Subject: LA Times, mobiles in Finland (McConnel)..
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 015058 -0600 (CST)
From: "Roy L. Beavers"
To: emfguru
--------------------------------------------------
.......What can I say? It's the ultimate Blue World..... It all
sounds "just fantastic and wonderful" ... until you read the last
two paragraphs......
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
roy@emfguru.com
.....It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.....
NEW!!! Website
...................People are more important than profits.................
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 19:14:18 -0800
From: Chris McConnel
To: "'Roy L. Beavers'"
Subject: LA Times article on mobiles in Finland
A Wireless Wake-Up Call for Finland
Roy, this appeared in todays LA Times.
- Chris McConnel
The mobile communications industry has reinvigorated the country, changing
the way Finns work, play and see their place in the world.
By CAROL J. WILLIAMS, Times Staff Writer
OULU, Finland--From this little-known university town at the northern
end of the Gulf of Bothnia, an army of Nordic computer nerds looks poised to
overrun America's Internet innovators and software supremos as the
desktop-dominated world goes wireless.
Nowhere has mobile communication caught on as it has in sparsely
populated Finland, where nearly 70% of the 5.3 million residents are armed
with wireless phones and an ever-expanding array of tools, games and
services they can use on the fly.
Mobile communications have changed the way Finns work, play and see
themselves in the world. This modest country once better known for global
supremacy in suicides and heavy drinking is taking the lead in developing
Internet-accessible handsets and services that will let consumers carry the
power of a personal computer in their pockets.
Although the phones can't do all that a home PC can, Finnish companies
have soared to the forefront with services that allow users to check news,
sports and weather wherever they are, as well as read their horoscopes or
biorhythms, order food, pay bills, buy Christmas presents and collect
e-mail.
"What you see happening here today will be happening in other markets
very soon. We're just a year or two ahead of other Europeans, and Europeans
are just a bit ahead of the United States," says Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief
financial officer for Nokia, the world's largest wireless communications
provider.
Only about 25% of U.S. citizens own mobile phones, compared with about
half the European population. Finland's current 67% market penetration is
expected to exceed 70% by the end of the year, a higher rate than in any
other nation. Finland is followed by Hong Kong, Norway, Sweden, Israel,
Japan, Denmark and Italy in the ranks of top cellular consumers.
Worldwide, mobile phones already surpass televisions and personal
computers combined in terms of unit sales, says Kallasvuo, and they are
expected only to grow in importance as people take the services of the
Internet out of homes and offices and onto the open road.
Finland's role in wireless development has been a boon for the country
that only a decade ago was overly dependent on slumping wood-products
industries and doomed trade with the Soviet Union.
Gross domestic product rose more than 30% in the five years after 1992
and is projected to post an additional 20% increase by the end of this year.
Unemployment has dropped from 20% at the start of the decade to 10.5% now--a
level not expected to change despite healthy increases in new jobs each year
because of the specialized training needed for the country's new high-tech
focus.
Most of the credit for the positive economic figures goes to the
explosive growth of wireless leaders such as Nokia and their support
services.
"I believe this is the future, and we'll be doing everything that we do
on the Internet today on these," says Juha Sipila, director of Fortel
Invest, holding up Nokia's 9110 model introduced in September. The
multimedia communicator has rivals from Sweden's Ericsson and Motorola of
the United States.
"They're still quite slow, but in the future they'll be as fast as my
PC," says Sipila, an unassuming venture capitalist who is one of Finland's
new high-tech millionaires. "I use mostly wireless communications now. I can
pay bills or read my e-mails while I'm waiting at the airport."
Like many movers in this unlikely Nordic challenge to Silicon Valley,
Sipila concedes that being in touch 24 hours a day has its downside, even
when the tethers to the office are invisible. Executives who have business
partners in California, 10 time zones away, can end up working from the
moment they get up in the morning until bedtime because the possibilities of
any time, anywhere communication have often progressed to obligations.
"I think in the future we will all get better at using this button,"
Sipila says, pointing to the off switch.
Another local success story, JOT Automation President Jorma Terentjeff,
agrees that mobile communications can be the workaholic's opium but says not
all users necessarily become addicted.
"It's popular nowadays to talk about burnout, and I don't want that to
happen to my people," says Terentjeff, who believes wireless communications
should be liberating workers from the 9-to-5 grind, not extending it. "We
all need time for hobbies and exercise. My mobile phone gives me the
flexibility to combine work with skiing."
Wireless operations also allow Terentjeff to custom-fit the work
environment to his employees' needs, he says, noting that one valued
co-worker has negotiated a protracted maternity leave on condition that she
keep an eye on her projects via wireless conference calls from home.
A Heart Symbol Says It's His Wife Calling
The booming sales of wireless fashion accessories, such as the rainbow
assortment of cloth pouches and snap-on plastic phone covers on sale at
niche boutiques throughout Finland, testify to the personal relationship
Finns have developed with their mobile phones.
"What customers are looking for is not just a means of communicating
but of defining their personality," says Esa Mangeloja, telecommunications
analyst at Conventum Securities in Helsinki, the capital. "You can choose
the ring tones you like and customize the display with some identifying
symbols, as well as choose colors and styles that suit you."
His own phone rings to the tune of an ancient Finnish gospel song and
is marked with his initials and a Lutheran cross. For those who find ringing
too intrusive, most mobiles can now be outfitted with a vibrating option.
Services such as call waiting and caller ID can also be customized. One
Helsinki executive's mobile displays a heart-shaped symbol to tell him it's
his wife calling.
Beyond bringing co-workers, friends and loved ones within a speed-dial
of one another, Finland's pioneering role in wireless technology has put the
country on the global map and made Finns more self-confident and proud of
their homeland.
