Given its low penetration in today's smartphone-focused world (16% of 2011 smartphone sales, down from 33% in 2010, according to IDC) and its recent difficulties, Nokia is not frequently listed as a technology leader in 2012. But it is too soon to dismiss the company entirely.
Its deal with Groupon is worthy of note as an alternative to relying on device sales as a future revenue model. Though it's not the first company to think of advertising as a business model, and advertising is my least preferred business model, having a robust indoor and close-proximity-to-point-of-sale technology will be highly strategic and might change advertising into something less distasteful.
The "Groupon Now!" service for Nokia Lumina smartphones (currently only available in the United States) works outdoor as well as indoor. The really big potential is to use the device's precise location to target highly appropriate messages to its owner/user. When I say "highly appropriate" I mean to target a notification based on so many factors about the user's current situation
, that the advertising becomes an anticipatory service.
An "anticipatory service" is basically anything that is provided to a user just prior to their needing it in daily work or personal life in a way that it provides unprecedented levels of benefit. An existing anticipatory service is a routing service on GPS devices that takes a user around a traffic jam before you arrive in the traffic itself. Another is an alert when you are approaching the expiration date of your contract with an important merchant or service provider. As simple and common place as anticipatory services may seem today, they are not (often) based on user location and they rarely alert a user at the point of sale (i.e., a location).
Nokia's CTO office had its eye on Indoor Positioning-based services many years ago. When Nokia acquired Gate5 and Navteq it significantly increased its assets in the location and positioning technology space. Here's a 2009 video of Brett Murray talking about anticipatory services driven by indoor positioning.
If there's a company that needs to adopt a new business model, it has to be Nokia. I hope that this company's indoor positioning technology portfolio will help it either directly, through relationships directly with the providers of anticipatory services, like Groupon, or indirectly by licensing its patents to others who will be leveraging indoor position as one of the key triggers for notifications.
It will just need to do it quickly in order to beat Apple and Google to the punch line.