Nokia Archive

Consulting firm Accenture has announced their plans to acquire the Symbian Professional Services group from Nokia. The group is responsible for customer engineering and customer support with regards to the Symbian operating system.

Approximately 165 Nokia professional services engineers and consultants in the United Kingdom, Finland, Japan, Korea and Australia are expected to transfer to Accenture as a result of the agreement.  Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Peter Ropke, senior vice president of Devices at Nokia, said, “This agreement allows the Symbian professional services team to realize its full potential in the supply of independent services to the open-source ecosystem. The transaction underscores Nokia’s commitment to the open-source community and the Symbian ecosystem.”

Blogger Robert Scoble started a good discussion last week about Nokia, Symbian and the mobile market in Europe.

After walking past the Moscone Center where the Apple WWDC is being held, I noticed the sign below outside a coffee shop. It is from Symbian – they are having a “hackathon” in San Francisco this afternoon. They are pushing hard to get iPhone developers to switch to Symbian. It appears if you show up you get a free Nokia phone. In addition, they are offering free food and video games — what more could a developer want?

Live video service Flixwagon has announced a partnership with Nokia’s Share on Ovi serivce today. The partnership will allow Flixwagon users to save their videos to the Share on Ovi service. Share on Ovi is basically a repository for videos, photos and other media. I like this idea because it brings together all of a user’s media in one place.

While I don’t know who the angel investors are for Flixwagon, I believe their competitor Kyte is funded by Nokia. Interesting for Nokia to work with a competitor of one of their investments!

Symbian Guru has more details on the partnership. Earlier today Flixwagon partnered with Current TV and 12seconds on election night coverage. Flixwagon is one of the products we said would change 2008.

Mobile provider Nokia has announced the launch of the Nokia Music Store in Spain today. Today’s launch in Spain comes several months after Nokia launched in Ireland, Netherlands, Australia, France and Singapore.

To access the music store you need a computer or a Nokia mobile device. On the computer, the service is 10 euros a month for unlimited streaming. On the Nokia handheld devices, songs are 1.50 euros each and albums are priced at 10 euros. The streaming service is DRM-protected.

The desktop application also functions like iTunes in that you can transfer songs from computer to mobile.

Nokia notes regarding the launch, "The catalogue of the Nokia Music Store is focused on the local market, strongly associated with the consumer, as more than 70% of the music that is sold in Spain is local. To achieve this, there is a team in each country to determine more closely the tastes of each region, something completely innovative and distinctive from other digital music stores. Its search engine enables the differentiation between genres such as Flamenco, Latin music, Alternative or Electronic, to name a few." 

Related: Ever wonder how men and women differ on carrying styles for mobiles?

Nokia’s Jan Chipchase has provided a Nokia study on mobile interaction and carrying styles. Ever wonder where a man carries his phone versus a woman? The most telling stat from the report is that 30% of pocket carriers and 50% of handbag carriers sometimes or always miss incoming calls. Here are some other interesting points from the report:

• 55% of men carry their phones in their trousers
• 56% of women carry their phones in their handbag
• 10% of men in Los Angeles carry their mobile on their belt (I am not a fan of the toolbelt look)
• 31% of men in Mumbai carry their mobile in their chest shirt pocket
• 20% of men in Tokyo carry their mobile in their bag
• 80% of women in Milan carry their mobile in their bag
• 8% of people in Los Angeles use protective cases for their phones

If you are interested, I always carry my Samsung Ace in my pants pocket – never in my bag because I don’t want it to get scratched as it shuffles around in the bag. It’s also easier to grab when that major acquisition email comes in. Where do you carry your mobile?

Here are the slides from Nokia and the full research is also available for download.

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Zurich and Berlin-based location sharing tool Plazes has been acquired by Nokia. Plazes has 13 employees and the deal is expected to close in the 3rd quarter.  After closing, Plazes will become part of Nokia’s Services & Software unit. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Plazes notes, "in the near future plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices." One of my close friends worked with Plazes for a while and during a trip to Berlin in 2006, everywhere we went I heard, "we must enter this location on Plazes". I never found the service that beneficial and overall I found the buzz slowly dying over the past 18 months. It seems like Dopplr has taken over the buzz from Plazes.

Brady from O’Reilly Radar says that Plazes will be used to provide Nokia with a social mapping application for its new portal, Ovi. More details on the acquisition on the Plazes blog.

Last year Nokia acquired file sharing service Twango and has been pushing mobile advertising recently.

In February Nokia launched their mobile ad network.  Today Nokia is announcing the Nokia Advertising Alliance which will attempt to make mobile advertising easier for brand advertisers. The alliance brings together the many phases of mobile advertising: planning, executing, and tracking.

Perhaps this is one way that Nokia can compete with Apple – mobile advertising. If they can win over brands and their advertising money, will they want to push Nokia devices so consumers and their customer base can view and interact with their advertising messaging? 

The Advertising Alliance is made up of two parts (from the release):

• The Nokia Media Network which gives reach to millions of mobile consumers through advertising on more than 100 blue-chip mobile publishers, operator partners and Nokia properties. 
• Nokia Interactive Solutions that creates end-to-end, high performance mobile campaigns for brands from banner ads, mobile internet sites and location finders to mobile coupons, click-to-call and other advanced mobile mechanics.

Four companies have been announced as launch members of the Alliance: i-movo, Mobile Acuity, Mobiqa, and uLocate. More will be named soon.

Nokia – go own mobile advertising – Apple certainly isn’t thinking about it.