of apps that are still live, that are almost-exclusively only on Symbian. In probably two dozen countries like Indonesia and Ghana and Romania. But THAT means there is a significant splintered market where in a few countries the 3310 - if it ran on Symbian - could become the 'must buy now' phone haha. Especially if it also was dirt-cheap and simple to operate.

BUT MORE LIKELY is that the story was a misunderstanding. That someone talked about S 30 OS and someone else thought that means Symbian (because if I remember correctly, S 40 was categorized at some point as being Symbian? My readers who know this better, please correct me if I'm wrong. Symbian seemed to be S 60 as its primary family in the Nokia OS platform classifications).

And its possible that SOME apps can be installed onto the new 3310 and those apps even could have some commonality with basic Symbian - so it could be that this phone could take some Symbian apps haha. We really have to wait and see.

Now could it be a designed and intended Symbian 'play' and experiment. Gosh yes it could be. Nokia owns the rights to the OS, nobody else wants it, there IS some remnants of an ecosystem left, in those countries where Symbian was the stongest in the end - ie Africa and some poorer countries in Asia. Gosh it WOULD get a ton of attention haha. And then the early sales of a dumbphone/basic-basic-rudimentary-smartphone but capitalizing on the buzz of the 'Return of the 3310' could propel Symbian into a brief return as the 3rd bestselling OS in smartphones in the world. Would not take many million quarterly sales to hit that level today haha. And while Symbian will NEVER become a major platform again globally haha, no chance of that - it COULD help the early buzz around the 'Nokia comeback' story. And be a really poignant reminder of just how totally Elop messed Nokia up with Windows (helping further fuel the damage that Microsoft continues to carry about that failed OS project).

Me? Do I think this part of the rumor will happen. Gosh no. I think its a wild rumor and fantasy - but I'd yes LOVE it to happen and for me to be wrong.

That said, since I first wrote about a possible 3310 return - I really now do hope they do it, the more I thought about it, the more I like it as one piece of HMD's and Nokia Brands (and Foxconn's) strategy to get back into the game. Can you imagine how much it will sting over at Samsung and Lenovo and LG and Sony when they try to get the headlines with their latest smartphones - if the lead story out of MWC Barcelona is.. a Nokia DUMBPHONE returning from the grave, a 20 year old phone haha.

PSPS I used to carry that phone as my second phone (Nokia Communicator as primary phone) and in some of my public presentations, I'd show the two phones at some points, playing with the idea that some carry two phones - and then at some point later in the presentation I would THROW the 3310 at the wall to the side of the stage...

In the best instances that drew a gasp from the audience. I didn't throw MY phone. Nokia had a PR toy, a 'stress ball' in the shape and color of exactly the 3310. So it was a rubber phone. And like a good magician haha, I switched the real phone and replaced it with the rubber phone - and then threw the RUBBER phone of course.. Sometimes it clearly bounced and the audience knew immediately that it was a fake. Sometimes they didn't know and I'd later reveal in the presentation walking up to pick it up, that no, this is a rubber mock-up...

Haha, the 3310. Memories..

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[E.Casais]

"because if I remember correctly, S 40 was categorized at some point as being Symbian?"

Not by Nokia; only S60 was Symbian.

However, in the late stages of Nokia's demise, when Elop was strangling Symbian and letting S40 wither on the vine after recasting it as Asha, there was growing confusion in the market about what was what. At some point, I even saw the catalogue of an electronics retailer advertising one of the later Nokia feature phone models as running "Symbian S40".

Regarding an even temporary rebirth of Symbian, forget it. In its last iterations, the OS had become very much tied to a specific hardware platform/SoC from Texas Instruments -- which no longer exists. And the OS developers are gone. Porting it to a new phone would require a massive techno-archaeological endeavour.

If the new 3310 is to be a basic phone in the $40 range, then it is a safe bet that it will run S30+.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Thank you E

That was the level of tech opinion I was hoping to hear... :-)

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Johnson]

Tomi: sorry, repeating myself here, already posted on another one of your blogs. Very interested to read how you see the clear but still early trend around privacy and security in mobile.

Smartphones record pretty much everything imaginable nowadays: location, contacts, messages / communication, sensors, cameras, microphones, fingerprints... treasure trove for anyone interested, just pick your three letter agency for example.

Some conspiracy theorists even say Meego was killed as a treat to this agenda, haha. True or not (probably the latter), all modern OSs are US based and clearly collecting a lot of data and metadata, retained in huge facilities across US. With exponentially growing storage capacity, computational power and artificial intelligence, the are soon very little privacy left.

The rest of the world seems to be looking for alternatives.

In my view, Nokia may have the perfect opportunity to differentiate as a privacy minded player, not least due to its Finnish roots. This could be ramped up relatively fast through cooperation with the security and privacy front runners f-secure and SSH, who also happen to be Finnish. Nokia could build compelling USPs through security services on top.

