While there have been doubts whether Nokia seems to be able to get their act together in 2010 with their business, I am confident that at least one part of their company they’re kicking butt with their products. The N900, running a totally different operating system compared to other Symbian based phones, has been the subject of good talk in the press recently. Most recently, a Finnish developer, Toni Nikkanen, managed to dualboot Apple’s OSX 10.3 on the phone, albeit taking close to 2 hours to the “About My Mac” screen. Nikkanen used PearPC emulator to boot the Mac OSX.
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Nokia’s New Flagship N900 Dualboots Android And Mac OSX
Uplause Introduces Real-World Massively Multiplayer Crowd Games For Big Events
Massively multiplayer online games and Wii Sports are so last season, it seems. Uplause is a new Finnish gaming startup with quite an interesting a concept — “Crowd Games” or Massively Multiplayer Crowd Playing Game (MMCPG) as the firm calls them. Uplause’s crowd games are developed for large events, where the audience can collectively participate in playing the interactive mini-games, real time, on location. See a quick overview of the concept in the video below.
Nokia, Please Try!
Some ten years back I was fascinated about the stories Nokia told about the upcoming technological evolution of mobile phones. As a Finn, I was of course proud of Nokia’s success, and almost religiously believed in Anssi Vanjoki’s preaches. He said that in a few years, most of the cellphones would contain a camera, and a significant portion will also have a GPS receiver. Nokia would be shaping the markets dramatically. Now we can see that it was true.
In parallel with the device evolution, irreversible changes have emerged in business, communication, information, personal and social life and wherever you can imagine, along with the internet era. We have changed our behavior, thinking, expectations and so on because of so many internet-enabled services. We have learned to want services and tools that work. No more can we tolerate applications the setup or use of which requires a technical expert. And frankly, we want it and often get it for free. A great range of software applications, services, hosting, disk space, whatever – in practice for free. Just select what you like most.
Moozement Rebrands Itself And Becomes HeiaHeia, One Of The First ‘Nokia Funded’ Startups To Emerge
It’s great time to take the first step with your New Year’s resolution to exercise more, before you give up and forget it like you did last year. At least I did. Moozement, a Finnish startup offering a simplified training log for sharing your activities with friends, has rebranded itself and become HeiaHeia (see my previous interview with one of the founders here). “Heia! Heia!”, pronounced similarly to “Hey ya, Hey ya”, is a Norwegian sports chant.
The company states that the key driver for the development of the service has been to create a sports service which anybody could use with her or his friends – not just the devotees of a particular sport or the users of certain technical gear or the fans of a given brand.
The founders, Ivan Kuznetsov and Olli Oksanen, are both ex-Nokiates who took the infamous ‘package’ when Nokia started offering it to its employees to slim down the organization. HeiaHeia is one of the first startups that emerge from stealth mode, which has its roots in the Nokia package. I know there’s other startups coming with a similar origin. I have even heard some people say that with the package, Nokia has done more to the Finnish startup scene than Tekes. I’m not sure about that, but it has certainly given a possibility for many people with long careers in Nokia of a runway of a year to year and a half to play around with their ideas before the reality hits and they need to start thinking about salary.
Predictions For 2010 – What Are You Betting On?
The year has just turned to 2010 and it’s time to do some predicting into the future on the most likely trends this year. While they may not be accurate nor hold true in the end, it’s nice to get a feel for what people are predicting. I’ve got 6 predictions, some not so spectacular, others slightly more outside the possible reach.
The first one is a pretty obvious one based on the recent developments in the media world as well as the startups involved in this industry as well: online video will become a mainstream alternative for advertisers. This does not mean that online video itself will be watched in equally large amounts to regular television, but it will become an alternative and a possibility for advertisers. This essentially means that the industry itself will grow as a business and become an attractive platform for doing business.
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Nokia Plays With Bloggers And Opinion Leaders – Watch And Learn!
Nokia has sent out some of its new flagship phones, the N900s, to some of the tech and gadget bloggers around the world. Tracy and Matt’s blog received one and have posted a great video on unboxing the phone and taking it into use as well as running through the basic functionalities of the phone. What makes this unboxing a bit more interesting is the fact that, to open the package – you have to plug in a USB cable and “hack” it.
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Rumor: Nokia Dropping Symbian Also For The E Series
We just recently reported that all high-end N series multimedia devices will be running the Linux OS by 2012, even though X series and E series devices will continue to run Symbian OS. We also predicted that Nokia will dumb Symbian altogether before long.
Now it seems like that’s happening sooner than we thought or Nokia wants to admit. Our source tells us that a contact at Nokia’s legal department unofficially affirmed that Nokia will also drop Symbian for the E Series enterprise range. This is no doubt a rumor, but we are pretty confident this could be true. Here’s why.
