Is Nokia the new SEGA?

In the late 80s/early90s, SEGA was one of the biggest players in technology. In a pre-Playstation age, the Japanese company dominated the video gamesmarket along with Nintendo, producing both outstanding consoles likethe Mega Drive and video games like Sonic The Hedgehog. SEGA vsNintendo was basically the Android vs iOS debate of its time.

Fast forward a fewyears and the company is not only a shadow of its glorious past butbarely visible in the gaming world it once dominated. Profits arerapidly declining, the console making arm has been closed andgenerally, SEGA is all but out of the games development andpublishing business except for a few titles it is still pushing out.

The reason behindSEGA's decline has been discussed extensively by gaming enthusiastsand having followed that discussion with keen interest, I can't helpnoticing the similarities with Nokia's current situation.

At the dawn of themobile phone revolution in the late 90s and early noughties, Nokiawas standard bearer and pace setter when it came to mobile phones.The mobile phone market was basically 'Nokia and the rest' but fastforward a few years to the smartphone era and Nokia is struggling forany significant share of voice.

Despite various attempts at a phone that competes with the iPhones and Samsung Galaxys, including its flagship Lumia range, business hasn't been going too well for Nokia. The Finnish company recently announced losses of $1.27 billion, mainly due to a sharp decline in sales of itsmartphones. There has also been reports of unit closures and joblosses as it continues to struggle.

Perhaps the mostinteresting recent development from Nokia is that it now has its mapping app, Here available in Apple's App Store. This has caused some morediscussions about the future of the company and whether it will endup as an app and component maker for other phone manufacturers, in the same waySEGA only exists as a games developer and publisher, or if it hashatched a very clever plot to use Apple's iOS6 mapping issues torebuild faith in its product.

No one knows how the story will end but it is clear to see that Nokia will not go quietly.There are a few phones lined up to be released and the company continues to work on new ideas that will allow it to compete against other smartphones available on the market. The only questionthat is left to be answered is whether these new phones will driveNokia back into reckoning or whether it will just be the equivalentof the SEGA Saturn and DreamCast, which ultimately proved to be thelast great effort from a dying brand.

We are closer to immortality than you think

The concept ofimmortality has been intriguing us as human beings for as far back astime recalls. Through religious belief and myths such as the fountainof youth, the idea of living forever is one that has found a home inmany hearts and minds.

Even in the world ofscience, a lot of research is being dedicated to unlocking the'immortality gene'. But while science struggles to unlock the key toimmortality, the digital world is a lot closer to perfecting its ownversion of the age old idea and is more confident of what it thinksthe end product will look like.

The idea being proposedis one of 'digital immortality'. The idea is to store a person'spersonality in a more durable media, such as a computer, and allowingit to communicate with people in the future. Basically, your brain isscanned and your entire essence is uploaded into a digital form ofbits and bytes.

This means you willthen have an avatar behaving, reacting and thinking like a person onthe basis of that person's digital archive. And even after thephysical death of the individual, the avatar could remain static orcontinue to learn and develop autonomously.

Regardless of yourstance on these sort of issues or whether or not you think thiscounts as immortality, you have to admit that the feat is quiteremarkable. It highlights a progress in our understanding ofourselves and is a pointer to what technologies of the future mightlook like.

The only issue I havewith digital immortality is that it could herald an age when humanbeings are harvested for their thoughts and made redundant by superandroids created from 'the best of us'. You also cannot ignore thepossibility of tweaked digital avatars and multiple copies ofsuper-upgraded clones and what impact that would have. Human beingswould be ironically left to die.

Whatever happens andhowever digital immortality works out in the future, what I believewill be equally exciting will be the discussion surrounding merits ofthis technology and whether or not it will enrich our lives in thesame way other technologies have. It is clearly a very excitingtechnology but will it empower us like the internet has or will itintroduce us to a new way of being unkind to one another?

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