In addition, with a little coordination and visionary commitment with/from the government and legistlators, Finland is in a position to become the switzerland of world's data. The classic Harvard business cluster potential waiting for someone to connect the dots. Nokia would of course be one of the primary beneficiaries.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Johnson

Hey, I remember the question too. I remember I was at least in the process of answering you, but may have been one of those airport-rush situations that then the comment never got finished..

So yeah. Great points and ideas. First off, data.

Mobile is the Magical Measurement Machine. It is the most complete data collector of human behavior and most of the data a modern phone is capable of collecting today (without the owner ever knowing) under normal behavior, without fancy spyware, is phenomenal. For example in Asia I think it was Bangladesh, could be India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, roughly that area in SEA, one local operator was able to detect with about 95% accuracy who is illiterate (illiteracy still a big problem in that part of the world). Obviously these skew heavily to older women who never got to go to school.

Anyway, without 'spying' on them as in listening to their calls or reading messages or facebook and with no cookies installed etc, just by the TRAFFIC PATTERN of the phone user, they could detect almost perfectly who were illiterate (then were looking for ways with the government to bring educational tools to those parts of the country to help that type of citizens, without embarrassing them on their phones, obviously - hey, we KNOW you can't read!)

I have a ton of the various Magical Measurement Machine stories from measuring trees with cameraphones, to capturing music and turning it into written musical notes - mobile is a Magical Measurement Machine.

Now turn that into spyware. Gosh the ultimate spy device. There are increasingly stories now where partners in couple-situations (marriages, open couples) use some type of spyware on their partners. Etc. And then there is government spyware which goes into a whole other atmosphere. And there is the various 'marketing' oriented spyware, some less abusive than others. What I preach in my workshops is 'Don't Spam, Don't Spy; Ask Permission and Satisfy' - that is long term best sustainable business model for digital and mobile interactivity but it is NOT anywhere near the majority view far less any kind of consensus view of how to proceed with consumer data.

Now on 'privacy vs security' - if you haven't read it you should read Tony Fish's excellent book 'My Digital Footprint'. That is an eye-opener to understand, that privacy is a totally differnt issue to security. There is overlap but you can have one, or the other, or both, or neither. They are not 'opposite sides of the SAME coin'. So I won't go into a lecture on Tony's topic, if you are not familiar with this and if the above was not 'obviously true' to you, then please look into Tony's writing, he has a lot in the public domain, and I urge you to go read his book too. Paperback, won't kill your book-buying budget haha.

That said. What we CONSUMERS hold most dear, is essentially useless data for 'mining' consumer information. So whatever is in the government file about us. Our birth date and place. Our address, our marital status, our educational level, our name. That kind of information is regularly stolen because it can be used to gain access to FINANCIAL data like bank accounts. But as DATA, it is pretty well useless to 'mine'. Useless in a modern context, it WAS useful in the previous century when nothing better was available. So, for example. We may know that I live in X neighborhood in Hong Kong. We may make an 'educated guess' ie ASSUMPTION about the 'affluence' of the person who lives at that address. And it may be correct. So take my name, Tomi Ahonen. Tomi is a boy's name in Finland. But Tomi is a girls' name in Japan. It could be that Tomi Ahonen living in Hong Kong is a man, he could also be a woman. Now, at that address, this 'Tomi Ahonen' COULD be the 'owner' of that address, and 'rich' haha, or it could be the MAID who works there, ALSO at the same address!!! See where address (and name) can immediately bring chaos to a beautifully constructed demographic system of data-mining.

So take me and my gender. My passport says I'm a man. I was born a man. But what if I secretly have a desire to become a woman and I've started to take hormone therapy and am in the process of getting soon a sex-change operation. Again, an extreme example yes, but if you go by DEMOGRAPHIC data, you get this kind of error all the time. The person who technically owns the car, doesn't drive it anymore because he 'lent' it permanently to his girl friend. And his home address - he doesn't live there anymore, he has had a breakdown in his marriage and lives now .. with his girlfriend. Etc.

Now. If we ASK the consumer what he wants or does, we are LIKELY to get far more accurate info than if we try to spy on him/her. BUT again, Mobile is the Magical Measurement Machine - mobile will still get the BEST data, even in flawed situations out of any case of trying to spy on someone. Like say... the unfaithful husband. If we track where is MOBILE is, we will soon find that he no longer sleeps at his home address, he is sleeping at the address of some unmarried woman that apparently goes to the same office every morning in the same car...

So yeah. HUGE opportunities and like with any tech, its both for good and bad. Now I'll post this and continue

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Johnson

So yeah. Thats the world of today. That will change EXPONENTIALLY when we add mobile wallets, our voting behavior, our home keys, our car keys, our public transport pass, and all the consumer loyalty program cards etc, onto the mobile. In the next decade it will be our driver's licence and our passport and the amount of data the mobile will be exposed to - and potentially can collect - is gargantuan.

