One definition of the shallowness of the modern world is that the focus at this week’s Nokia World conference will no doubt be on which handsets Nokia releases and whether or not they have an iphone beater tucked up their Nordic sleeves.

But more interesting than all this hardware is the pre-announcement last week of Nokia Money.  To quote from the press release, Nokia Money:

“…will enable consumers to send money to another person just by using the person's mobile phone number, as well as to pay merchants for goods and services, pay their utility bills, or recharge their prepaid SIM cards.”

This promises to bring simple 24-hour banking services to a huge number of people, particularly in the developing world.  Globally there are about 4 billion mobile phones, but only 1.6 billion bank accounts.

If Nokia can pull this off, then I think this would be a Very Good Thing. Of course, not as interesting as whether the Spotify app is approved for the iPhone </irony>, but decently cool all the same.