"Even five years ago, when Finns traveled abroad we felt a little
ashamed of ourselves, like we should apologize for the intrusion," says
Matti Latva-aho, the affable young director of Oulu's Center for Wireless
Communications. "Now we feel we're in the spotlight of an important
international development."
The wireless center is the cornerstone of the town's Technopolis, which
groups together private and government research and development operations.
The center, part of a sprawling research park adjacent to the University of
Oulu, contracts with private industry to design and test new
applications--and takes its cut of the profits of the most successful
products.
At the privately owned Elektrobit firm in Technopolis, managers are
leading by example. The company, which produces base stations, satellite
communications and testing and measurement equipment, was the first in
Finland to construct a headquarters entirely devoid of conventional phones.
Instead, every employee has a mobile handset with access to the
internal computer network. Half a dozen of Elektrobit's spun-off
one-man-wonders operate in the hinterlands of the country, living examples
of the virtual development possible in a wireless world.
"If you're doing design work or engineering, it's sometimes more
productive to work alone, and it doesn't really matter where you are if you
can be reached," says Elektrobit's marketing manager, Juha Auer. "We have a
lot of key people who don't want to live in Oulu for whatever reason--a
spouse's job or kids in school. By working remote, everyone is satisfied."
Oulu is perhaps the town to benefit most from Finland's high-tech
successes. Nokia's research and development facilities are here, and the
company's meteoric rise in the early 1990s inspired related industries to
locate nearby. The University of Oulu, long a teacher-training institution,
has reinvented itself over the past decade to prepare the next generation of
engineers and programmers.
"In Europe alone, 500,000 people are needed in technology industries,
and in the next few years that demand will rise to 2 million," says Lauri
Lajunen, president of the 13,000-student university. But he contends that it
is a difficult sales job to lure the best minds to Finland, "even though
once they are here, they realize it is not Siberia."
This flat, wind-swept town--even farther north than Nome, Alaska--does
evoke the atmosphere of Slavic hinterlands, with its birch forests, spare
wooden houses and early-afternoon twilight. But residents here tout their
easy access to the best of all worlds: skiing in Lapland just a couple of
hours' drive north, business in Helsinki only an hour away by air, and daily
commuting to work increasingly reduced to linkups via mobile modem.
Finland's phenomenal rise from relative poverty followed in the comet
trail of Nokia, the 134-year-old company that left its traditional pursuits
of tire and rubber-boot manufacturing only a decade ago to focus on wireless
communications. Nokia, Ericsson and other Nordic telecom leaders prospered
from early recognition that a common standard for mobile phones and roaming
agreements among service providers would allow all wireless customers to
reach one another, regardless of location or which brand of handset they
own.
"It's a wireless world now, and standardization in Europe has really
created opportunities here," says Jari Raappana, marketing director of
Stonesoft, a network security and information management firm near Helsinki.
"We lost the Internet growth to the United States, but wireless is a good
opportunity for Europe--something in which we can be the world leader."
Finland and Scandinavian countries were also far ahead of the rest of
Europe in deregulating telephone companies, which fostered a more
competitive climate among service providers than in countries where state
monopolies had little incentive to invest in research and development.
Telecom executives forecast that 1 billion mobile phones will be in use
around the world by 2003, but the real growth potential lies in the new
services emerging almost daily from Finnish entrepreneurs, says Jari
Jaakkola, a vice president of Sonera, Finland's telecom leader and the
country's second-largest company after Nokia.
For instance, a canceled flight might soon trigger digital messages to
a traveler's phone with alternative bookings or options for overnight
accommodations.
With the business community here already fully supplied with cellular
phones, sales are growing most rapidly among Finnish teenagers, who have
turned what many of their parents intended to be a security tool into an
instrument for self-expression.
More than 80% of Finns between the ages of 12 and 20 carry mobiles, and
preset limits on how many minutes they can use them have become a kind of
allowance negotiated between parents and children.
"My mother gets very angry if my bill is over 100 markkas," says Petra
Paananen, a 13-year-old browsing among the displays of covers and pouches at
the Forum shopping center in Helsinki, citing a sum equal to about $18 a
month.
Some Worry Wealth Is Polarizing Society
Like many teens, Petra was given her mobile handset as a present by her
parents so they can be reached any time she needs their advice, comfort or
permission. But more often than phoning home, she spends her e-allowance on
the Short Message System, an adolescent rage in Finland. The 160-character
limit on messages has inspired teens here and in other countries to invent
their own codes to convey longer ideas with minimum keystrokes, such as BTDT
(been there, done that), CUL (see you later) or GAL (get a life).
While the mobile madness has mostly been a boon, some observers fear
that the explosive growth of new wealth has polarized Finnish society and
deepened the despair of those made jobless by the decline of traditional
industries, such as pulp and paper mills and mining.
"The nouveaux riches are not hiding their wealth, and in Finnish
culture we're not used to that," says Antti Kokkonen, managing editor of
Oulu's daily Kaleva. "A lot of people here still think everyone should be
equal."
Despite his concerns, the editor applauds the opportunities and
economic growth that have been created by the success of wireless in
Finland.
The country has even overcome its infamous No. 1 world ranking in
suicides, witnessing a 9% decline since the late 1980s, probably as a
consequence of the surging economy and a national suicide prevention
project.
The only risks from the wireless boom, says Kokkonen, are disappointing
sales volumes if the new generation of Internet-accessible phones fails to
lure consumers from their home computer rooms, or if the claims of U.S.
researchers that excessive mobile use can cause cancer are substantiated.
"People in Finland don't take this too seriously," Kokkonen says of the
alleged health dangers. "That's quite obvious from the number of people you
can see walking around with a phone stuck to their ear."
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com