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What is it?   Why is it necessary?
The role of innovation in research.

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How To Get More Clients Using Customer Insight Mapping

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10 min read - this is the most current release (no survey for 2022 as yet)

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How Unilever and Capgemini put consumer insight at the heart of decision making

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Chatbots are everywhere in 2018. This summer's FIFA World Cup, for example, sees a new landmark in chatbot use as millions of fans interact with bots from teams, brands, betting companies, sponsors, and more. One obvious vertical for chatbot use is customer service, where the bot shoulders the burden of routine queries while staff can deal with more complex cases. In health care too, the growing number of institutions hosting chatbots has led Juniper Research to predict that $3.6B will be saved by 2022.

Yet it might be that education proves to be the biggest winner from the use of chatbots. According to Avi Ben Ezra, CTO of SnatchBot - the award-winning chatbot building platform - a survey of its users shows that out of 18,000 companies, organizations, and individuals building chatbots powered by SnatchBot, it is education that has a slight lead, at 16 percent of users, with IT and ecommerce at 13 percent each, fintech at 11 percent, and only then customer service at 10 percent.

Chatbots powered by SnatchBot come with impressive AI

It helps that SnatchBot's platform has state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) in 130 languages and an intuitive logic for building conversations that makes it easy to create bots that can ask questions, keep scores, and give feedback. But one recent use case in particular shows how explosive chatbot use can be for researchers.

Professor Dr. Diana Derval teaches at Donghua University in Shanghai and the Sorbonne Business School. She is also Chair of DervalResearch (a global market research firm specializing in shopping behavior) and the inventor of the Derval Color Test. In the first three days, three million people took the test, with the total rising to ten million within a year, revealing that not only do people have a different perception of color nuances but some people are more sensitive to contrast than to colors. These findings have been presented at several international conferences on sensory science but they are also extremely important for marketing.

Professor Derval explained how the use of the chatbot came into its own. "What started as a simple LinkedIn post to show the huge variations in color nuances perception among individuals," she explains, "turned into a viral test and we wanted to give users the best experience thanks to the Derval Color Test bot. The main purpose of this chatbot is to boost the interaction, to propose further readings on the topic of colors, and offer freebies like a chapter of my new book: Designing Luxury Brands."

Adds Dr. Derval: "We have always been a great fan of chatbots. Ten years ago DervalResearch implemented with GMI the first chatbot in Second Life. It was literally a talking sofa. The open questions and people's great receptivity enabled us to generate fascinating insights and Snatchbot allowed us to easily implement a similar interaction in Facebook, using Messenger."

She agrees that there are lessons in the use of a chatbot for research more generally.

"With the Derval Color Test, we definitively pioneered the emerging field of co-research. Traditionally researchers test hypotheses on reachable people, use statistics to try to convince themselves the people they found are somehow representative, and publish a paper hoping someone would actually read the obscure research. What we did, and we were both praised and criticized for it, is that we shared our first findings on color perception so that people could comment on them."

Intuitive, smart chatbots for every kind of user

"I must say Snatchbot made the implementation easy," Dr. Derval continues. "We tried to give our chatbot a personality and to combine our knowledge of human behavior and neurosciences with the tool's AI capabilities. The idea being to entertain and inform users and whenever possible to anticipate their requests."

Readers can talk to the Derval Color Test bot by sending a message to it on Facebook.

Clearly, being able to reach ten million people with a research test shows the potential for a paradigm shift in the education sector and also in marketing. Market research is often expensive and survey samples are usually in the thousands, not the millions.

The revolution represented by widespread chatbot use in research is quite consciously being driven by SnatchBot. As Avi Ben Ezra explained, "We set out to create a platform where anyone can create a chatbot with no coding experience, even a smart, AI-driven one. What's more, we made it omni-channel. So you can put the bot everywhere that your target audience is active: websites, Messenger, Skype, LINE, Slack and so on."

"Even better, it's free to use," adds Ben Ezra. "Professor Derval's use case is an amazing, imaginative use of a chatbot that cost her nothing. That's what we want to see more of. People and organizations in the thousands building chatbots and realizing the possibilities."

For users who want premium support and the removal of a 'Powered by SnatchBot' branding, the company offers a PRO-Plan. But whether via the free or paid-for version, it's evident that SnatchBot's platform offers researchers an exciting new way to obtain mass participation in their projects.
Sponsored posts are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they're always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

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How a chatbot helped get research feedback from 10 million people

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Sponsored In the first three days, three million people took the Derval Color Test via chatbot, with the total rising to ten million within a year, revealing that not only do people have a different perception of color nuances but some people are more sensitive to contrast than to colors.

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It's no secret: innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses.

Innovation and creativity

Yet hard as it is for such organizations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA's Ames Research Center are actually doing so. What can other companies learn from their approaches and attributes? That question formed the core of a multiyear study comprising in-depth interviews, workshops, and surveys of more than 2,500 executives in over 300 companies, including both performance leaders and laggards, in a broad set of industries and countries (Exhibit 1). What we found were a set of eight essential attributes that are present, either in part or in full, at every big company that's a high performer in product, process, or business-model innovation.

Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it. Taken together, the essentials described in this article constitute just such an operating system, as seen in Exhibit 2. These often overlapping, iterative, and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorization but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups. The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set and prioritize the terms and conditions under which innovation is more likely to thrive. The next four essentials deal with how to deliver and organize for innovation repeatedly over time and with enough value to contribute meaningfully to overall performance.

To be sure, there's no proven formula for success, particularly when it comes to innovation. While our years of client-service experience provide strong indicators for the existence of a causal relationship between the attributes that survey respondents reported and the innovations of the companies we studied, the statistics described here can only prove correlation. Yet we firmly believe that if companies assimilate and apply these essentials-in their own way, in accordance with their particular context, capabilities, organizational culture, and appetite for risk-they will improve the likelihood that they, too, can rekindle the lost spark of innovation. In the digital age, the pace of change has gone into hyperspeed, so companies must get these strategic, creative, executional, and organizational factors right to innovate successfully.

Aspire

President John F. Kennedy's bold aspiration, in 1962, to "go to the moon in this decade" motivated a nation to unprecedented levels of innovation. A far-reaching vision can be a compelling catalyst, provided it's realistic enough to stimulate action today.

But in a corporate setting, as many CEOs have discovered, even the most inspiring words often are insufficient, no matter how many times they are repeated. It helps to combine high-level aspirations with estimates of the value that innovation should generate to meet financial-growth objectives. Quantifying an "innovation target for growth," and making it an explicit part of future strategic plans, helps solidify the importance of and accountability for innovation. The target itself must be large enough to force managers to include innovation investments in their business plans. If they can make their numbers using other, less risky tactics, our experience suggests that they (quite rationally) will.

Establishing a quantitative innovation aspiration is not enough, however. The target value needs to be apportioned to relevant business "owners" and cascaded down to their organizations in the form of performance targets and timelines. Anything less risks encouraging inaction or the belief that innovation is someone else's job.

For example, Lantmännen, a big Nordic agricultural cooperative, was challenged by flat organic growth and directionless innovation. Top executives created an aspirational vision and strategic plan linked to financial targets: 6 percent growth in the core business and 2 percent growth in new organic ventures. To encourage innovation projects, these quantitative targets were cascaded down to business units and, ultimately, to product groups. During the development of each innovation project, it had to show how it was helping to achieve the growth targets for its category and markets. As a result, Lantmännen went from 4 percent to 13 percent annual growth, underpinned by the successful launch of several new brands. Indeed, it became the market leader in premade food only four years after entry and created a new premium segment in this market.

Such performance parameters can seem painful to managers more accustomed to the traditional approach. In our experience, though, CEOs are likely just going through the motions if they don't use evaluations and remuneration to assess and recognize the contribution that all top managers make to innovation.
Strategy & Corporate Finance
Choose

Fresh, creative insights are invaluable, but in our experience many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale. At bigger companies, this can be particularly problematic during market discontinuities, when supporting the next wave of growth may seem too risky, at least until competitive dynamics force painful changes.

Innovation is inherently risky, to be sure, and getting the most from a portfolio of innovation initiatives is more about managing risk than eliminating it. Since no one knows exactly where valuable innovations will emerge, and searching everywhere is impractical, executives must create some boundary conditions for the opportunity spaces they want to explore. The process of identifying and bounding these spaces can run the gamut from intuitive visions of the future to carefully scrutinized strategic analyses. Thoughtfully prioritizing these spaces also allows companies to assess whether they have enough investment behind their most valuable opportunities.

During this process, companies should set in motion more projects than they will ultimately be able to finance, which makes it easier to kill those that prove less promising. RELX Group, for example, runs 10 to 15 experiments per major customer segment, each funded with a preliminary budget of around $200,000, through its innovation pipeline every year, choosing subsequently to invest more significant funds in one or two of them, and dropping the rest. "One of the hardest things to figure out is when to kill something," says Kumsal Bayazit, RELX Group's chief strategy officer. "It's a heck of a lot easier if you have a portfolio of ideas."

Once the opportunities are defined, companies need transparency into what people are working on and a governance process that constantly assesses not only the expected value, timing, and risk of the initiatives in the portfolio but also its overall composition. There's no single mix that's universally right. Most established companies err on the side of overloading their innovation pipelines with relatively safe, short-term, and incremental projects that have little chance of realizing their growth targets or staying within their risk parameters. Some spread themselves thinly across too many projects instead of focusing on those with the highest potential for success and resourcing them to win.

These tendencies get reinforced by a sluggish resource-reallocation process. Our research shows that a company typically reallocates only a tiny fraction of its resources from year to year, thereby sentencing innovation to a stagnating march of incrementalism.

Discover

Innovation also requires actionable and differentiated insights-the kind that excite customers and bring new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? Genius is always an appealing approach, if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields to other approaches besides exceptional creativity.