What to do with that? Well, I think the ship has somewhat sailed on that - in that the key is the OS. That info went to Google. They won the info wars and they are the only brand that gets to about 90% of all human pockets by year 2025. And Nokia's chances to take say 1/3 of that via its own OS strategy from a decade ago - that has been totally squandered and that is gone. Even Apple can't get to the level Android can, but Apple will have at least its own 'rich people' data collecting machine around its particular type of iToys.

Outside of the OS layer, yes, there can be various security systems before it (in the network say) or on top of it (towards apps) and in particular there is likely a bigger opportunity in the enterprise space. There SHOULD be companies exploring all that already haha. As to a tech cluster, gosh, sounds like yeah F-Secure and Nokia and related buddies around like now Comptel etc, that would sound like something worth exploring.

Part of the problem is the 'pain point'. A business/enterprise especially a larger one, can understand the issue of risk, and have various IT systems to manage data breaches and intrusions and pursue safeguards. Consumers are oblivious to most issues until its usually too late. And then its mostly a 'virus' issue. A single virus happens to damage that given IT system and then someone spies on you or there is a ransomware incident or your data is lost and you have to reset your device etc. But consumers as a 'group' aren't really willing to 'bother' about their IT/tech security matters. So commercially it would seem like a pretty hopeless task of trying to sell something 'that is good for you' but one that most consumers then happily ignore.

That kind of thoughts 'immediately' jump into my mind haha...

How are our other readers - plenty who are involved in or near Finnish ICT tech companies. What do you think of Johnson's idea?

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[E.Casais]

I can envision the following approaches -- with HMD Android devices as the starting point.

1) HMD and partners (F-Secure...) harden Android for security, or more restrictively, for privacy, by adding the necessary layers of security software on top of the OS, and configuring it appropriately.

Difficult to implement.

a) Android is a sprawling system with lots of nooks and crannies;

b) it is being updated frequently, so that keeping it hardened for security in a compatible and up-to-date manner will be a challenge;

c) I suspect that many Android features that go counter to security or privacy cannot be disabled or restrained without violating the licensing terms.

Basically, this means implementing something like the Blackphone. It requires special skills and focus. It will not be cheap.

2) HMD and partners (F-Secure...) provide devices with tools and software for users to configure a better level of security or privacy -- a bit in the way that F-Secure provides a security suite (with firewall, anti-virus, etc) for PC.

Difficult to sell.

a) Most users will not know how to set up those tools -- if they are interested to do it in the first place;

b) the interactions with common cloud services (e.g. Dropbox) may not be intuitive at all;

c) this requires effort from users, but the benefits are intangible.

Basically, it ends up telling users that their Android smartphone is like a Windows PC and requires a similar overhead to keep it safe from the dangers lurking on the Internet. Not a seller.

3) HMD provides a line of basic phones (not even feature phones) without the wealth of storage and communication facilities of a smartphone, without the possibility of apps and downloadable software, with a no-frills OS that has none of the security/privacy concerns of Android.

HMD already does that, so it is covered.

[Johnson]

Thanks for the thoughts Tomi and E.Casais. Essentially your pessimism dooms us all into a dystopia way beyond what Orwell imagined. :)

Of course the OS war is already "lost". However, given the informed choice, I am sure anyone will pay a small premium for more privacy / security out of the box. I am sure attention to these issues, and hence consumers' knowledge and willingness to invest money and effort, will grow in the coming years. The crux is to make privacy / security effortless for the user and do it believably.

So option 2 (by E.Casais) might be more plausible. But I think the downsides should not be overplayed. Simple things can yield dramatic improvements. An integrated service bundle would really add value. Key here is is the word "integrated", out-of-the box experience. Because, just like pointed out by E.Casais and Tomi, users are lazy and security is hard. Something like Knox by Samsung?

Simple elements to the Nokia security bundle:

- "Always-on" VPN for example, is one service all would benefit from with little performance overhead. (F-secure already has a pretty good track record in this: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/01/majority-of-android-vpns-cant-be-trusted-to-make-users-more-secure/)

- Virtualisation and stronger app sandboxing might be another way to add security without breaking UX. Just make it easy.

- Security minded choices as preinstalled apps would also yield big results. How about something like Signal (Briar? Ricochet?) as the default messaging / calling / videoconferencing app?

- Leveraging the goodwill of being Finnish. Working with the Finnish government to strengthen data protection regulation etc.

Or maybe I am just naive. :)

[Winter]

@Johnson
Install and use Tor for browsing. But it is not just the OS. The very concept of mobile phones implies tracking users.

[Per "wertigon" Ekström]

@Wayne:

It's just too bad that Apple security means we have to trust a company only interested in two things;

1. World breaking profit
2. Locking in their users for even more profit

And yes their customers love it just like MS customers love it. Else why would they keep coming back for more?