This week Nokia held its annual Nokia World Conference in Amsterdam, outlining its 2008 plans. The key themes in CEO and President Olli-Pekka Kallsvuo’s keynote address were; the ‘convergence of mobility and the internet’; and the need for environmental sustainability.
Ovi
Central to Nokia’s ‘vision’ of ‘convergence of mobility’, is the merging of individual services such as mobile applications and mobile internet services, into a kind of joined-up suite of integrated services.
The aim of Ovi is to link different services across mobile, online and PC platforms – for instance linking Nokia Maps to Nokia Photos, to enable people to take pictures of/at a location, share them with friends on their mobiles and online.
Ovi launched this year with Nokia Maps, Nokia Music Store and this month, N-Gage games service. Nokia Intellisyc Email was also launched as well as web communities (such as Widsets and MOSH), and app downloads via the new Nokia Download! service available on new NSeries devices.
A web portal to Ovi is being launched next year, while an on-device version is already available on the 8GB versions of the Nokia N81 and N95, with new NSeries devices getting Ovi in 2008.
Read on for more of the highlights of the 2007 Nokia World Conference….
Continue reading ‘Nokia World 2007 Round-up:’
Anything Nokia does, Motorola can also do, but will it do it better? It seems Motorola is following Nokia’s lead with MOSH by moving into content services after buying Australian company Tilefile.
Tilefile has developed an ‘innovative social media platform’ which can connect users through a ‘content-neutral’ media format. The platform basically brings videos, photos and audio files into a single ‘Tile’, which can be shared amongst multiple users.
The ‘front’ of each Tile contains the media files while the ‘back’ gives access to the community (i.e. users) sharing it. Users can simply click onto the Tiles to view packages of media shared with other people, and these can then be joined to other Tiles as users navigate through them.
We’re sure it’s simpler in practice than it sounds. At the moment, it’s an internet-only project, but with Motorola’s investment, we’re assuming the manufacturer plans to use Tilefile to launch its own mobile content sharing service, much like Nokia’s MOSH.
Nokia’s hopes for its new Music Store have been dashed slightly after Warner Music Group pulled out due to concerns over another Nokia service.
It seems Warner is withholding its music catalogue from Nokia’s music service because of Nokia’s Mosh social networking service that allows users to share files with each other on their devices.
In the current climate of music labels getting gittery over illegal downloads and track sharing eating into their already substantial profits, Warner would rather not be involved because Mosh users are illegally distributing copyrighted material.
Luckily for Nokia, major record labels like Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI are all still moving ahead.
In fairness Nokia has put in place checks to stop Mosh users sharing copyrighted material, although the Wall Street Journal apparently found Beatles tracks and Harry Potter content being shared on Mosh.
It seems record labels like Warner aren’t quite ready to embrace the possibly future of music distribution through content sharing on mobiles just yet.
[Via Arstechnica.com]
Nokia’s beta of its MObile SHaring initiative, MOSH, is creeping slowly towards the 25,000 user milestone. While Facebook won’t be getting even vaguely sweaty about it, we wonder how MOSH will get on once it exits beta phase and starts getting some marketing money thrown at it.
If Nokia’s serious about making MOSH work and not have it turn into another under-supported piece of corporate fashion-chasing, then it needs to give punters a real stand-out reason to get involved with the site. Tight integration of the site’s features with Nokia’s mobiles would be a good start — but we don’t see much sign of that happening right now. So Nokia… What’s it all about?
(MOSH site)