The rest of us can look for insights by methodically and systematically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements. Companies that effectively collect, synthesize, and "collide" them stand the highest probability of success. "If you get the sweet spot of what the customer is struggling with, and at the same time get a deeper knowledge of the new technologies coming along and find a mechanism for how these two things can come together, then you are going to get good returns," says Alcoa chairman and chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld.

The insight-discovery process, which extends beyond a company's boundaries to include insight-generating partnerships, is the lifeblood of innovation. We won't belabor the matter here, though, because it's already the subject of countless articles and books. One thing we can add is that discovery is iterative, and the active use of prototypes can help companies continue to learn as they develop, test, validate, and refine their innovations. Moreover, we firmly believe that without a fully developed innovation system encompassing the other elements described in this article, large organizations probably won't innovate successfully, no matter how effective their insight-generation process is.

Would you like to learn more about our Strategy & Corporate Finance Practice?

Evolve

Business-model innovations-which change the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams, and/or modify delivery models-have always been a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. As smartphones and mobile apps threaten to upend oldline industries, business-model innovation has become all the more urgent: established companies must reinvent their businesses before technology-driven upstarts do. Why, then, do most innovation systems so squarely emphasize new products? The reason, of course, is that most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it's visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it's not too late.

Leading companies combat this troubling tendency in a number of ways. They up their game in market intelligence, the better to separate signal from noise. They establish funding vehicles for new businesses that don't fit into the current structure. They constantly reevaluate their position in the value chain, carefully considering business models that might deliver value to priority groups of new customers. They sponsor pilot projects and experiments away from the core business to help combat narrow conceptions of what they are and do. And they stress-test newly emerging value propositions and operating models against countermoves by competitors.

Amazon does a particularly strong job extending itself into new business models by addressing the emerging needs of its customers and suppliers. In fact, it has included many of its suppliers in its customer base by offering them an increasingly wide range of services, from hosted computing to warehouse management. Another strong performer, the Financial Times, was already experimenting with its business model in response to the increasing digitalization of media when, in 2007, it launched an innovative subscription model, upending its relationship with advertisers and readers. "We went against the received wisdom of popular strategies at the time," says Caspar de Bono, FT board member and managing director of B2B. "We were very deliberate in getting ahead of the emerging structural change, and the decisions turned out to be very successful." In print's heyday, 80 percent of the FT 's revenue came from print advertising. Now, more than half of it comes from content, and two-thirds of circulation comes from digital subscriptions.

Accelerate

Virulent antibodies undermine innovation at many large companies. Cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies simply get in the way of their own attempts to innovate. A surprising number of impressive innovations from companies were actually the fruit of their mavericks, who succeeded in bypassing their early-approval processes. Clearly, there's a balance to be maintained: bureaucracy must be held in check, yet the rush to market should not undermine the cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning cycles, and clear decision pathways that help enable innovation. Are managers with the right knowledge, skills, and experience making the crucial decisions in a timely manner, so that innovation continually moves through an organization in a way that creates and maintains competitive advantage, without exposing a company to unnecessary risk?

Companies also thrive by testing their promising ideas with customers early in the process, before internal forces impose modifications that blur the original value proposition. To end up with the innovation initially envisioned, it's necessary to knock down the barriers that stand between a great idea and the end user. Companies need a well-connected manager to take charge of a project and be responsible for the budget, time to market, and key specifications-a person who can say yes rather than no. In addition, the project team needs to be cross-functional in reality, not just on paper. This means locating its members in a single place and ensuring that they give the project a significant amount of their time (at least half) to support a culture that puts the innovation project's success above the success of each function.

Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure end-user involvement throughout the development process. At many companies, marketing's role is to champion the interests of end users as development teams evolve products and to help ensure that the final result is what everyone first envisioned. But this responsibility is honored more often in the breach than in the observance. Other companies, meanwhile, rationalize that consumers don't necessarily know what they want until it becomes available. This may be true, but customers can certainly say what they don't like. And the more quickly and frequently a project team gets-and uses-feedback, the more quickly it gets a great end result.

Scale

Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work at global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it. The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence. Resources and capabilities must be marshaled to make sure a new product or service can be delivered quickly at the desired volume and quality. Manufacturing facilities, suppliers, distributors, and others must be prepared to execute a rapid and full rollout.

For example, when TomTom launched its first touch-screen navigational device, in 2004, the product flew off the shelves. By 2006, TomTom's line of portable navigation devices reached sales of about 5 million units a year, and by 2008, yearly volume had jumped to more than 12 million. "That's faster market penetration than mobile phones" had, says Harold Goddijn, TomTom's CEO and cofounder. While TomTom's initial accomplishment lay in combining a well-defined consumer problem with widely available technology components, rapid scaling was vital to the product's continuing success. "We doubled down on managing our cash, our operations, maintaining quality, all the parts of the iceberg no one sees," Goddijn adds. "We were hugely well organized."

