Look who's talking (or are they?): Shy Finns go cell-phone crazy
Using technology that's headed our way, they even dial to feed the parking meter.
Timo T.A. Mikkoonen, a TV producer, doesn't have to leave his van to feed parking meters in Helsinki. (Riku Isohella/For the Inquirer)
By Andrea Gerlin
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
HELSINKI, Finland - Reija Myllynen stood before a vending machine in a downtown shopping center and pressed 0600-80031, the number for Dial-a-Chocolate, twice on her mobile phone.
Seconds later, two Twix bars tumbled off a shelf in the machine, free-falling past the gummy bears and mint-filled candies.
Myllynen reached in, snapped them up, and smiled. She was rushing to her after-school job and was short of cash and hungry.
"This is lunch," she said. "It doesn't cost much more than in a shop, but it's a very easy way to get something to eat."
A bonafide Dial-a-Chocoholic, Myllynen estimates that she stops here at least twice a week. The $1.50 cost of the two chocolate bars will show up on her mobile phone bill at the end of the month, along with a charge for the telephone airtime.
In Finland, home of Nokia and veritable cell-phone capital of the world, a phone is not just a phone. It is a credit card, a menu, a stock ticker, and an entertainment center. It is a passport to the future.
By pressing their phones' buttons and reading text messages on tiny screens, Finns can transfer money in their bank accounts, trade stocks, buy cappuccino, rent videos, order flowers, and plug the parking meter - all without ever talking to anyone, which is to say without using a phone for its traditional purpose.
In the brave new world of telephony, Finland clearly leads the world.
"The U.S. is definitely behind in transaction-related services and applications," said Sarah Kim, an analyst at the Yankee Group, a technology and research consulting firm based in Boston.
But while the services so common in Finland aren't in major trials here, analysts say it's just a matter of time.
Finnish television producer Timo T.A. Mikkonen never leaves home without his mobile phone. He must take his blue van, full of equipment, to several locations each day. Under a program run by PayWay, a unit of the same company that lets Finns dial up a chocolate bar, Mikkonen can pay for parking by mobile phone.
After finding a space on the main esplanade in Helsinki the other day, he looked up at a nearby sign, whipped out his phone, and dialed the designated number. Like that, the space was his for 60 minutes. When time ran out, he let his fingers do the walking to extend it, without leaving his filming location.
"You don't have to have any coins around, which is a hell of a thing to have to be looking for while driving around looking for parking," Mikkonen said. "This gives you a free hand."
Still to come are pizza delivery, movie tickets, bus tickets, and "any service or product used daily," said a spokeswoman for Sonera Corp., which operates the PayWay program and 500 phone-friendly vending machines around the country.
And don't forget loyal-customer rewards. Finland's biggest bank, its biggest mobile phone maker, and Visa International joined forces to install in mobile phones a second microchip - one that will combine the functions of credit cards, debit cards, and consumer-loyalty programs. The pilot project is scheduled to begin this summer.
Even in Finland, which has long lived stylishly on technology's cutting edge, "it will be a revolution," said Risto Linturi, a former chief technology officer of Helsinki Telephone Co. and an investor in 10 smaller local companies.
Market penetration is certainly no problem. Nearly 80 percent of Finland's five million people own mobile phones. That's more than the number of fixed phone lines in the country and double the rate of market penetration in the United States.
Finland's affinity for mobile phones is partly attributed to its 1991 adoption of the GSM digital mobile-phone standard used for wireless-telephone communication in Europe. Nor has it hurt that Nokia - which makes 30 percent of the mobile phones sold around the world - is based there.
Dead air is rarely a problem. Finnish phones work in elevators, on the subway, and even deep in the northern forests. And the country's rural geography, Finns say, lends itself to telecommunications: When they need new cell-phone towers, they simply build them. Imagine that in the United States, where communities fight pitched battles over locating towers.
