Social networking on your phone
2007-09-10 13:10
Helsinki - Nokia plans to build
social networking technology acquired with US firm Twango into
its key S60 software, enabling it to bring community features
faster to a wide range of phones, a company official said.
The world's top cellphone maker, Nokia, announced in July
the deal to buy Twango - a service which allows users to share
photos, video or audio files - as it bets on a take-off of
cellphone versions of hugely popular social networking sites.
"We are going to integrate it with our S60 platform,"
Stephen Johnston, senior business development manager at Nokia,
said in a speech to a trade fair in Helsinki.
When asked about social networking and the role of
communities in Nokia's future, he said: "It's really going to be
the underlying layer, across everything."
Nokia hopes mobile social networking sites - which allow
increasing swathes of the world's population to keep in touch
with friends online - will eventually encourage people to use
the internet on their cellphones with as much enthusiasm as
they do on computers.
"Its seems that for many, virtual communities are the
closest ones," Jorma Ollila, Nokia's chairperson, said at the fair.
Last week, Nokia unveiled a new music store and gaming
service, and said it would wrap them with a navigation offering
into an internet service platform under the new brand "Ovi", a
Finnish word for "door".
"In the future the services will certainly expand. It is
open, so it offers opportunity also for other service
developers," Ollila said.
Nokia's S60 software platform is used extensively in Nokia's
line-up of mid- to high-end phones, but also in advanced
handsets of LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.
Its closest rival is Microsoft's Windows Mobile.
Market surge ahead
Revenues from running networking sites such as MySpace,
Facebook and Bebo on cellphones are expected to rise sharply in
coming years as so-called "user-generated content", once a niche
concept, starts to win mass appeal.
Juniper Research expects annual revenues from wireless
social networking to increase to €2.86bn in 2012,
compared with just €190m this year.
"It is very early days. Mass social networking is a very
recent phenomenon. People haven't yet worked out how to monetise
it in the fixed world," said Windsor Holden, principal analyst
at Juniper.
Holden said smaller players or new companies have a window
of opportunity of 18 to 24 months to build communities.
"In a couple of years this market place will be crowded by
your MySpaces and Facebooks. The opportunity is there because
people carry a phone around all the time," Holden said.
Vodafone, the world's largest cellphone company by
revenue, in February clinched a deal with media group Myspace
owner News Corp that allows customers to post profiles, videos
and blogs on a cellphone version of MySpace.
But smaller companies like Munich-based Gofresh, which runs
the itsmy.com mobile social networking site with 550 000 users, expects forays by internet sites into the mobile space to fail.
"Can online companies move to mobile? We have learned -
definitely not. There is no PC company which would be leading in
the mobile space," said Antonio Vince Staybl, one of the
co-heads of Gofresh. "People always look for new stuff and the
new stuff is mobile."