Extend

In the space of only a few years, companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries. Successful innovators achieve significant multiples for every dollar invested in innovation by accessing the skills and talents of others. In this way, they speed up innovation and uncover new ways to create value for their customers and ecosystem partners.

Smart collaboration with external partners, though, goes beyond merely sourcing new ideas and insights; it can involve sharing costs and finding faster routes to market. Famously, the components of Apple's first iPod were developed almost entirely outside the company; by efficiently managing these external partnerships, Apple was able to move from initial concept to marketable product in only nine months. NASA's Ames Research Center teams up not just with international partners-launching joint satellites with nations as diverse as Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden-but also with emerging companies, such as SpaceX.

High-performing innovators work hard to develop the ecosystems that help deliver these benefits. Indeed, they strive to become partners of choice, increasing the likelihood that the best ideas and people will come their way. That requires a systematic approach. First, these companies find out which partners they are already working with; surprisingly few companies know this. Then they decide which networks-say, four or five of them-they ideally need to support their innovation strategies. This step helps them to narrow and focus their collaboration efforts and to manage the flow of possibilities from outside the company. Strong innovators also regularly review their networks, extending and pruning them as appropriate and using sophisticated incentives and contractual structures to motivate high-performing business partners. Becoming a true partner of choice is, among other things, about clarifying what a partnership can offer the junior member: brand, reach, or access, perhaps. It is also about behavior. Partners of choice are fair and transparent in their dealings.

Moreover, companies that make the most of external networks have a good idea of what's most useful at which stages of the innovation process. In general, they cast a relatively wide net in the early going. But as they come closer to commercializing a new product or service, they become narrower and more specific in their sourcing, since by then the new offering's design is relatively set.

Mobilize

How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support, and reward innovative behavior and thinking among the right groups of people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibers of their culture, from the core to the periphery.

They start back where we began: with aspirations that forge tight connections among innovation, strategy, and performance. When a company sets financial targets for innovation and defines market spaces, minds become far more focused. As those aspirations come to life through individual projects across the company, innovation leaders clarify responsibilities using the appropriate incentives and rewards.

The Discovery Group, for example, is upending the medical and life-insurance industries in its native South Africa and also has operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, among other locations. Innovation is a standard measure in the company's semiannual divisional scorecards-a process that helps mobilize the organization and affects roughly 1,000 of the company's business leaders. "They are all required to innovate every year," Discovery founder and CEO Adrian Gore says of the company's business leaders. "They have no choice."

Organizational changes may be necessary, not because structural silver bullets exist-we've looked hard for them and don't think they do-but rather to promote collaboration, learning, and experimentation. Companies must help people to share ideas and knowledge freely, perhaps by locating teams working on different types of innovation in the same place, reviewing the structure of project teams to make sure they always have new blood, ensuring that lessons learned from success and failure are captured and assimilated, and recognizing innovation efforts even when they fall short of success.

Internal collaboration and experimentation can take years to establish, particularly in large, mature companies with strong cultures and ways of working that, in other respects, may have served them well. Some companies set up "innovation garages" where small groups can work on important projects unconstrained by the normal working environment while building new ways of working that can be scaled up and absorbed into the larger organization. NASA, for example, has ten field centers. But the space agency relies on the Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley, to maintain what its former director, Dr. Pete Worden, calls "the character of rebels" to function as "a laboratory that's part of a much larger organization."

Big companies do not easily reinvent themselves as leading innovators. Too many fixed routines and cultural factors can get in the way. For those that do make the attempt, innovation excellence is often built in a multiyear effort that touches most, if not all, parts of the organization. Our experience and research suggest that any company looking to make this journey will maximize its probability of success by closely studying and appropriately assimilating the leading practices of high-performing innovators. Taken together, these form an essential operating system for innovation within a company's organizational structure and culture.

Commentary - McKinsey Quarterly

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It's no secret: innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses. Innovation and creativity Yet hard as it is for such organizations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA's Ames Research Center are actually doing so.

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Netflix - 8 min video

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Netflix - A Disruptive Innovation : (Video on demand for movie rentals)

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Video : Research & Innovation in Science

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Video : Research & Innovation in Science

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Diffusion of Innovation Theory: The Adoption Curve

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In the space of 20 years, smartphones have taken over the world. Billions of people use them every day. But what were the phones that started it all? Let's take a look back at the history of mobile phones...
A LOT can happen in 40 years. But when it comes to technology, 40-years is like going back to the days of Moses or the Roman Empire. Case in point: the mobile phone -- and, more recently, the rise of mobile internet communications, social networks, and super-fast internet.

It was a long road getting here, but now we live in a world where our phones are more powerful than some laptops! It's crazy when you think about it, right? I mean, half of the phones inside our Best Android Phone Guide have more RAM than my mum's laptop! You now have 5G to consider too.

But what were the phones that made it happen? How did we get from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 5s (the world's first 64-bit smartphone)? Who were the pioneering brands that made today's handsets possible? And which phone, out of the thousands launched since the 1980s, was the most important? Answer: there have been quite a few.

