Nokia Announces In-App Purchasing For The Asha 303
For developers, having as many payment models as possible gives better flexibility for your app's business plan. This is especially important when targeting the frontier of new untapped markets, such as those where the affordable Nokia Asha 303 is expected to expected to be popular. Nokia just announced that they are now supporting in app purchasing for the Asha 303, which is the first for the Series 40 platform.
Interview With Kalle Koutajoki Of Foodie On Developing For Symbian
In our series with Nokia we continue to discuss possibilities of developing for Symbian. This time we interview Kalle Koutajoki of Foodie.fm about their application and why they decided to go ahead with development on Symbian. Foodie provides an online service around recipes and shopping. Their application is able to give you a shopping list based on the recipe and also helps you see where the products are in the actual store and order the goods to your home door. Let's go ahead with the interview!
The Mobile App Juggernaut Is Only Just Beginning
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Aman Ghei, an early/growth stage Investor at Accel Partners. You can follow him on twitter with @amanghei.
There’s a lot of noise lately about whether or not mobile apps are sustainable, or have any future. But so far, and despite some real challenges and issues, mobile apps have been nothing short of success.
The challenges for developers working on mobile apps range from visibility and pick up rates to loyalty and monetization. The majority of revenue generated by app stores today still comes from the top 100 apps and the “long tail” is often ignored. As the demand for smartphone real estate increases, the cost of acquiring new mobile customers is rising rapidly as well. Seamless payment and customer acquisition methods are other big challenges that apps are struggling to solve. Not to mention how inhomogeneous the two leading platforms - iOS and Android- are.
Nokia: Symbian Anna Coming Next Month
Nokia has also announced today in Singapore, that they will be introducing 10 Symbian phones in the coming 12 months. Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, said on stage that they plan to offer support and software upgrades through 2016 giving some hints on the continuity of the platform for developers. According to an article in AllThingsD, Nokia will also start shipping the new version of Symbian, Anna, on new hardware next month. Current Symbian phone owners will be able to upgrade their phones with the new version starting August.
Nokia Announces Restructuring Of Its Business
Nokia has today announced its "third and fourth" steps in its realigning of its organisation to meet the new strategic goals of the company. Basically this means that Nokia will look to lower its headcount by about 7000 in total, while 3000 of these will move to work with Accenture. Accenture will be made responsible of Nokia's Symbian development.
Russian Mobile Market's Trends
Yandex recently conducted a survey among the users of its mobile maps application. Turns out the majority of the people use the app for keeping track of traffic to avoid being stuck in traffic jams. Searching for addresses and places is only second on the list and most of those requests appear in the afternoon (between 13:00 and 16:00), which means most of the smartphone users live in populous cities and travel to unknown destinations for work or lunch. The report also gave an insight into the mobile platforms market in Russia. Nokia is the current market leader: Symbian phones are currently the most popular in the Russian market. However, their market share has shrunk by a staggering 12% last year. Apple is on the second position and during the past 12 months iPhone's marketshare has risen as much as Nokia's has fallen - by 12%. Finally, Android's popularity is growing even faster than iOS' - it grew by 14% in 2010.
More Information On How Nokia Plans To Transition To WP7
All About Symbian's Rafe Blandford was on Sunday in Barcelona to listen to Stephen Elop and Jo Harlow talk on how Nokia plans to transition to Windows Phone over the years and what this eventually means to the developers and consumers. Naturally, many feared that no one would be interested in developing software for the platform anymore now that it has been publicly announced that its development won't be continued indefinitely.
Reports State iPhone And Android Dominant In US Markets, While Others Continue To Lose
Zokem is a Finnish based market leader in the next-generation mobile analytics, providing its patented products to the leading players of mobile and media industries. Earlier today Zokem released an interesting report on how the various smartphones and operating systems perform in the US market. The gist of which clearly puts the likes of older Windows Mobile phones and the Symbian devices to have lost the battle in the US. Which isn’t surprising as users in the region have migrated quite quickly towards the iPhone, Android and the BlackBerry.
Furtiv Joins Photo App Craze With Fotogram
Furtiv is a Finnish mobile app developer that has just launched a photography app called Fotogram. The app is very similar to Hipstamatic, created for the iPhone. In essence, you're able to assign a set of filters for your photos. We haven't seen too many photo apps coming out from this region so Fotogram is a nice addition to the pack. The app is currently only available for the Symbian platform on Nokia phones. The company has also launched quite a few other plugins that enable users to upload their images and videos to photo sharing services online.
Internet Apps And Native Apps: Why Neither Is Going Away, But The Coming Years Will See A Tremendous Power Shift
People love a good story, no matter what form of content it is they're consuming. Journalists, especially those who cover the technology industry, like to apply the same elements that make up an attractive narrative to their writing, so what most people get today is a tale of two or three competitors, the hurdles they have to overcome to deliver the solution they've envisioned and marketed, and then the demise of the one who couldn't execute properly. No matter how enticing it may be to remove the complexity of the battle for consumer's hearts, minds and wallets in order to make the story easily digestible, reality is often quite different. Take for instance the current obsession with mobile applications and how they're going to eclipse the internet as the delivery platform of choice for services and software.
Fortumo Sideswipes Boku, Zong And Other Facebook Mobile Payment Providers
Fortumo is an Estonian startup (see our previous coverage) focusing on making it possible for everybody from individuals to home-based businesses to global web entrepreneurs to easily and cheaply collect payments from their customers using mobile payments. The company emphasizes that it should be as easy, quick, and cost-effective to start using mobile payments on your site or in your app as creating a blog or a homepage.
Fortumo has now released a new service called FortuMoPay, designed for selling credits (to be used e.g. on virtual goods) in online games, web applications, and social networks.
MoSync Driving A New Cross-Platform App Store Ecosystem
MoSync, a Swedish developer of cross-platform mobile app development tools (previously Mobile Sorcery; see our previous coverage), has big plans for creating a whole ecosystem boosting open cross-platform App Stores. MoSync's new CEO Dusyant Patel, and Co-Founder Tomas Uppgård opened up MoSync's plans for ArcticStartup.
The global revenue from mobile applications, consisting of both paid downloads and mobile advertising, is estimated to increase to $17.5 billion by 2012 from $4.1 billion in 2009. The estimate is based on an independent study by Chetan Sharma Consulting (well, as independent it can be, being commissioned by GetJar). While massive amounts of players in the ICT industry are rushing to their own app store of some kind, developers are faced with an ever increasing burden and business challenges.
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).
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 Cuts Jobs. A Sign Of Times To Come?
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.
Kuneri Wins at Smartphone Show, Gets to Mobile Summit with Ramblas
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 Releases Online Tool for Packaging Flash Lite Apps
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.
HappyWakeUp analyzes your sleep
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.
