The TED Phone

At TED Global in Oxford, UK this week TED and Nokia announced a partnership to bring TED talks to Africa and other developing parts of the world using the technologies that scale best, the mobile phone.

Using the soon to be released Nokia N8, TED plans to ship phones pre-loaded with TED talks (curated by TEDx organizers in those countries) to many parts of the world. These phones will be free to TEDx organizers in different countries and will feature 16gb of storage, a powerful projector for slides or playing back videos, an HDMI video camera, bluetooth, wifi and GPS. They will also ship with apps for audio and video editing.

Here are some of my notes from a discussion lunch that took place around the announcement:

- One of the Nokia reps pointed out that “Phone numbers used to represent locations not necessarily people.” This has changed a bit in that the reverse is often the case now, especially in developing countries.

- He also said that the “Kodak moment of the 21 century is the sharing of the moment.” Suggesting that it’s no longer enough to just capture the moment, people now want to share via social media with family and friends.

- Soon there will be 1 billion mobile users, 80% with gps enabled phones.

- Location based recommendation services are the new concierge maps.

- The goal is to get the ‘long tail’ of the world producing their own TED events and talks.