But first: a history lesson.

History of Mobile Phones

The First Cell Phone...

The world's first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973, when Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival telecommunications company and informed them he was speaking via a mobile phone.

The phone Cooper used - if you could call it that - weighed a staggering 1.1kg and measured in at 228.6x127x44.4mm. With this prototype device, you got 30 minutes of talk-time and it took around 10 hours to charge.

However, the concept of smartphones was first envisaged by Nikola Tesla WAY back in 1926 - he basically predicted iPhones, the internet, and our modern telecommunication-powered world.

First Portable Phone

In 1983, Motorola released its first commercial mobile phone, known as the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. The handset offered 30 minutes of talk-time, six hours standby, and could store 30 phone numbers. It also cost £2639 ($3995).

In the very early days of the mobile space, handsets weren't designed with consumers in mind. You'd need a couple of thousand pounds to get hold of one, and even then performance wasn't great.

Back then, mobile phones were designed with the likes of Gordon Gecko in mind, businessmen-types that drove big Jags and flew Concord. Not your average Joe. And these phones weren't what you'd consider "portable" either.

Even at the start of the 1990s, this was still the case despite Nokia and NEC entering the fray. Nokia's first 'handheld' mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman 900, launched in 1989 and weighed just 800g - a huge improvement over 1982's 9.8kg Mobira Senator model.

1990 to 1995 represented an upward swerve in design and portability, with mobile devices (cell phones) gradually starting to appear in the hands of average consumers for the first time.

When Did Flip Phones Come Out?

Of all the major innovations back in the early days of cell phones, it was perhaps the advent of flip phones that had the biggest impact on consumers.

The first flip phone to come out was the Motorola StarTAC; it was released in 1996 and, thanks to its small and portable size, was one of the most popular cell phones of its time.

In fact, the Motorola StarTAC was so popular it was placed in the number six spot on PC World's Greatest Gadgets of The Past 50 Years. During its time on market, Motorola shifted around 60 million StarTAC phones, making it one of the most popular early cellphones by a mile.

When Was The Flip Phone Invented?

The first actual flip phone, however, was invented in 1989. It was called the MicroTAC, and it was the direct predecessor to Motorola's StarTAC phone.

The MicroTAC featured a semi-clamshell design, whereby the mouthpiece portion of the phone would "flip" down when the user was taking or making a call. Unlike the StarTAC, its buttons and screen were still displayed when, hence the term "semi-clamshell" design.

The MicroTAC was a Motorola phone too, and it picked up where the Motorola DynaTAC left off, shaving off pounds in weight and featuring a vastly more futuristic design. But the Motorola DynaTAC was an important step towards the world's first flip/clamshell phone.

Without the Motorola DynaTAC and the MicroTAC, we wouldn't have had the StarTAC. And without the StarTAC, the idea and popularity of cellphones might never have caught on with consumers, so, yes, we do owe a lot to Motorola and its innovative ways back in the early 1990s.

Keep in mind that these phones were not cheap, either - even by today's standards. The MicroTAC, for instance, retailed for over $2000 when it first came out.

First Nokia Cell Phone

You can't really talk about cell phones without mentioning Nokia because, well, without Nokia, we probably wouldn't have much a phone market today.

And Nokia's role in the growth of the cell phone market really cannot be understated. Neither can its rapid rise as a company, especially given its chequered and rather gloomy history.

For instance, in 1996, Nokia's revenue was around $6.5 billion. Most of it derived from the company's sole focus: telecommunications. By 2001, Nokia's revenue had jumped to a staggering $31 billion. Between 2001 and 2012, Nokia was the biggest phone maker on the planet.

As for Nokia's first cell phone, that'd be the Mobira Cityman 900. Released in 1987, the Cityman 900 was developed and released in conjunction with Mobira. The phone weighed 760g and measured in at 183 × 43 × 79 mm - it was a hulking monster.

In Finland, Nokia's native market, the Mobira Cityman 900 was often referred to as the "Gorba" because Mikhail Gorbachev, the then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was fond on using one to take his calls.

The Gorba was a monster of a phone though, weighing a ton. And it was only designed to work on the NMT 900 network. The Mobira Cityman 900 also made its Hollywood debut in 1987's Lethal Weapon too, where it can be seen in use in several scenes.

The Mobira Cityman 900 was the first Nokia phone, but it was not the phone that Nokia built its empire on. The most popular Nokia phones were yet to come. And these phones were tiny in comparison to the Mobira Cityman 900 - orders of magnitude smaller.

And once cell phones, notably Nokia cell phones, became truly portable - meaning, they'd fit in your jeans pocket - this was when things really took off.

Starting in and around 1992 with the release of Nokia's first mass-produced phone, Nokia 1011 which could send and receive SMS messages, make calls, and store up to 99 phone numbers, things really started to take off with cell phone adoption.

