I just ran into an interesting Finnish start-up called Joikusoft. They have launched a Symbian app that will turn your Nokia smartphone into a WiFi router! I tested it and it indeed works. No wonder US carrier don’t want to sell Nokia smartphones – this type of innovations will cause them to loose the control they so hard try to retain.
When I access the Internet through my laptop and my iPhone (this is the way to have a 3G iPhone wink-wink) the application first presents to me a welcome page. This makes me think that there is a significant opportunity with this technology to provide a p2p m-commerce service whereby individuals can conduct ‘street marketing’ by walking in the right crowds, broadcasting strategically named SSIDs and by bluejacking commercial messages. Carriers need to be really worried about the e-commerce moving ‘off-deck’ this way, much more than they need to worry about loosing connectivity charges. In the new world of multi-modal connectivity most of us will sign up for the carrier’s unlimited plan anyway for those situation where we will need it. The more the traffic is then diverted ot other access networks the more the carrier will save in their spectrum cost.
Or am I dreaming here?
