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The Mobile Opportunity That Nokia Let Slip Away

This article is more than 10 years old.

I'm sure the economic history of the 21st century will have Apple written all over it, but the footnote about Nokia will say: Missed opportunity. Big time. And then some.

Observing Apple and Nokia in 2007 and 2008, Apple's eventual ascent to the sun seemed improbable. Nokia dominated mobile handsets with over 50% of the market and sales exceeding 400 million units a year, well over tenfold the unit sales of any top-selling computer maker.

Mobile does business on a different scale from IT, which is why analysts have been slow to acknowledge that the upside for Apple is still huge. However, perhaps the more interesting story remains that of Nokia.

When Apple rose and Nokia began to sink, it looked as though the West Coast analyst community simply did not understand Nokia's competitive strength. Nokia owned the world and the world was much bigger than the sale of computers suggested. It never had much US market share but it was big in just about every country that you might call "emerging".

Something interesting about those markets - they are far more innovative than the US in terms of mobile usage. Mobile money, for example, was born and raised in the emerging markets of South East Asia and Africa.

Mobile for us represents an opportunity to redesign work in a location free way, which is a big change. For many countries it represents the beginnings of a connected world and all the economic benefits of hyper-communications.

VascoDe, an Israeli Cloud service, looks set to inherit Nokia's mantle in this essential growth area. Call it the forgotten 4.75 billion, that section of the world that will not buy an iPhone or iPad in the coming decade but probably already owns a simple Nokia or HTC that it cannot make much use of online.

Dorron Mottes, VascoDe CEO explains: "83% of all phones are simple phones. The real question is how to upgrade their capabilities. You might have interest in being on the web, can't afford a smartphone and certainly can't afford the data costs."

So VascoDe has a cloud-based solution that allows people with simple mobile phones to dial a short code and then engage in real time sessions with the VascoDe cloud server where they can access email and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. By the way I got talking to Dorron because we were both scheduled to be at Mark Fidelman's Business Next Social conference in January.

"People often can't check their email because it means a trip to the Internet cafe, as well as the cost. Say you want to make a job application online, you have to make this trip every day," says Dorron.

So the idea is - the simple phone becomes the web-browsing tool of choice. By dialing into the VascoDe servers users can access email, Twitter and Facebook and be as social and connected as their smartphone cousins, except, as yet, the range of apps is quite small, a feature that will change.

That means VascoDe is addressing a population of around 4.7 billion phone owners. The company has soft-launched on all three networks in South Africa and has a deal in place with Nokia-Siemens Networks to help leverage other markets.

Subscriptions are about $1 a month, though Dorron is looking to reduce that via sponsorship. That's a lot of dollars from a population on the cusp of relative prosperity.

If you are looking for a sure-fire growth market in mobile this has to be it. The market will grow, as will the capability of people to pay. The product will help elevate people into a new type of connected economy and will contribute to their prosperity, bringing them on a journey to ever more capabilities. Just the dream, in fact, that drove Nokia's global investments for a decade before Apple came along.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701