And Nokia's supplychain was their to meet demand; it produced and designed new cell phones at a dizzying rate, generating tens of millions of sales per quarter. And this trend continued from the early 1990s right up the release of the first iPhone and the first Android phones.

By the late-1990s, mobile devices were fast becoming the norm thanks to the following handsets...

1989 - MOTOROLA MICROTAC 9800X

The Motorola MicroTAC had a pretty long shelf life; it was first introduced in 1989, but then went through a few changes that moved it from an analog phone to a GDM-compatible handset in 1994.

It was eventually succeeded by Motorola's StarTAC in 1996, which was one of the first "true" mobile-capable phones ever released.

1992 - MOTOROLA INTERNATIONAL 3200

The Motorola International 3200 was the world's first digital mobile phone. Like the StarTAC, it was GSM compatible. However, it was never certified, so it could be officially linked to a mobile network.

The phone itself, which is still available in some places, as a collector's item, will actually work on the 900MHz network. You'll just have to track one down, and that will probably be pretty tricky (and kinda expensive too!).

1992 - NOKIA 1011

The Nokia 1011 was the world's first mass-produced mobile phone. It could store 99 numbers and was originally released in November 1992.

Because of the technology inside the phone, the price of the Nokia 1011 was exceptionally high - around €1796 in today's money! That's almost as much as the Samsung Galaxy Fold - a phone that folds and has laptop-grade specs!

The Nokia 1011 was able to send and receive SMS messages, making it the world's first SMS-capable phone.

1993 - BELLSOUTH/IBM SIMON PERSONAL COMMUNICATOR

The IBM Simon was built by IBM and was one of the first instances of a head held, touchscreen device. Originally released in 1994, the IBM Simon went on to sell around 50,000 units total, between 1994 and 1995.

The battery on this bad boy, however, only lasted an hour! And you thought your iPhone was bad...

1996 - Nokia 8810 (AKA: "The Matrix Phone")

The Nokia 8810 was designed to be the most luxurious phone of all time. Nokia pulled out all the stops with this one, adding in the world's first internal antenna and support for 250 contacts.

The 8810 would also connect to early 2G networks, and it was also the phone used by Neo's crew in the blockbuster film, The Matrix, making it a true classic in every sense of the word.

1996 - NOKIA 9000 COMMUNICATOR

The Nokia Communicator 9000 is basically the world's first smartphone, as it ran on an Intel 24 MHz 1386 CPU and also had 8MB of RAM. It was heavy too, and it had a full QWERTY keyboard.

It could do email, texts and make calls - three things that hardly any of the competition could manage in the mid-90s.

The Nokia Communicator cost £1000 when it was first released in the UK.

1997 - Nokia 6110

The Nokia 6110 was the first mobile phone to use an ARM processor and was just one of a long line of 6xxx series phones from the Finnish company.

The handset was targeted at the consumer market and featured things like improved call-quality and extended battery life. It was also the first phone with an advanced user interface, a feature that would soon become standard.
Nokia 6110 Features:
1997 - Motorola StarTAC

Inspired by the communicator from Star Trek, this bad boy was the world's first clamshell handset. Another first for Motorola.

1998 - Nokia 5110

Excellent battery, slim by 1998's standards, and it also featured Snake. What more could a 90s consumer want? Interestingly, this was the first mobile phone I ever owned. I think I was in year nine at school when it came out. At the time, pretty much everybody in my year at school had this device.
Nokia 5110 Features:
1998 - NOKIA 9110I

The Nokia 9210i was the successor model to the Nokia 9000 Communicator and it featured a TFT color display, a 32-bit ARM processor and the first instance of Symbian OS on a mobile phone.

The handset was used by Val Kilmer in 1997's remake of The Saint, as well as Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock in Bad Company.

1999 - BlackBerry 850

The BlackBerry 850 was the first handset released under the BlackBerry brand. Ten years later, RIM would be crowned the fastest-growing company on the planet. And we all know what happened post-2010 as Apple and Android arrived on the scene. BlackBerry's fall from grace is perhaps the saddest thing I have witnessed in my years as a tech journalist. The company, once so influential, now doesn't even make its own phones. Tragic, really...

2000 - Nokia 3310

The phone that all of your mates had at school - if you went to school in the mid-to-late-90s, that is. Even in 2013, many regard the 3310 as one of the best mobile devices ever created. Some even say it's indestructible.

2002 - Samsung SGH-T100

Before Samsung took over the world it made handsets like this, which was the first phone ever to use a thin-film transistor active-matrix LCD display.

2003 - BlackBerry 5810

It didn't have a built-in speaker so you had to plug headphones in to make phone calls, but the BlackBerry 5810 did have email and a QWERTY keyboard.

2003 - NOKIA 1100

Over 250 MILLION Nokia 1100s were sold during its time on the market, making it one of the most successful phone releases of all time. Even by today's standards.

The Nokia 1100 was designed to be basic; it didn't feature a lot of the fancy stuff other Nokia phones had, and this made it very attractive to more basic users.

