Nokia CEO Stephen Elop:
Nokia’s Windows Phone devices flop

Stephen Elop

Nokia (NYSE:NOK) CEO Stephen Elop  last week unveiled the company’s first smartphones running Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone platform, the opening gambit in whether Nokia’s bet on the new software will help revive its flagging fortunes. The Lumia 800 and 710 will be available in November in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, with support from 31 operators and retail partners. By the end of the year, both devices will be available in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan.

For the United States, Nokia did not announce any specific products, but Elop said a portfolio of devices will be coming in early 2012, meaning Nokia will miss the crucial holiday shopping season for the U.S. market. There are lots of unknowns in this gambit: Will Nokia’s Windows Phone devices be differentiated enough from those from HTC, LG and Samsung? Will consumers warm to Nokia’s brand, which has taken a beating in recent years, especially in North America? How will Nokia break through with carriers and retail sales representatives, two crucial constituencies? The pressure is on Elop and Nokia to deliver. If they don’t, Nokia might not last.

Sony has reportedly announced that it will acquire Ericsson’s stake of 50 percent in mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson for $1.46 billion. Consequently, Sony Ericsson will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony and will be integrated into the company’s platform of network-connected consumer electronics products.

As per sources, Hans Vestberg, CEO, Ericsson said that when the joint venture was formed ten years ago, thereby combining Sony’s consumer products knowledge with Ericsson’s telecommunication technology expertise, it was a perfect match to drive the development of feature phones. However, today they take an equally logical step as Sony acquires their stake in Sony Ericsson and makes it a part of its broad range of consumer devices.

Sony President, Chairman, and CEO, Howard Stringer has reportedly said that this acquisition makes sense for Sony and Ericsson, and it will make the difference for consumers, who want to connect with content wherever they are, whenever they want. Further, Ericsson reportedly plans to focus on the global wireless market as a whole as well as how wireless connectivity can benefit people, business and society beyond just phones. The agreement, subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close in January 2012.  According to reports, the transaction also includes a patent deal enabling Sony to receive the five sets of patents that are essential to making the phones and a licensing agreement on any other intellectual property.

Reports suggest that shares in Ericsson rose by 5.1 percent to $10.7, while Sony’s share price rose 5.4 percent to $21.7 at the time of closing.

Yahoo expanded its mobile presence today to include mobile messaging. The company debuted a beta version of Hub, a free device-agnostic texting app available through Google’s Android Market.

Unlike Apple’s iMessage or Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Messenger, Hub users can text contacts using any carrier or device, even feature phones. In addition, contacts receiving messages are not required to have the app themselves. iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger only work among users of those services.

Hub messages are sent over Wi-Fi or data connections, and users will not incur traditional texting fees regardless of how many messages they send. Hub offers group messaging, instant notifications and free local and international messaging to select countries.
Hub users must have a device running Android 2.2 or above, a U.S. SIM card and a texting plan.

Yahoo is one of many entering the field for mobile messaging. In August, Facebook revealed its own free texting app, Messenger. The app allows users to message Facebook friends in real-time and is available for devices running iOS, Android or BlackBerry. And earlier this year Microsoft’s Skype acquired group messaging solutions startup GroupMe, and device maker Samsung Electronics launched ChatON, a carrier-agnostic mobile messaging app.

The move toward application-based texting, highlighted by Yahoo’s new Hub, likely will cut into wireless carriers’ SMS revenues as more and more users sign on to such services. Chetan Sharma, from Chetan Sharm Consulting, said in a new report that the United States unseated Philippines as the king of text messaging with almost 664 messages per subscriber per month, compared with the Philippines which is seeing a sharp decline in per user messaging due to IP messaging. He said some of the European operators are also experiencing the pain of declining SMS usage. But analysts have pointed out that any reduction in SMS revenues (most wireless carriers charge 10 cents per SMS) will be more than offset by increases in carriers’ data revenues.

While voice control has been part of Android since the dawn of time, Siri came along and ruined the fun with its superior search and understanding capabilities. However, an industrious team of folks from Dexetra.com, led by Narayan Babu, built a Siri-alike in just 8 hours during a hackathon.

Iris allows you to search on various subjects including conversions, art, literature, history, and biology. You can ask it “What is a fish?” and it will reply with a paragraph from Wikipedia focusing on our finned friends.

The app will soon be available soon from the Android Marketplace but I tried it recently and found it a bit sparse but quite cool. It uses Android’s speech-to-text functions to understand basic questions and Narayan and his buddies are improving the app all the time.
The coolest thing? The finished the app in eight hours.

When we started seeing results, everyone got excited and started a high speed coding race. In no time, we added Voice input, Text-to-speech, also a lot of hueristic humor into Iris. Not until late evening we decided on the name “iris.”, which would be Siri in reverse. And we also reverse engineered a crazy expansion – Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri. We were still in the fun mode, but when we started using it the results were actually good, really good.

You can grab the early, early beta APK here but I recommend waiting for the official version to arrive this week. It just goes to show you that amazing things can pop up everywhere.

Google has launched a new resource page : http://www.ourmobileplanet.com/ There are many cool features but what is best is that all of this info is at our fingertips.

Whether you are creating a business plan, writing an article or planning a new mobile strategy these figures and tools are going to be useful. Bravo Google.

