“Nokia's Emerging Hope - Forbes” plus 1

Posted: 05 Nov 2009 01:55 PM PST

In late 2007 Jawahar Kanjilal was in his office in Singapore when he got a call from his boss in Finland. The honchos back at the handset giant's headquarters had a task for him. "He said, 'You need to go and seek out new service opportunities for Nokia ( NOK - news - people ) where none exist today,'" recalls the 40-year-old, still shuddering at the thought of it. "I asked him what exactly does he mean because [the brief was] like a white piece of paper."

Kanjilal didn't get any more instructions other than to target small towns and suburbs and create services. His boss said: "'Beyond this I can't tell you anything because it's your role to go figure that out now.' I started sweating because I didn't know what to do," Kanjilal says with a drawn-out laugh. "It was too wide a mandate. At that point there was only me. I was employee number one. I had to build a team and create a new service."

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His mandate came with a promotion to run Nokia's new emerging-market services division. And it came as the winds of change were sweeping through Nokia, which boasts annual revenue of $75 billion and employs 126,000 in more than 150 countries. Since mid-2007 Nokia has been evolving into a company that not only makes handsets but also offers mobile services. Users can buy music through Nokia's online music store, for example. And a wide range of Nokia's low-cost handsets now can send e-mail even in remote areas that have unreliable Internet access.

Kanjilal is in the forefront of that transformation in developing countries as Nokia works to keep both its dominant position in high-end handsets, where Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion ( RIMM - news - people ) are stealing market share, and squeeze more revenue from emerging markets, where margins are thin and low-cost phones proliferate (see "Beyond Bandits"). Consumer services such as text-message-based newsfeeds and the e-mail application are aimed at fending off cheap-handset producers.

Kanjilal's response to his boss' marching orders took shape over 18 months of endless work days and sleepless nights, tapping the company's research staffs in far-flung cities in India, China and Africa. During the first months Kanjilal and his staff spent time in India doing research and meeting with potential industry partners and government agencies. Having grown up in a small city, Pune, 120 miles from Mumbai, Kanjilal says he understands the lives of rural dwellers. "They know they are deprived," he says. "They constantly want to know how they can improve. And the 'how' can come when you give them the right information."

In June of this year he and his newly assembled staff of 30, as well as Nokia's people in India, launched Nokia Life Tools in India. Life Tools, a feature that's embedded in some handset models, serves like a text-message-based newswire service across three categories: agriculture, entertainment and education. So if a corn farmer subscribes to the agricultural newsfeed, he'll get text messages throughout the day on corn prices and corn-related news. "We have a small editorial desk in each market collecting real-time data," says Kanjilal. These staffs collect and validate information, then customize it according to region and crop, targeting it to the needs of each subscriber. Charging up to $1.20 for a monthly subscription for agricultural news, Life Tools in India now covers more than 275 crops in 18 states. As for education, starting at 60 cents a month subscribers receive text messages with new words and their meanings for students to widen their English vocabulary. The words and pop quizzes are aligned with their school curriculum. The entertainment feeds provide astrology advice, ring tones, cricket news and jokes.

Nokia is moving ahead with this service in other emerging markets. Late this month Nokia will roll out the service in Indonesia. The education and entertainment services will be available nationwide, while the agricultural newsfeed will be offered in Java and Sumatra, covering 80% of country's farming households. Next in line? Africa and elsewhere in Asia in 2010, though Kanjilal is keeping mum on details.

Kanjilal hopes that Life Tools will do for emerging markets what the Internet has done for developed countries. A few years back "everyone was saying that mobile phones will bridge the digital gap and bring the Internet to emerging markets," he says. "But then it just became a cliché because there was nothing happening due to the lack of infrastructure. The Internet has brought information to us, it has brought us the ability to communicate via e-mail or blogs or forums. And also it's a source of entertainment." He believes that Life Tools has the potential to deliver those benefits to areas that may not get Internet access for a long time to come.

Nokia already does a huge business in India, as well as in China. India boasts at least 400 million mobile-phone subscribers and adds some 10 million new ones every month. And just under 60% of all handsets sold there during the second quarter of this year were Nokia handsets, according to data from research firm IDC. In China Nokia has 45% of the market. Emerging markets have been Nokia's "strong point," says William A. Stofega, an IDC mobile device technology and trends analyst in Boston. "They've invested money, and they have the technology to squeeze margins out of low-end products. You can go to India, and you'll have someone refer to a mobile phone as a Nokia. Life Tools is going to increase Nokia's share [in emerging markets]. Think about how [applications] work. They're all about driving market share. So, if you're going to buy a Samsung handset, that may be nice, but at the end of the day you're not going to get some of the cool stuff like Life Tools."

