Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone giant, has announced the shedding of 600 jobs.

The following sectors will get hit: Approximately 450 employees, maximum 100 in Finland, in the Markets unit will be affected, 130 Nokia Research Center employees globally, of which again a maximum of 100 are in Finland. Some smaller workforce adjustments are also in the plans in the global process operations. The adjustments in process operations are estimated to affect approximately 35 employees, of which almost all are in Finland.

In addition to the job cuts, Nokia plans to close its Turku site (Finland) and relocate those activities predominantly to Salo (Finland).

The changes in the Markets unit, Nokia Research Center and in other Nokia functions will come into effect on January 1, 2009. The closing of the Turku site is estimated to be completed by the end of January, 2009.

Last week Kuneri won the Best SpeedNet Pitch award at Symbian Smartphone Show 2008 in London. The CEO Ugur Kaner pitched Kuneri and their next, biggest product Pikkoo to a jury consisting of representatives from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Navteq, Orange, and Symbian. Pikkoo should be launching in a closed Beta soon, stay tuned for invitations.

But that wasn’t enough, Kuneri was also selected to represent Finland at Mobile Summit 2008 in Stockholm this week by Mobility @ Otaniemi and got the opportunity to pitch at the VC Panel event. Digital event marketing and media agency Ramblas Digital got the other speaker slot for the main stage.

Congrats both Kuneri and Ramblas!

Kuneri, Finnish Flash Lite specialist founded in 2006 and based in city of Oulu, announced yesterday the launching of public beta release of their newest product SWFPack. SWFPack is a unique online mobile development tool for Flash Lite developers.

Flash Lite is the emerging mobile technology of Adobe, already having quite good device coverage, with estimated reach of one billion devices in 2009. Content distribution for the platform has been challenging since now, as the Flash Lite content needs to be packaged as installers for distribution. Packaging has been hard to do on Windows, and simply impossible on other operating systems. SWFPack thus solves a significant problem.

SWFPack is available without cost for all Flash Lite developers. The first release allows Flash Lite content to be deployed on Symbian devices in SIS format. Kuneri promises support for Series 40 devices in NFL and Windows Mobile devices in CAB formats in the next releases. Kuneri aims to make SWFPack a standard tool, and will keep on adding features to it.

The CEO Ugur Kaner comments in the press release Kuneri has a vision to simplify development of mobile applications, enabling developers to focus on the content quality and better user experience. Ugur continues that “SWFPack is the first milestone on our roadmap and will be followed by a series of other innovations”. Ugur revealed to ArcticStartup a while ago some of the future plans the company has for monetizing its services, and we can say they have indeed interesting ideas coming up.

A friend of mine at Nokia tipped me off to this wonderful wake up software. HappyWakeUp, a smart alarm clock for your mobile phone, promises to wake you up feeling refreshed every morning. Not a small thing to promise in any measure.

I am particularly keen on getting my good night’s sleep and am already using pzizz for my napping and Phillips Wake-Up Light for my mornings. Pzizz works like magic, but I’ve found the Phillips Wake-Up Light useful only for reading at the evenings. Thus my excitement when I heard about the HappyWakeUp.

HappyWakeUp goes beyond the mere gently sound or light and instead offers us statistical analysis of our sleep pattern for the price of:  One week - 2€. Two months - 8.95€. Full license - 49.95€. This is how it works:

HappyWakeUp detects the optimal moment to wake up by monitoring the quality of your sleep using the microphone of the mobile phone. Actually it listens to your movements during the night time. Therefore the phone has to be near to you, preferably on your bed. Detection of the arousals is based on statistical analysis of the microphone signals.

To read more about how the service works go here.

The company does not say where they are based, but since there is the Finnish language option available and the English copy writing has quite a few typos I’m guessing they are from Finland.

It’s a compelling story and I’m eager to try it out. Before trying tho, I need to get a Nokia phone which is a bit of a let down. No happy wake-ups for iphone owners. According to the company behind the service, Smart Valley Software Ltd., the service works only with Symbian 60 3rd edition platform and can be installed in Nokia mobile phones.

I was personally about to get a Nokia phone to go along with my iphone anyway, just to have the video recording capabilities with me at all times. But I can see this nifty service bypassing potentially significant tech savvy market if they are not hard at work with the HappyWakeUp iphone app. A nice opportunity for an iphone app developer perhaps.