Nokia sees a good future for Nokia

By the year 2012 a quarter of all content will be user-generated and passed between friends, rather than being created and distributed by today's media brands, according to interviews with "trend-setting consumers".

The Future Laboratory spoke to 9000 consumers on behalf of Nokia, all of whom are described as "active users of technology" and thus can be trusted to tell us what the world's going to look like.

As Nokia's Vice President, Multimedia, Mark Selby describes it thus:

"We think it will work something like this; someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file - the soundtrack of the evening - then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on."

All of which will be done on their mobile phone, obviously.

Driving users to prefer content mashed up by friends, as opposed to professionally-produced, are four trends which The Future Laboratory and Nokia have identified through their research.

Immersive Living reflects the way people are always on-line, while Geek Culture is a reflection of how everyone wants high-tech toys these days - at least, all the people interviewed for this study. G Tech is technology for girls - apparently not just technology for boys painted pink - and Localism sees users taking pride in content produced by their locality.

All in all it's remarkable how closely this research matches Nokia's ideal vision of the future. Consumers using mobile phones to create and mash up content, taking power away from the media brands and placing it in the hands of those running the portals and controlling the mobile user experience.

Now if they can just get rid of those power-hungry network operators then Nokia's plan for world domination will be complete, at least until the pills wear off. ®