Publication Period January 26 through February 1, 2008
Nokia and Friends To Wage Mobile War On Everyone Else
“Nokia estimates that in 2010, the total Internet services market will be approximately €100 billion ($146 billion),” said Nokia president and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. “Nokia’s goal is to be the world’s number-one in bringing the Internet to mobile devices.”
Nokia has slowly been pushing its way into absolutely every aspect of the industry. Nokia’s VP of sales Chris Dailey said at CES that Nokia intends to become a leader in Internet services for mobile devices. Nokia, he said, shares Xohm’s WiMAX vision of mobilizing the Internet and intends to provide appealing WiMAX-enabled devices.
Nokia and Facebook To Join Forces?
It looks like Nokia and Facebook are working on getting the social site to Nokia’s handsets in a pretty large fashion. This could be as large a move as the iPhone’s YouTube button and also feature Facebook in Nokia’s retail displays, says PaidContent.org.
Rumors abound about this deal, and a big one is that the deal will involve Nokia purchasing a stake in Facebook, much like Microsoft has, according to PaidContent. Facebook has been gathering funds slowly for what seems to be a push towards Europe and a deal with Nokia, the
world’s largest cell phone maker, would dramatically increase its global distribution. These rumors seem to have an air of plausibility because of the players involved. Nokia is fighting against Apple and the iPhone, which features a YouTube button and uses Google as its default search engine. With this move, Nokia puts itself into direct competition with Google, which it soon would have faced anyway in the realm of handsets.
The Nokia Squad and The Google Gang:
If Nokia gets Facebook, it also gets Microsoft. Microsoft, which has a deal to do Facebook’s US advertising until 2011, recently beat out Google for its advertising outside the US, mainly because Microsoft bought some of Facebook’s shares. Nokia has been tacking on other mobile services and partners for a while, from Ovi’s social site Mosh to Sony Pictures and CNN adding videos to Nokia’s repertoire and Universal’s music catalog. Nokia bought the digital map company Navteq for $8.1 billion last October to revamp and improve Nokia Maps. Nokia has been locking horns lately with content providers though; Orange and Warner Music both recently refused to support Nokia’s Music Store.
Google’s online services team has its Internet herald YouTube, Apple and its iPhone with four million units sold, MySpace which Google paid News Corp $900 million to handle its advertising for three years and Google’s search engine that is often the default for mobile and PC browsers and is a search engine you have most likely already used this morning.
Social Sites: Destination Mobile
MySpace and Facebook have been battling it out since Facebook hit the college scene. MySpace has cornered the market, enough so that News Corp bought Intermix Media in 2005 for $770 million in cash and thus acquired MySpace. Google serves as the main search engine for MySpace and has already proved to be mobile friendly.
Last October, MySpace received around 75% of US traffic for social networking sites and Facebook reached around 15%, according to the Web tracker Hitwise.
MySpace has already made its way to the mobile world. It is offering things like sending and receiving messages and friend requests, commenting on pictures and profiles, posting bulletins, blogging and searching the site. It’s up and running with two versions available, one received through a subscription for about $3 a month and the accessed through MySpace Mobile Web beta, a free WAP version that is ad supported. MySpace has controls over most applications, usually either shutting down or buying them, on its site and these controls definitely made a move to mobile a bit smoother.
Facebook officially launched its Facebook Platform for its Internet site back in May of 2007. Facebook is unusually open to developers and encourages them, so not only do developers get access to Facebook’s 20 million users, Facebook has become a rich platform for third party applications. If its platform is such that the applications can be easily shifted to and viewed on mobile devices, Facebook is poised to explode past MySpace in the mobile market. MySpace has joined Google’s OpenSocial – and Anti-Facebook – Alliance that provides a platform for developers to write one set of code for multiple social networks. Facebook leads in sheer numbers of third party applications, but Alliance members hope to gain an edge with the addition of MySpace. If this deal goes through and Facebook looks good and is easy to use, users will buy Nokia mobiles just for Facebook.
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said, “One of the things to say, very clearly, is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real. If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as a college kids or teenagers thing. But it is very real.”
Nokia Spars with Google and Apple Over Mobile Apps
This isn’t Nokia’s first dance with mobile applications. The Nokia Music Store aims to provide an experience to rival iTunes. The portal features major labels, independent and local artists’ music for both streaming and purchasing. Users can purchase individual tracks or full-length albums.
Nokia maps is a free application, though it cost Nokia over $8 billion, that comes with zooming and route planning from just about anywhere. Nokia maps also comes with voice-guided navigation for devices with built-in or external GPS modules and purchasable city guides. Google maps is perhaps better known more widely used, but it is now paired very directly with Apple in the minds of consumers thanks to the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Google will undoubtedly remain a strong force in both searching and map functions, but now Nokia has the opportunity to advertise itself as an alternative to Google and as a more complete alternative to Apple’s iPhone.