Finns also describe themselves as perfect mobile-phone users - not because they like to talk much but because they don't.
"Finnish people are not very eager to talk," said Antti Tainio, vice president of Nordea, Finland's largest bank. "We are shy. But we are very eager to use technology."
Mobile phones have become so much a part of life here that it's no longer considered rude when they ring in restaurants or at meetings.
"If you forget your phone, you drive back home to get it," said Akif Ali, chief executive of Arcus Software Oy, which is developing three-dimensional maps and guides to use mobile phones as navigational aids.
"To some people, it's like a pet," said Erja Ammalahti, a public-relations officer for Tekes, the national agency that promotes Finnish technology.
Among teenagers, mobile-phone ownership approaches 100 percent. Many go online, to Web sites like the one run by the Finnish company Iobox, where they pay for and download personalized ring tones or logos for their phone displays.
Surveys show that Finns send an average of 25 text messages a month on their mobile phones. Teachers ban the phones during exams to prevent cheating. Competitions are held to find the fastest button punchers, and one popular TV program is GSM Chat, where viewers send text messages instead of calling or e-mailing.
Linturi, the telecommunications investor who plowed the capital from his family's computer-training program into 10 Finnish high-tech and telecommunications ventures, predicts that mobile phones and related handheld devices will make it technically possible to eliminate cash within a decade.
Making that socially acceptable, however, may take longer. About 75 percent of all transactions in Finland are already performed with credit and debit cards. Checks have not been used for at least five years. Mobile-phone commerce, the theory goes, is the next frontier.
Tuula Polojarvi, a secretary stopping by the trendy Café Meteori on Helsinki's busy main drag last week, usually pays for everything by credit card. But she was curious to try the mobile pay device at the Internet cafe. In the hip confines of earth tones, track lighting and mellow music, she dialed the number specified on the machine and purchased a mocha for $2.25 plus airtime.
The mobile pay machine across from the counter spat out a receipt that was valid for three hours. No problem, since Polojarvi, a regular at the café, was ready to order. At other times, brief logjams formed as a customer stepped back and forth to calculate which denomination ticket to purchase or a new waitress became flustered by the unconventional pay scheme.
Sonera joined with Pizza Hut this month to test a system that integrates the mobile payment device with a cash register, making transactions more orderly.
Tuula Peratolo, a Sonera employee and one of a hundred participants in the preliminary trials, paid for a meal last week by dialing a preset number on her mobile phone after the waitress handed her the bill. Peratolo typed in the code, received payment confirmation, and got a receipt from the cashier as she left the restaurant.
For now, Sonera doesn't want to become a bank, Peratolo said, and only vending-machine transactions may be billed to monthly accounts.
One area where mobile payment has been more of a flop is stock trading. Petri Rutanen, chief executive of eQ Online, a day trading firm in Helsinki, said only a few hundred of the firm's 25,000 online customers use mobile phones to trade stocks and only when they can't get Internet access.
Since the mobile service was launched a year ago, it has not increased their trading or eQ Online's commissions. Customers seem to find the small screen cumbersome.
Down the street, at Nordea, parent company of Finland's largest bank, there is more cause for optimism. Nordea vice president Antti Tainio, who buys flowers for his wife on his mobile phone and describes himself as "mobile mad," is exuberant about Finns' cell-phone transactions.
Finns account for almost half of Nordea's 2.2 million online-banking customers, he said, yet are only a fifth of the population in the five countries where the company has branches.
Almost 100,000 of the bank's Finnish customers use their mobile phones (or the phones' text messaging systems) for checking account balances, transferring money, making payments, or trading stocks.
Except for mortgage payments, which still require paperwork, they can perform any traditional banking function on the buttons and display screens of mobile phones. The bank charges 65 cents per transaction in addition to the $1.65 monthly fee for Internet banking.
"If you have four or five minutes in an airport," Tainio said, "you can make bill payments ... when there isn't enough time to go to a branch or take out your laptop."
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