Kanjilal believes that Life Tools has a shot at becoming viral. "Just like Bluetooth or any other technology, it starts off in a particular pool of handsets and then it spreads. The same is the intent with Life Tools. So suddenly you will have all Nokia handsets in that segment carrying Life Tools for the markets we have launched."

How's Kanjilal's baby doing so far? It's too early to tell. All eyes, no doubt, will be on the number of Life Tools-enabled handsets that Nokia can sell in the coming quarters. The handsetmaker isn't disclosing any numbers yet, though Kanjilal says there's been "an encouraging number of subscribers, with many subscribing to multiple services" during its first few months in India. "We have also seen a positive impact in many farmers' incomes within a short time." he adds, citing an internal report.

Without disclosing any hard figures, Kanjilal's current boss, Dieter May, who is the vice president of Emerging Markets and is based in Finland, seems pleased with the progress. "Our research and feedback from the market tells us that people are seeing the value and tangible benefits it brings to their lives," he says.

Nokia doesn't have this field to itself. In India Reuters has Market Light, which is also a text-based mobile phone service that sends out weather information and crop prices. (Life Tools gets some of its content from Market Light.) There are also Farmer's Friend in Uganda, Cell Bazaar in Bangladesh and a few others in China and Ghana. If Life Tools proves lucrative, other handsetmakers may quickly jump in. Kanjilal isn't very worried. "There are many providers of agricultural information but none that match the scale of Nokia's service," he says. "Market Light is live in only a few states in India, while Life Tools is available across 18 states in 11 Indian languages."

What's more, Nokia has a strong distribution network in emerging markets. Over the past five years or so Nokia has perfected its model for markets such as China and India, where it learned the hard way that it must rely more on provincial distributors and direct sales staffs than on national-distribution partners. One result is the Nokia vans, which travel to far-flung rural areas to sell handsets and now spread the word about new services such as Life Tools.

Perhaps the most promising thing about Life Tools is Kanjilal, who has a good track record in creating new products in India, where he grew up and worked before moving to Nokia's Singapore office in 2000. An engineer by training, he joined Hutchison Telecom in 1995, just as the mobile phone debuted in India. Unlike many of his business school classmates who went on to work for established names such as Procter & Gamble ( PG - news - people ) and Unilever, he decided to take a risk and join the fledgling cellular industry. "My dad threw a fit," he says. His father said, "'The phone that we have at home doesn't even work half the time, and now you're saying a mobile phone is like a cordless phone and you believe that it will work all over the city. Are you nuts?'"

Kanjilal went on to develop several firsts in the industry. In 1998 he came up with the concept for the first built-in Indian ringtone for mobile phones. It was based on a melody by sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. Kanjilal recalls the buzz in Nokia's New Delhi office when Shankar faxed back a note saying yes to his request to use his song for the ringtone. "My boss saw the fax first and came running to me and said, 'Now how will you execute it?'" Kanjilal recalls with a laugh. "Six months later the phone was launched with that ringtone built in. You could not delete it. It was the top-selling mobile phone in India that year."

In 1999 Nokia rolled out its first phone with a ringtone-composer feature. Kanjilal created the first service in India to go with this feature, working with Sony ( SNE - news - people ) Music to compile a list of music scores that handset owners could use to create tunes from songs by Ricky Martin, Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan and others. He was also instrumental in developing the first phone with a Hindi interface, in 1999. Life Tools may be his biggest career challenge yet, but it looks as though the honchos back in Finland made the right call back in 2007.

RINGING UP SALES

Handset market shares, second quarter

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Playing the name game - Queen's Journal

Posted: 02 Nov 2009 10:35 PM PST

With the likes of Apple, Bronx Mowgli and Moon Unit, one thing's certain—names are strange things. Poet W.H. Auden called them poetry in the raw and deemed them as untranslatable, but others attribute names the power to determine one's personality when he or she grows up. Names are often the first thing someone else will know about a person—and in most cases, names stick for life.

Most common names have etymological associations. If your name is Richard, it's derived from "powerful leader"; if it's Sarah, it's derived from "princess." Names can refer to virtues—like Clement or Constance, to occupations—for instance George, to the Bible—Daniel and John. Names can indicate power or station, as in Henry IV, or through the use of honorifics like Sir or Madam. Even animals like dolphins use names in the same manner as humans do.

English professor Sylvia Söderlind said a person's name is the most prominent part of themselves.

