Nexit Ventures Invests In Open Smartphone Platform
Today Nexit Ventures announced an investment of €3 million to a Finnish Oulu based Aava Mobile (PDF here).
Aava Mobile develops smartphone platform designs based on open technologies such as Linux and Android. The open platform technology will provide more flexibility for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and mobile operators to incorporate their own brand, user interface, content, and services into the devices.
The platform includes both hardware and core software components, and thus according to the companys accelerates the development of new handset models significantly. Similarily flexibility of the open platform design brings new business opportunities for application developers as well as mobile operators.
We did an video interview with Artturi Tarjanne, General Partner at Nexit Ventures, just before the news on Aava Mobile broke. You can find the video here and here.
I dont really understand why someone would invest in a open smartphone platform. The smartphone market is dominated by certain players who like to keep their cards close. A new player is going to find it near impossible to get traffic.
Actually it will be the other way round: those with closed platforms will almost certainly loose in the long run. Those who can offer open platform for developers and still keep their offers easy to use and otherwise compelling to the "general user" will win. Techies will do some of their marketing (the most influentical part, if they are skilfull + lucky). Contact me if you want to know about one way to handle the "easy to use" part. 8)