The Video Game
YouTube is the unrivaled champ in online video and has the chance to be the same with mobile video. It is the unanswered feature that will keep Google’s gang one-step ahead. YouTube is thought of as user generated content (UGC) but has moved far beyond that to create Internet heroes and display professional content. Google’s Eric Schmidt said, “This is the next step in the evolution of the Internet.” Nokia’s best shot at getting in this game is enabling Flash on its handsets, which is something Apple does not do, and making sure the market knows that it’s YouTube-compatible.
If a user goes off looking for valid competition to YouTube, he probably won’t be back for quite some time; however here is a brief rundown of some:
* Eyespot – It’s an easy to use, colorful video uploading site with some community features. It allows video “mixing” but the quality is YouTube-esque at best and is a very rigid process. With a “100MB” limit and some of their “Most Popular” videos with views in the mere 30s, there’s no reason to come over here from YouTube.
* Ourmedia – It started off as “The Global Home for Grassroots Media” but is now “Channels of Creativity.” It used to be the hub for socially conscious and activist videos. Now it is a hub of slow page loads and frustrating interfaces. Oh and about every page we went to after the main page was littered with spam, and yes some of them are promoting YouTube videos.
* Vimeo – It touts “seven billion users who have uploaded over 950 trillion videos.” The sleek application feels more like a well designed Web site than an application with a lot of nice privacy settings. It allows mobile video uploads and allows HD uploads that retain their quality. Due to its privacy features, Vimeo will probably never reach the views of YouTube, but those features will keep users coming back and keep this site booming.
*Google Video and a slew of others – Yes Google Video did exist at one point and then it was soundly beat by YouTube. Now Google Video is a YouTube viewer that provides a few extra ways to filter and sort. There are also countless other sites offering the same thing with mini version of the stardom and following YouTube commands. So, if a user isn’t looking for Diva-status, they’ll be looking at videos over on YouTube.
Google and Yahoo: Search Engine Battle Royale
Google and Yahoo have been squaring off since Google entered the search business and slowly eliminated the need for a phone book. Google and Yahoo both had very different approaches – Google began and stayed much more browser-based using techniques like Ajax, a group of tools used to create interactive web applications, while Yahoo was based more in the semi-proprietary widget world. Yahoo had a chance to edge out Google, as widgets tend to be a bit more flexible and Google did have some major challenges in converting its resources to a mobile compatible state, but Google has thrived, becoming a verb and sitting on the iPhone you have or probably wish you did.
Yahoo has been doing deals with Motorola, LG, Samsung, and Nokia for quite some time now. However, even though Yahoo Go runs on 250+ mobiles, and comes preloaded on some phones made by Motorola, LG, Samsung and Nokia, many carriers in the US remove the software. The New York Times recently reported that “no American carrier offers phones with the Yahoo software installed, forcing American consumers who want to use Yahoo Go to download it themselves.”
Yahoo has no control over any phone’s operating system and its ties with Nokia aren’t nearly as strong as the Google and Apple tie, major obstacles to getting its product out there.
Yahoo has been slowly cutting back and phasing out services, like removing almost all community features from Yahoo 360 and killing Auctions and Ask Yahoo.
Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang said in his blog last October, “we’ve closed Yahoo Podcasts and plan to shut down a number of one-off services, and we’re currently assessing our options.
The big thing to notice here, is that no one really noticed when most of these services began cutting back and dieing off. The recent announcements of coming layoffs might mean the move to mobile proliferation could be a last ditch effort to keep Yahoo from having one foot in the grave.
People Who Live In Windows Houses Shouldn’t Throw Apples
If Nokia and Facebook do come together, Microsoft coming along for the ride is a safe bet. Microsoft currently handles Facebook’s ads in and outside of the US. Microsoft bought about 1.6% of the Facebook stock to the tune of $240 million. Google also saw the opportunity here and the ad giant bid for a stake of Facebook.
With Google and Apple partnering up in a big way for the iPhone and iPod Touch, there could have very easily been a Facebook button if Google had won the bid.
Microsoft picked up Facebook to improve its standings in the Web markets and Apple seems to be in Google and thus MySpace’s corner, even if behind the scenes. If this all goes well, Windows might even pick up the Nokia Music Store for its mobile OS in order to beat out iTunes that currently has a limited availability. Now that the iPhone and Windows mobile are taking root in the world mobile markets, the clash of these Titans can be expected to bleed over into the social networking world.
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