Android smartphones already outsell the iPhone in the U.S. and many other markets, but one area where iOS still reigns supreme is app downloads. That may not last, though: research firm Xyologic estimates that if current trends continue, downloads from the Android market will surpass the iOS App Store in June of 2012. That’s around the same time that the number of available apps are expected to be equal.

Right now, at least 494 million iOS apps are downloaded by users every month. The same figure across most Android devices is just 279 million, but in a short eight months Android will have caught up worldwide, at least by Xyologic’s math. Certain markets already have a heavy Android dominance, including the Czech Republic, Poland and Portugal. It appears that Apple’s tablet dominance will take a lot longer to fall by the wayside – iPad app downloads make up an impressive 15% of its download space. Whatever the equivalent number is for Android’ Honeycomb-optimize apps, it’s nowhere near that.

Notably, Xyologic’s research does not include figures from China, where Android is growing by leaps and bounds despite the (suspected) best efforts of the Chinese government. It also doesn’t include third-party app downloads from the Amazon App Store and others, a factor that might increase exponentially as more and more tablets use the popular solution, to say nothing of the upcoming Amazon Kindle Fire. Keep in mind that all of these estimates are tentative and based upon usage as of August, 2011.

[via Taiwan News]

I came across this very interesting chart.

Following partner Nokia, Intel has now announced it is to abandon the MeeGo platform as well. Instead, it will be working on a new mobile platform with Samsung that’s called Tizen.

Though it will be possible to develop native apps for Tizen, the companies will promote its HTML5 engine toward app developers. The core of Tizen will in part be built from what Intel and Nokia developed for MeeGo. Other bits will come from another project that is merged in Tizen; LiMo. The first Samsung hardware with Tizen is expected nid-2012 while the SDK’s should de ready in four to six months from now. What will happen to Bada is unknown.

Have you heard of BloomWorlds? Chances are you probably haven’t, because even though I’ve been seeing intermittent updates about it on and off for the past year and a half, they never actually came out with a product, which was supposed to be a family-friendly, curated Android market. As of today, the project is shut down, and the post mortem report filled with reasons for its failure is sitting in our inboxes. And now your screens.

I’ve heard a lot of talk, and one of the founders even fruitlessly spent hours buying Brian and me drinks at CES trying to convince us that their market had a chance. I simply wasn’t seeing it, but he was adamant and as any passionate founder refused to accept reasoning. That was one of their biggest mistakes. If you’re going to bet against Google and the rest of the industry, you better make sure you have the top notch idea and top notch execution. BloomWorlds lacked both.

Ironically, they are probably going to see more press now than ever (BloomWorlds even passed on TechCrunch and Mashable coverage at the time).

^{If after 1.5 years you’re still staring at this, something is wrong}

The biggest app stores are now tipping the half-million mark in terms of overall inventory, but a recent report from the app analytics firm found that when it comes to the most popular apps, consumers often gravitate to content published especially for their markets. In the biggest store of all—the App Store from Apple—on average, nearly one-third of the most popular apps in each country store—27 percent—were unique to those stores.

Distimo notes that the U.S.—at 7,158 apps—has the most exclusively published apps in its App Store. No surprise, really, given this is where so many developers are based and where so many hope to find success first before trying elsewhere.

Looking at worldwide trends, language also plays a big role.

Taking the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia, these countries’ top apps overlap 54 percent of the time. Although Latin America does not seem to get ranked by Distimo, you can imagine that it too would see a similar trend. The storewide average overlap is 33 percent.

On the other hand, countries with the highest number of localized apps in the top rankings marry two important trends: they have very mobile-friendly consumers, and they are countries where English is not the first language.

Japan topped the list with 67 percent of its most popular apps being popular in that country alone. China, where Apple launched a country-specific App Store in October 2010, came in second with 56 percent of most popular apps specific to the China App Store.

Is there a limit to how many local apps have a chance against the world-wide bestsellers like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja? For now, it appears the answer is yes. Distimo notes that one-third local seems to be the general number for local apps’ popularity across all platforms, not just Apple’s.

Nokia’s Ovi Store, for example, has significantly more country-specific apps than other app stores—29.4 percent for Ovi with Apple the next-highest proportion at only 5.2 percent—but Distimo notes that the number of local apps that make it into the top rankings are roughly the same as for the App Store and the Android Market, despite Apple’s and Google’s catalogs having far fewer local apps.

That could spell an opportunity for those developers looking to have more visibility among users in specific markets.

You can see that trend playing out especially in China. Platforms like Android are seeing the creation of full-out local app stores to compete with the Android Market, catering to those using devices built on the OS, with app stores from the likes of Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) and Tencent.

There have also been a number of companies setting up shop to help localize apps from, say, the U.S. market for the Chinese market. The most recent of these was an effort from the DIY app platform Mobile Roadie, which as partnered with local mobile agency FabriQate to launch Q Mobao to help Western developers create iOS and Android apps for the Chinese market. It has also launched a similar initiative in South Korea.

Targeting specific markets is not just about local content, of course.

Last week IDC published figures (via Bloomberg) for smartphone market share in India, and it turns out that Apple has only a tiny part of the market in that country, shipping just over 62,000 iPhones to India in the last quarter, less than it shipped to Norway. That gives Apple a 2.6 percent share of the smartphone market in India. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) currently enjoys the biggest share of the market in India, with 46 percent.

With India the second-largest mobile market after China, that is a big miss for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). IDC notes that part of the issue has been a lack of widespread 3G network for fast mobile data services. Although users can still connect by WiFi, that’s an impractical solution for a person on the move.