The Nokia 1100 was officially developed for emerging countries like Nigeria and India.

Nokia's one billionth phone was sold in 2005, as a result of this handset's release.

2003 - NOKIA N-GAGE

The Nokia N-GAGE was the first-ever "gaming phone". It ran on Symbian and featured a rather unique design, whereby the keys were set out on the side of the display.

The phone was designed in an attempt to lure away gamers from Nintendo's Game Boy Advanced. The handset also included support for apps and also MP3, making it a true smartphone in every sense of the word.

On sale between 2003 and 2005, Nokia sold about three million units of this device.

2003 - PALM ONE TREO 600

The TREO 600 was probably the world's first smartphone, as it actually allowed for multi-tasking; you could check the calendar while making a call, for instance.

The result of this phone saw the formation of Palm as a company too, following the merger of Handspring and PalmOne into Palm Inc.

2004 - Motorola Razr V3

Motorola shifted over 130 million of its 'fashion' phone between the years 2004 and 2006, making it the best-selling clamshell handset in history.

2005 - BlackBerry 7270

First BlackBerry handset to feature Wi-Fi, and one of the main reasons for widespread CrackBerry addiction.

Miss QWERTY phones? Check out the Titan Pocket!

2006 - Nokia N95

A true smartphone, one that ran on Symbian, packed in a 332MHz Texas Instruments CPU, and feature 160MB of RAM. It also featured a decent 5-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. I had one of these while I was at university but, unfortunately, I ended up losing it at Glastonbury 2008.

2007 - LG Shine
LG Shine Features:

Dimensions: 99.8 x 50.6 x 13.8mm

Weight: 118g

Operating system: Java MIDP 2.0

CPU: ARM9 115 MHz

Memory: 50 MB Internal, microSD (TransFlash) external memory card slot

Battery: 800mAh Li-Ion

Display: 240 x 320, 2.2-inch Display 262K-color TFT LCD

Camera: 2.0 megapixels + Autofocus

2008 - Apple iPhone 3G

This one needs no introduction and is largely responsible for changing the face of the mobile space forever. Apple's iPhone popularised applications with millions of consumers, helped make touchscreen interfaces the norm, and broke new ground for overall design and finish.

The iPhone 3G was the sharpest tip of the mobile stick, but from here on out things would begin progressing even faster.

2010 to 2021: The Android & iPhone Era

A lot of things happened in the phone market during 2010 and 2021. The first and most obvious thing was the rise of Google's Android platform; it went from a relative newbie in 2009 to the world's biggest mobile phone operating system by 2013, destroying the previously dominant operating systems in the form of Symbian, BlackBerry, and Windows.

Symbian kind of died a death in a relatively short period of time, a death that coincided with the death of Nokia. The two things were related too; Android and iPhones did things differently. People liked how they did things, so more and more people moved away from Symbian.

Nokia died. Then came BlackBerry's slow and painful death. The company's refusal to adapt to changing market conditions combined with people adjusting to new form factors for phones, as well as things like apps becoming a thing, killed BlackBerry's market share within the space of a few years.

The company held on, pushed new phones out, but as more and more people migrated away from BBM to WhatsApp, and Apple's iPhone grew in prominence, BlackBerry's days as a player in the phone space were over. The company's last-ditch attempt to revive its fortunes was a brand new operating, BlackBerry 10, which fell flat on its face.

BlackBerry eventually yielded to market demands and incorporated Android into its phones but by this point, it had zero appeal with consumers. People had moved on, either to Apple or Samsung. BlackBerry flailed around for a bit then called it quits, switching to a licensing deal for its brand which was first undertaken by TCL.

Onward Mobility now has the BlackBerry license and has claimed it will release the first 5G BlackBerry phone at some point during 2021.

We also lost a lot of other brands between 2010 and 2020. HTC died a pretty spectacular death, and so too did LG, one of the longest-standing phone brands in the Android ecosystem. Huawei grew rapidly, almost catching Apple and Samsung, but was eventually knee-capped by the US government, losing nearly all of its market share in the space of 24 months.

Apple and Samsung now dominate the phone space. But it is smaller brands like , , , and that are growing the fastest. And this means, by 2023 or 2023, the biggest phone brand on the planet will probably no longer be Samsung and Apple. It will be a Chinese phone brand. Most likely one owned by BBK, so either OPPO, VIVO, or RealMe.

I wonder how things will change between 2020 and 2030?

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The History of Mobile Phones From 1973 To 2008: The Cellphones That Made It ALL Happen

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In the space of 20 years, smartphones have taken over the world. Billions of people use them every day. But what were the phones that started it all? Let's take a l...

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5 min read

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An Electronic Book or eBook as they are universally known is a text-based publication in digital form. While they may contain images and graphs of some kind, mostly their formats lead them to be text-based.

eBooks are designed to be read off an electronically compatible device either an iPhone, a Kindle eReader, tablet or personal computer. While eBooks are the actual text and document being read, an E-Reader is a device that makes this possible. Ebooks are stored as electronic files, they are small and easy to share and purchase.

