Tag: Ovi

Vodafone walks through the Ovi with Nokia

On 07/11/2007

Following their relatively recent announcement of a multimedia initiative, Nokia reports a big win with Vodafone having agreed to carry their Ovi platform on Nokia devices that are distributed through the operator. Ovi, which is Finnish for door, was to be Nokia’s next big push towards becoming a multimedia company. One of its flagships under that umbrella, the Nokia Music Store, will now run alongside Vodafone’s own music service.

Nokia’s risk with the introduction of Ovi was that operators would reject having the Ovi links on the phones that they were distributing (not uncommon for them to do), so to have the “world’s largest operator by revenue” amongst their ranks is no small feat. Otherwise, Nokia would have seen limited distribution in markets where handset prices are subsidised by carriers, which is true in most!

With Nokia having bolstered its portfolio of offerings in recent months even more (the acquisition of Navteq being the biggest one), this opens the pipeline to a much richer content experience, and this is what might have pursuaded the good folks at Vodafone: with carriers struggling to come to terms on the “right” treatment of content to maximise sales and user experience, a door to a fully-packed store of content and applications must sound tempting.

It might actually mark a turn in the market: could it become the handset manufacturers who will take the lead in the content space and become the funnel through which content providers feed their wares to the consumer? It would make sense in that it is arguably easier for an OEM to ensure that there is optimal performance for a product on a device (after all, they manufacture the device). Such a model would bring relief to the operators who would continue to control the billing relationship with the consumer and hence alleviate fears of removing that bond but they would be a big step closer to becoming the dreaded bit pipe as had happened to ISP on the Internet. I have argued before that this process would – in any event – take longer, so that might alleviate fears.

It is breaking into the control-driven model of operators, and that is a significant development in itself. Nothing will of course change for the content providers, at least not in the short term: it is just that they need to ring a different doorbell now (or rather an additional one…).

Focus on Nokia

By Volker

On 29/10/2007

This is less of a commentary of the way you would normally find here but more a reference to a rather good Forbes article on Nokia. It is a glowing review for one but it also recapitulates Nokia’s changing fortunes in particular in two areas, namely its various attempts to converting itself into a media company (or a hardware company with a powerful media side to it) and its dealings in the US market (where Nokia has fallen to an astonishingly low market share of only 10% by failing to realise that US Americans love clamshells; its global market share is 39.2%).

On the media front, Nokia has been rather busy recently, both on the buy side (Enpocket, Navteq) as well as with another internally conceived programme (Ovi) and some new investments through the fresh Nokia Growth Partners fund, such as Vollee (streaming rich PC games to mobile phones) and Kyte (in short a multi-platform YouTube). And, as Forbes reports, it now also seems to make strides in the US market: it has entered a deal to supply phones to AT&T (starting with the 6555 tailormade for the US market), and also seems to work with Verizon on improving its footprint there.

Nokia will apparently ship 430m units this year alone. In doing so it grabs 80% of the industry’s profits on 39.2% of the market share. Going from strength to strength, it seems.

Nokia maps it out, buys Navteq

By Volker

On 02/10/2007

In Deals

Nice thing if you can get it: for a modest $8.1 bn ($7.7 bn if you discount the cash the company has in its coffers), Nokia acquired the provider of digital maps, Navteq. Even though this marks Nokia’s largest acquisition ever, it is a hardly surprising move given the recent activities of the company to flex its muscles in the content space. Its Nokia Maps application cried out for something like that (it ran on Navteq-supplied maps anyhow). To combine GPS-equipped phones with the people who power loads of todays digital maps seems smart, in particular when one fairly apparent new competitor in Nokia’s courtyard runs a fairly successful digital mapping solution itself, namely Google: If the proprietor of Google Maps enters the handset market with the already somewhat fabled GPhone (another article here), Nokia is arming itself to withhold and defend its still impressive market share of c 1/3 of the global market for mobile handsets, errh, multimedia devices. Last year’s acquisition of Gate5 seems to not have been enough for that. No other big OEM has come out with GPS-enabled devices with force yet, so Nokia’s move would also cement its positions amongst its current peers.

So what will we see? Easy, huh? After turning mobile phones in multimedia computers and slashing away on the digital camera and music player market along the way, navigation systems (or “sat nav” as your ubiquitous salesman affectionately calls it) will apparently be the next victim: who needs them if one has a GPS-equipped Nokia N95 (which, yes, also comes with a digital camera powered by a prestigious Carl Zeiss lense and has 8GB space to accommodate your music and videos).

This is the near-sighted and easy bit and I am all for it: if I can have the quality of specialist devices merged into one, then that is my device of choice even though the challenge is that you then have to beat every leader in the segment. But the history of camera and music phones shows that there is a niche that is rather a gaping cleft, in particular when also cleverly branded, and one that is apparently growing. So why not for sat nav, too?

The magic word however is context-awareness. It can probably be called the holy grail of service and product discovery and the provision of relevant offers: if I am being offered something in a context that makes the offer relevant, I am much more likely to be lured into using/buying it. This is exactly how Google’s famed AdSense works (and advertising is an area Nokia recently focussed on, too, i.e. with the acquisition of Enpocket).

The principle of context increasing relevance naturally applies to everything: if I am hungry, I am more likely to visit a restaurant. If I am at an airport, I am more likely to be interested in flight times, or travel offers, etc, etc. So combining a device that adds an important context parameter, namely location with a platform like Nokia’s Ovi that adds an array of different services (games, music, maps, etc) looks like a model that should increase the likelihood of a purchase – because it can offer the user a more relevant offering in the context in which he uses the device. Nokia seems to be finding it easier to get its content-loaded multimedia devices past the carriers’ doors, too, that is if Graeme Ferguson, ex-Vodafone Content Meister, is to be believed…

However, I will continue to call it a mobile phone…

Nokia pockets Enpocket

By Volker

On 17/09/2007

In Deals

Nokia has agreed to buy ad-platform provider Enpocket for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close later this year. This, coupled with Nokia’s recent announcements concerning Ovi, shows the Finnish giant’s push into other parts of the mobile content value chain.

Nokia’s CTO Tero Ojanperä highlighted just that: “Nokia has already announced its intention to be a leading company in consumer Internet services and we believe that mobile advertising will be an important element in monetizing those services for our customers and partners. […] This acquisition is a […] move to bring the reach and depth of Nokia to organize the market across the world, and make it easier for an ecosystem to develop.”

Nothing much to add, I guess. It’ll be interesting if they will manage to leverage Nokia’s might to extend the reach of Enpocket or if the latter will simply be absorbed by the sheer size of the former…

Nokia opens doors (if you read Finnish, that is)

By Volker

On 30/08/2007

Nokia launched its new Ovi platform to great fanfare. Ovi is apparently Finnish for “doors“, which gives a hint on what they intend to do: lots of door-opening to “delivering experiences and services”, which now is their business according to CEO Kallasvuo.

There is not too much on tangible details so far. Ovi is supposed to be the door (geddit?) to a bundle of services, namely their new music service, their revived N-Gage gaming brand (now a service and not a device anymore; good New York Times article here) and Nokia Maps. Then, it is said, it shall also “the entry point for other Web and mobile services”. Which ones? Dunno…

Nokia is of course perfectly positioned to try and unify a content experience on the fragmented mobile space: its massive market share in most markets around the world allow it to push its platform onto a lot of existing devices. As an attempt of unifying the scattered environment, this is probably as good as it will get in the shorter term, so fingers crossed!