This morning I attended the Yahoo and Nokia press conference at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square. I don’t attend many press conferences but I have to say this one was a snoozefest. I went in with my developer hat on since I am working on mobile strategies now for my startup. I thought I might hear something about how Nokia/Yahoo would be pulling in developers - but except for a couple times Carol mentioned the word developer, my theory was not valid.

I really want to be excited for both Nokia and Yahoo – but not sure this deal will really bring in any new share for either company. If you don’t use Yahoo Maps today, you won’t when there is a badge for Nokia on it. And I doubt anyone will buy a Nokia handset when they see the Yahoo Mail/Chat logos on the box.

Here are my notes plus a photo of both Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

• The financial terms were not disclosed
• Nokia will power Yahoo Maps and Navigation under their Ovi brand
• Yahoo will power email and chat on Nokia mobile devices
• The partnership will begin to be seen in production in the second-half of 2010
• Carol Bartz on Yahoo Maps, “we haven’t been focused on our maps platform” and “we lost focus on maps about 2 years ago” – I can’t believe Yahoo is going to try to focus on Maps now when they are the #4 player? I haven’t heard one developer (including myself) ever talk about using Yahoo Maps for development
• Bartz – “we will partners with others to leverage their strengths”
• there was a lot of talk about developing markets and countries – Kallasvuo noted that Nokia is #1 worldwide and wants to be #1 in US market as well.
• the deal isn’t exlusive and Yahoo will continue to push their services on other devices including iPhone and Android
• Bartz said that in a couple of weeks we will be WOWd by the new social features and integration that Yahoo will be launching around Yahoo Mail

I will post my thoughts on this deal in relation to the other players that appear to be dominating the US market (Android, iPhone, HTC) later this week.

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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.

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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?

Find more stories about: Apple, iphone, mobile, Nokia, WWDC

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.

Find more stories about: Flixwagon, mobile, Nokia, Quick News

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?

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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.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, Germany 2.0, Nokia, plazes, Quick News

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.

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This morning in Europe, Nokia and T-Mobile are announcing a new collaboration plan to accelerate the availability of new Internet services and personal social communities on mobile devices. The companies will work to enhance T-Mobile’s community-oriented MyFaves service, launched in October 2007 in Europe.

T-Mobile’s web’n'walkmobile Internet service will also become widgetized for greater pleasure. The widgets will provide customizable access to each customer’s most preferred Internet and messaging services. The deal is a two-way deal in that Nokia devices will push the T-Mobile services and T-Mobile will allow more access for customers to utilize the software and applications that Nokia provides.

Of course all of this is great for the already mobile-rich Europeans, what about us? No mobile Internet for you!

Nokia recently announced their partnership with Google which will bring Google Search to Nokia handsets.

Find more stories about: mobile, Nokia, Quick News, Social Networking, T-Mobile

Nokia is announcing this morning that they are integrating Google Search into their latest mobile handsets. The integration will begin in select markets with the Nokia N96, Nokia N78, Nokia 6210 Navigator and Nokia 6220 classic and Nokia will make Google search available to its customers in over 100 countries around the world, serving mobile owners speaking more than 40 languages.

"Providing choices for our consumers is an important driver in Nokia’s Internet service strategy," said Ilkka Raiskinen, vice-president, software and services at Nokia.

Nokia now refers to their search as, "Nokia Search, now with Google" and I am assuming it will be similar to how AOL handles search with Google. Considering how large of a player Nokia is in the mobile handset space, will this new partnership affect Yahoo and Microsoft’s search share?

This news comes a day after Nokia’s mobile ad network launch – will Google supply ads for the network?

Find more stories about: Google, Insights, mobile, Nokia, search

Nokia (NOK) is announcing the launch of a mobile ad network this morning at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Named the "Nokia Media Network", Nokia notes, "The biggest brands in the world trust us with their mobile advertising because they know the Nokia Media Network enables them to reach the largest, highest quality audience on mobile and provides the best ROI."

AccuWeather, Discovery, Hearst, Reuters, and Sprint are the first companies on board. Nokia is leveraging their acquisition of Enpocket in October 2007 to optimize the ad campaigns along with providing analytics for campaign optimization. Will Nokia’s acquisition of Twango last year also offer more opportunities for the Nokia Media Network to reach consumers on any device, whether on a computer or on a mobile? 

"Nokia Media Network’s wide reach of the most desirable mobile audience is yielding click-through rates averaging 10% in certain channels, the highest reported response rates in the industry." I wonder how many of those clicks are mistakes – with my new iPhone I’ve clicked on the wrong items more than the right items so far.

To sell in ads across the world, Nokia has expanded its account management and media sales teams to include offices in Beijing, Boston, Chicago, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Minneapolis, Mumbai, Munich, New York, Paris, Singapore and Shanghai.

Yahoo launched a mobile ad network a year ago but I haven’t heard anything about it since then.

With mobile devices moving into rich-media browsing, do we need mobile ad networks? And will the mobile ad networks be acquired by traditional ad networks looking to offer a more comprehensive solution?

Find more stories about: advertising, mobile, Nokia

Nokia and Twango have announced that Nokia has acquired the assets of Twango. The price of the transaction is undisclosed but the WSJ believes it was less than $96 million. Twango is a place to share and save your photos, videos and audio files. We reviewed Twango back in January and the service has continued to grow since launch. I was impressed with co-founder Randy Kerr’s business acumen in January and I am just as impressed in my acquisition discussion with him today.

A bit from the official release:

"The Twango acquisition is a concrete step towards our Internet services vision of providing seamless access to information, entertainment, and social networks – at anytime, anywhere, from any connected device, in any way that you choose. We have the most complete suite of connected multimedia experiences including music, navigation, games, and – with the Twango acquisition – photos, videos, and a variety of document types," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Multimedia, Nokia. "When you combine a Nokia Nseries multimedia computer that is always on, always connected, and always with you together with a rich media sharing destination like Twango, people will have exciting new ways to create and enjoy rich media experiences in real time."

I had a chance to briefly speak with Randy about the transaction and here are my notes:

• The company does not share membership numbers but he said they have "sufficient numbers" to make the deal work.
• The official release states "Nokia acquired substantially all of Twango’s assets" – this means it’s an asset purchase.
• I asked about iPhone compatibility with Twango and Randy said that the app works great on the iPhone, in fact using the Safari browser, all of Twango is available.
• Revenue models info? Randy said they will continue to offer a free service and are looking into ad models and premium subscriptions.
• Who are Twango’s competitors? I was pretty sure I would hear the usual suspects but Randy surprised me by saying that Apple and Google are their biggest competitors. Apple with the iPhone and Google with their suite of social-sharing services.
• They are hiring in Seattle and the job information will be posted on Tuesday on Twango’s web site. They have 12 employees today, 6 new Nokia staff are joining the team and their goal is to double the headcount by year’s end.
• The Twango name will remain for now and will be a service of Nokia.

Congrats to the Twango team and to Nokia for getting a great service. It will be interesting to watch where Twango goes now with a large company with deep pockets behind them.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, Nokia, Quick News, twango