Nokia, just as the rest as us, are seeing increasingly that the smart phone is not only for the early adopter or the affluent consumer, but is actually becoming ‘the people’s phone’ in the developed world. Nothing tells this story better than seeing iPhone coming to Tesco in UK (via TechCrunch). At the same time, even though N900 might be hyped, it is very geeky even compared to the Android phones coming out, let alone the intuitive bliss of iPhone (see the video below by Engadget).
Spotify Adds Support S60 Devices – A New Growth Strategy In The Making?
Spotify announced yesterday that is has added support for Symbian smartphones. Symbian is used by Nokia, SonyEricsson and Samsung. This has been a long awaited release as Symbian is still the most widespread phone OS around, thus dramatically increasing the potential for new Spotify users. While being a nice update and all, there might be something else in the makes regarding these application platforms. While many companies port their software to multiple platforms, not many are able to take advantage of them to the extent Spotify does. Earlier this month Spotify announced that it has signed a deal with 3 UK to distribute HTC phones with Spotify premium included. This may be the route Spotify is more eagerly going to take in the near future regarding other operators in Europe as well.
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Nokia Comes Clean: Symbian Will Go
Until today the Finnish Sisu and some rather big sunk costs has prevented the world biggest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia to admit they have been going down a wrong path already for a while. This wrong path is called Symbian. It seems that Nokia has started to use their own Nokia Maps and turned finally around.
Ben Smith of TheReallyMobileProject reports that Nokia will let Symbian go in 2012 and focus on Maemo. All high-end N series multimedia devices will be running the Linux OS by 2012, even though X series and E series devices will continue to run Symbian OS. That is, until Nokia will decides Symbian should be banned altogether.
Nokia Looking To Unload Dopplr?
TechCrunch has heard that Nokia is looking to sell off Dopplr, a company they acquired less than a month ago. If this is indeed true, I wouldn’t want to be a Nokia shareholder. In essence, Nokia paid for recruiting Marko Ahtisaari, Dopplr CEO (former Nokia) as well as Matt Biddulph, Dopplr CTO. The reason I wouldn’t want to be a shareholder is that paying for these kind of recruitment fees isn’t the smartest path down the road to gather a winning team of professionals.
We also heard that there isn’t a lot of synergies regarding the product roadmaps of Ovi and Dopplr, as they were mainly after the team behind Dopplr. This again raises an interesting point, would you as an entrepreneur sell your company at any cost and whatever the future may look like for your beloved one?
Ahtisaari From Dopplr To Head Nokia Design
We have heard from inside Nokia that the ex-CEO of Dopplr, Marko Ahtisaari has been appointed to head Nokia’s Design department. This comes just after Nokia acquired Dopplr for undisclosed sum and a long silence that preceded the official announcement yesterday (see our story here).
At the same time Nokia has announced that it has appointed John Martin, a former Apple Vice President, to head a unit that focuses on Linux based devices running Maemo operating system like the latest N900. (via Finnish Taloussanomat)
It will be interesting to see how Ahtisaari will shape Nokia this time and how long he will stay there. Last time he stayed almost two years with the Finnish mobile phone giant pulling the Design unit from individual separate pieces into a well functioning shop before leaving in August 2006 to Blyk as a Head of Brand & Design. What goes around comes around.
Nokia Acquires Dopplr (This Time For Real!)
Marko Ahtisaari, the CEO of Dopplr, has just posted a blog post on the Dopplr Blog that Nokia indeed has acquired the company. Furthermore, Nokia has confirmed this with their own press release. Last week we quoted on ArcticStartup a rumour originating from Techcrunch that Nokia has acquired them. This stirred up a lot of publicity and since no party confirmed the rumour and one of the co-founders stated the deal was fabricated – we were under mixed messages and were unable to decide which side is right.
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Dopplr Acquisition A False Rumour?
It seems that the Nokia acquisition of Dopplr we just wrote about, referring to a TechCrunch rumour, might be a hoax. We’re receiving multiple sources referring to this as nonsense. Perhaps one of the most relevant is the fact that Matt Biddulph, one of the founders of the company, has stated that it’s completely fabricated.
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Nokia To Acquire Finnish Startup Dopplr
There are rumours circulating the web that Nokia is to acquire Dopplr. Rumours started when TechCrunch posted a post on this. Nokia apparently moved in for the scoop when Dopplr was looking for a round of financing. The supposed price Nokia paid is between 10 and 15 million euros.
Despite having its headquarters in London, the company is very much based in Finland. Inoa, one of the free registries to Finnish companies, state that the board members are Marko Ahtisaari, Matt Biddulph, Tyler Brule, Saul Klein and the board is directed by Lisa Sounio.
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Jongla Creates A Mobile Marketing Platform
I heard of a new startup yesterday called Jongla. It’s a Finnish startup, that promises to take advantage of the mobile platform and its capabilities of marketing personally. The business model is simple, sell the platform to marketers as a media. What is the platform then? It’s an application that all mobile phone users can load for free and the catch here for consumers is that with the platform, they are able to send free multimedia messages to each other. The startup itself isn’t very new. The company was founded already back in 2004.
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