"It's the thing that identifies you from everyone else. [But] there's no such thing as a name meaning something. It is the least descriptive part of you. My name means 'from the woods,' but that is very irrelevant to who I am."

Söderlind said various cultures confer less arbitrary names.

Some Native American names refer to events that occurred at birth, like Running Dog or Red Cloud. In Africa, people may be named after the day of the week they're born on. Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's first name, for example, refers to the Friday he was born in the Akan language.

When people have more freedom to choose, though, names often follow fashions or trends. "When I was growing up [in Sweden], my name was an old-fashioned name, and I hated it," Söderlind said. "But then, the King of Sweden married a woman named Silvia, and all of a sudden, there was a whole generation of little girls named Silvia, because it was a queenly name."

When it comes to surnames, family history can complicate their meanings—and significantly lengthen the phonebook.

One man from Philadelphia eventually became referred to as Wolfe+585, Sr. because his last name began with Wolfe and had 585 other letters in it. One of the simpler translations of the name from Fairleigh Dickinson University, called him "wolf slayer who lives in the stone house in the mountain village." The longest one that I found has to do with his ancestors having been shepherds who protected their sheep from aliens by migrating to Earth from another planet 12,000 years ago.

A 22-year-old Chinese man named C was required by law to change his name, since only Chinese characters recognized by official computers are permitted in names.

Other countries like Denmark and Portugal are even more restrictive; parents are required to choose from lists of acceptable names, selected for readability as well as good taste.

Laws about naming are actually quite common, even in Canada. They can be in place to prevent confusion—such as laws against surnames with too many hyphens—to prevent embarrassment for the child or to prevent unpronounceable or unreadable names. Recent accepted name attempts in various countries include Metallica and Gandalf. Rejected were names like 4real, Ikea and Brfxxccxxmnpccccl- llmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116.

Although most parents in search of a baby name don't stray quite that far, philosophy professor Adèle Mercier said people often like to be creative with their name choices.

"I think there are phases, where parents look for names for their children that are not so popular." "Some older names start sounding like they could be younger names," she said. "Many parents will name their children the same name, recognizing that the name is rare. So all of a sudden, you have an influx of Emilies. I would predict that in 20 years, Moses will become a popular name."

There are over three times as many commonly used female names as male names and many languages also tend to have male and female versions of the same name—such as Mario and Maria in Spanish and Jean and Jeanne in French—but English has few of these and few gender-neutral names as well. Our language and culture don't seem to support them.

"When a name becomes popular, it becomes so popular that people start using it for women," Mercier said. "At that moment, they cease to be usable for men. You'd be surprised at the number of female names that used to be male names but now have a ring of femininity. It's a deeply sexist direction, as if the name had been sullied." She said names like Carol, Evelyn and Leslie were all formerly male names—along with currently gender-neutral names like Chris and Kim, which used to be masculine but may now be in the process of transition.

Intentional name-changes to avoid prejudice or make a name easier to pronounce in moving to a new culture are also quite common.

Mercier said these name changes can also be accidental in their nature.

"When you arrive as a refugee, you arrive without papers," she said. "You say your name in a language the border guard does not understand and he does a kind of transliteration of your name."

Mercier said these unintentional changes can also be purposeful, like people who deliberately change their names.

"You assume not a different identity, as you're the same person, but you accept to be referred to by a different sign," she said.

On the Internet, a name changes are often trivial. Anyone can come back under a different name and expect to be greeted as someone else entirely, as any association or reputation is associated not with the person but with the name. In this context, the lack of a name that can be concretely associated with someone also results in an online disinhibition effect, where people act or speak with less restraint than they would use in real life. But name changes can also be deeply significant. This is especially true in literature, where a name often symbolizes fundamental transitions. Any name can be significant—and since the author has complete control over what it is, any choice suitable to the story can be made, Söderlind said. Names can be shorter or longer, using harder or softer sounds, to indicate things about that to which they refer in a kind of foreshadowing. Other connections can be made through similarities, as in Scarlett O'Hara's association with the colour.

"The author names a character in order to create connotations, and in literature a name gathers connotations in the narrative," Söderlind said. "Ordinary names connote ordinary people you could meet on the street, while someone like Huckleberry Finn lives outside society. He is a child of nature. The reader will immediately sense that they belong to different contexts."

Söderlind said the most successful names go on to become cultural phenomena.

"Names take on the associations from literature. [They] take on a life of their own when they leave the page," she said, adding that names like Lolita and Don Juan have come to refer to character types now, not individuals.

"What they stand for has been created by the text."

—With files from Matthew Sigurdson