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They are convenient, light and have a huge storage capacity, that allows for incredible travel reading, electronic notes, and character summaries. However, they were not always like this.

The First Automated Reader Is Invented

The world's first automated reader, the precursor to today's e-readers, was invented by a woman named Angela Ruiz Robles. Angela had her innovative idea in Spain in 1949. Angela Ruis Robles was a school teacher, who watched her students lug textbooks back and forth from school every day. The idea was that her reader would be far easier to carry for school children, than a number of different textbooks.

In Angela's first design, smaller amount of text were printed onto spools and were operated by compressed air. She made her first prototype in 1949. While this book was not electronic it is still hailed as the first automated reader. Her project was never picked up for mass production and she was never able to get a viable patent on the design, but there is a photograph of her holding it in 1949 so she can still claim it.

The Internet and the First eBook is Downloaded

The invention of the internet was the next huge step forward in Ebooks. Information sharing, and file sharing was the birthplace of Electronic books.

In 1971, Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, was given unlimited computer time on a huge Xerox mainframe computer in the Materials Research lab (probably because his brother's best friend was one of its operators). What might seem like an incredibly boring time in Internet history, as there were not many people on the internet in 1971, Michael Hart turned into an incredible opportunity.

The machine was used primarily for data processing, but it was also connected to ARPAnet, a part of what would later become the internet. The value of this gift, given the huge expense of buying and running such machines, he later calculated to be around $100,000,000.

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When Hart was given a copy of the Declaration of Independence at a grocery store in the lead up to the local fireworks on July 4th, he found his inspiration. Hart came up with a good use of the computer time he had been given. He typed the text into a computer, all in capitals as there was no lower-case option at the time, and sent out a message on ARPAnet saying that it was now available to download. Six people took him up on the offer and downloaded the text. The world's first e-book was born.

Hart then set about typing up more texts to make them electronically available. His entries included The Bill of Rights, the American Constitution and the Christian Bible. What he created was far more than an electronic text document, what he created was an idea. The idea of not just using computers to crunch numbers and deal with data, but to get computers sharing text and literature.

What Happened Next on the TimeLine?

It was a long time before the next development came along in 1987 from the computer games creators East Gate Systems. It was around this time that the company published the first hypertext fiction work. The first hyper textbook was titled Afternoon by Michael Joyce and was available for purchase on a floppy disk. This book was created as the first demonstration of a new online program called Story Space. Story Space was a software program available for Personal computers for creating, editing and reading hypertext fiction.

1993

BiblioBytes launched a website to sell ebooks over the internet, the first company to create a financial exchange system for the net.

1999

American publisher Simon & Schuster created a new imprint, iBooks, and became the first trade publisher simultaneously to publish titles in ebook and print format. Featured authors included Arthur C Clarke, Irving Wallace, and Raymond Chandler. Oxford University Press offered a selection of its books over the internet through netLibrary.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology in America held its first ebook conference. Dick Brass of Microsoft declared that ebooks were the future of reading. "We are embarking on a revolution that will change the world at least as much as Gutenberg did," he declared, and predicted that by 2018, 90% of all books sold would be Ebooks.

This number, 90% fails to take into consideration the very stable and profitable Gift Book Market. 40% of the paper book market is what is called a 'gift purchase'. People buy each other books - and they don't buy each other EBooks. Christmas is still a huge time for selling books, recipe books, picture books, design books, coffee table books and picture books for newborn babies. This market of bookselling has not been affected by Ebooks and ebooks and still have not tapped into this market.

eBooks and how they change the way we talk about reading

Pages do not exist in E-Books, and the orientation of the reader within the text can be altered depending on adjustments made to the font size and layout. Therefore, the location of the reader throughout the text is displayed as a percentage of the whole text.

The rise of e-readers has prompted speculation about the ways the mind processes words on a screen compared to words in paper books-the concern that holding a physical book promotes understanding in a way that staring at a screen does not. The physicality of the book, sparks the reader to see the text not only for its content but as an object as well.

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A recent study by Sara Margolin suggests that e-readers do not hinder reading comprehension, at least in short passages of text. As research like this gains ground, the use of e-readers will only increase, and with it, new ways of conceiving of and talking about reading will surface in the language, and in turn, enter dictionaries.

Yet we still use the term bookmark to hold the place where we are up to.

While eBooks are unlikely to ever totally replace the physical books, their continued development will surely create new and interesting ways for people to consume content.

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How E-books changed the culture of reading

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An Electronic Book or eBook as they are universally known is a text-based publication in digital form. While they may contain images and graphs of some kind, mostly their formats lead them to be text-based. eBooks are designed to be read off an electronically compatible device either an iPhone, a Kindle eReader, tablet or personal computer.

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SETU Trimester 3 2022 - RAI102 Research and Insight

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3.2 WATCH |  How to Empathy Map (2.51 min)

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3.2 WATCH |  How to Empathy Map (2.51 min)