Today we welcome a new series of blog posts from Jan Chipchase. Jan has spent a decade exploring the intersection of technology, people and culture for Nokia and frog design, and specializes in turning insights into opportunities. Jan sits on the advisory board for the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. His frequent updates from around the world can be found at www.janchipchase.com.

The largest disruptions in mobile phone use over existing practices have come from the very personal nature of mobile phone ownership. Photo by Jan Chipchase

It’s common for cell phone service developers to become fixated on mobility – a little semantic recalibration can be useful if you’re trying to set colleagues down the right path.

Arguably the largest disruptions in mobile phone use over existing practices have come from the very personal nature of mobile phone ownership: incoming and outgoing communication; social networking; web browsing and media consumption; search queries are now by default a private matter with sharing a matter of choice.

There are of course exceptions – it is wrong to assume that personal mobile phone ownership results solely in personal use – some devices are shared amongst families and businesses; it can be socially or contextually inappropriate to refuse to hand over a mobile phone when requested; use may be mediated through more technically or textually literate peers; and every day many mobile phones are indirectly shared after being lost or stolen. But broadly speaking the privacy afforded by personal ownership, its pocketable size and the modalities of use it supports make the mobile phone well suited to tasks that we prefer to keep private – including those in the realm of personal finance and transactions.

This time it’s personal.

Actually it always has been.

-Jan Chipchase