Nokia may well have the intention of selling off its handset business according to this article.
The iPhone (almost?) de-throwned Nokia as the most profitable handset manufacturer. But an even greater threat may be the Android phones.
Maybe the maemo OS may bring new live to the company (Symbian really is dated now). And then again, maybe Nokia does need to transform itself as IBM did a couple of decades ago.
Great times ahead.
Arno Aaldijk lived the uprise of Nokia as a mobile phone giant first hand. He compared the Location Based Services business then and now and came to the following conclusion: not a lot has changed, until very recently.
Everyone has been trying to monetize on LBS since the very beginning. But customers didn’t want to pay the exorbitant rates to be localized. Google has changed this game by offering free maps and more recently free turn-by-turn directions.
Of course the handsets and software have also improved, but the challenge remains gathering the right map data and qualitative poi information. But we’re reaching a tipping point.
Monday November 16th was MoMoAms day.
The premise: location is important for mobile applications.
This has always been the case, but now it has become easy to integrate location into mobile applications. Easy, because many handsets have become location aware, or because services like SkyHook make it easy for developers to integrate location in their applications.
However one crucial hurdle has been taken away: the cost of getting a handsets location. In the past operators asked up to 1 euro for each request a location based application made to determine the location of a handset. Thus making it way too expensive. And then they asked themselves: why are there so few location based services? Don’t customer think it is worth 1 euro a pop, to know their location? Nope 
Four interesting presentations:
And one I’m not yet sure about. It was interesting, but too vague to know what the point really was (except if it was the idea to remain vague of course): Tish Shute (LinkedIn) – Writer and Consultant. Subjects: Augmented reality, beyond the end to end internet, everyware, and sustainable living.
I’ll cover each of these presentations shortly in follow-up posts. But it was again a pleasure to head north to join MoMoAms.
While Apple tries to make its Developers more happy with their reviewing processes by providing the current approval status, there are people that see (expect?) the move by app developers from Apple towards Android to really start now.
Meanwhile, Nokia has introduced its new N900 with yet another mobile OS called Maemo, and now Samsung joins the crowd with again another mobile OS called Bada.
Although this clearly shows manufacturers think there is a lot of business to be done in the app space, developers increasingly find themselves in a situation that is even worse than that of developing mobile web applications: please create separate app for every popular device.
There’s a lot going on in the app space at the moment.
I’m a huge fan of the Android operating system:
For the consumer there are also a lot of compelling reasons to use a Android phone
But when you look at how some of the players in the Android arena promote the differentiators, I’m not sure the message will hit home. The Verizon droid feature overview is not really a example of user-friendliness. And what’s with the apps promotion page?
Android is a cool platform that really appeals to a lot of developers. Now let’s sell it to the consumer!
Useful applications on mobile phones always needed to be relevant in your current context. Search is one of those applications that has been perceived as a useful application on a mobile phone from the beginning, at first by being able to perform a search here and now. It is interesting to see that consumer expectations on search shift more and more to local search.
According to this research by TMPDirectional Marketing consumers increasingly expect all their searches to be local, i.e. more than 60% of consumers expect their current location to significantly influence their search results.
If we take a quick look at Google search it seems currently ‘half way’. In Google maps on mobile it always assumes your current location to be extremely relevant all the time. However, when using the general search feature, it may differ. For example, here in Belgium, do a search for ‘pizza’ on your desktop and on your mobile, and on both platforms you will find a local results link returning pizza places nearby. However, if you do the same with ‘bakker’ (bakery) you need to use the ‘local’ option in the top menu to get your local search results. And if you do that, do not expect to see the same results as in Google maps. Customers seem clear enough in the expectations, but there still seems to be some room for improvement at Google search.
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