Nokia and Mobile Monday in Novosibirsk
Behemoth and Leviathan, watercolour by William Blake from his Illustrations of the Book of Job
Yesterday I went to attend Mobile Monday (because it was Monday) meeting in Novosibirsk. It was sponsored by Nokia and Nokia talked most of the time.
The meeting ran for almost 3 hours. There were (seemingly) high profile people (and informative topics):
Michael Novikov (Founder, MobileMonday St. Petersburg): About MobileMonday;
Kirill Zelenski (Business Development Manager, Russia, Forum Nokia): Forum Nokia developer support programs, developers’ community, Forum Nokia services;
Alexander Trufanov (Forum Nokia Champion): Application development for S60 platform;
Sergey Balandin (Principle Scientist, University Relations Representative, Russia and CIS, Office of CTO, Nokia Research Center) R&D and university cooperation programs run by Nokia;
Three of us from Eyeline went and it was nice to see many familiar faces from the Novosibirsk (predominately ex-Novosoft) IT crowd.
An overall impression is positive. Nokia seems to be getting active in catching up with the leaders who have taken the initiative in the mobile ecosystem lately, to wit: Apple and Google.
When I went home thinking about this, I thought of IBM mainframes vs. generic PCs, 80-90s Apple vs. Microsoft. In essence: good companies, good products may loose their market (well they all have caught up later on) to more open (MS OS OEM) or more innovative (PCs) competitors.
In any case, Nokia is a MONSTER. Huge! A behemoth (a biblical huge animal, see the image in the beginning)! 40% of the global market. More than 2 billion phones sold. 900 million people use Nokia phones every day. 1 million phones are MADE every day. (Hopefully they are all sold.)
To continue on the praise path, Nokia is also number 5 brand in the world. Pretty impressive.
Other interesting facts told by the speakers:
There are 3.7 million users of Forum Nokia, 1.8 active developers
There are 7,000+ applications for Nokia S60 and 45,000+ for Java ME
There are about 150 million S60
Launch Pad, a higher level proram for showcasing your app, costs 300 euros per year.
Forum Nokia is a gateway to Nokia
Open Innovation is an initiative for developing and not patenting something new
23% downloads from Downloads section of Nokia phone menu in Europe happens in Russia
Free content from Mash attracts 5 million daily users
There wil be many shops run by Nokia (and mobile operators like Turkcell, Turkey, BTW, loves Nokia more than any other nation except for Finland which has 90% Nokia penetration — what is penetration of Motorola in the US or Blackberry in Canada?)
I guess that’s it. If you want to know more ask me, Mobile Monday, Nokia or Google (i.e. search).
