Nokia vs. Google platform integration

After spending $8 billion to buy Navteq and its mapping database, Nokia has now decided to give away the mobile navigation service with its various phones. Darla Mack describes the new service from the standpoint of Nokia handset users.

Of course, maps — fixed line, mobile, location aware (whether GPS or fixed line IP address), 3D, turn-by-turn navigation and every other incarnation — are a major strategic area for the Monster of Mountain View. As a friend noted last week, the location aware mapping services are probably the only category leading aspect of Google’s Android platform right now.

And, in fact, Forbes remarks on the forthcoming battle between Nokia and Google. However, Forbes spends most of its time on the impact on TomTom and Garmin, which are already being substituted away by the Apple and Google mobile phones. (Nokia is stronger than either the iPhone or Android in Europe, where Forbes reports that TomTom has 44% market share.)

Even if the mobile phone substitutes aren’t quite there yet, this is another milestone in the mobile-phone-as-the-Swiss-Army-knife-convergence-device view of the 21st century electronics industry. This highlights the direct and indirect competition between the various service and software platforms: Nokia is a hardware company that offers services, Google is a services company that now sells hardware, and both are providing handset software.

So it seems like another milestone away from open innovation, towards vertical integration (or related diversification), in which every platform owner feels it has to own every piece of the puzzle. That doesn’t count the network operators, who also want to rent their own mapping services. (The Verizon service comes in for caustic criticism by one of the Forbes readers.)

To me, Apple’s purported partnership to promote Bing on its iPhone makes more sense than integration. My hunch is that Google and Nokia will still try to control every piece of the stack, even as Microsoft retreats away from mobile platforms into applications.

Just another Manic Monday

Monday morning classes are often difficult for all concerned, and bring to mind the 1986 observations sung by Susanna Hoff.

I went to two talks (the other one I’ll post after I’m caught up on grading) today. Tonight it was Mobile Monday, the Silicon Valley chapter. The program had three speakers:

• Jordy Mont-Reynaud, the mobile dev lead for Bebo, talked about how this social networking site is going mobile in the next few weeks.
• Sam Altman, the student entrepreneur founder of Loopt, who explained how location-based services support their “social mapping” service which allows people to socialize and get together. (The service has been live for a year with Boost Mobile).
• Ain Indermitte of Nokia introduced Nokia Mosh (“mobilize and share”), a beta site for the Nokia developer community (or others) that seems like a cross between Flickr and SourceForge.

I didn’t get the point (USP in the words of Rosser Reeves) for Mosh, but I signed up anyway, getting this prompt:

In the future MOSH will be advertising supported. To ensure we show you the most relevant offers possible from our partners, please complete the following. We will never share this information with anyone and it will only take a minute to complete.

The first two speakers were more directly relevant, since they part of the sample of social media companies in the thesis project that I’m supervising this year. As a platform guy, what was most striking was the difference between the two in their view of mobile client software.

The Bebo talk was subtitled “If it doesn't work on a billion phones, don't bother.” He noted how hard it is — absent preloaded software — it is to get new applications onto mobile phones, using SMS as the least common denominator, and quoted a statistic (couldn’t find the original) that 61% of mobile games played recently were downloaded games — i.e., 39% of the games were the lame free games preloaded on the phone rather than from the $2 billion mobile game industry.

Loopt is going the other way — winning loyalty with various native applications (BREW, Windows Mobile, and various forms of Java) rather than the compromises necessary to run a WAP-based application. Part of the reason is that the location-based APIs vary by carrier, although attempts are being made to abstract the APIs across devices. (He also noted a series of privacy issues that sounded similar to those addressed by FireEagle from Yahoo).This was the first time I attended a meeting of Mobile Monday, and I was quite impressed. The place was packed — we had about 150 people crammed into the Nokia Research Center (Palo Alto) — I counted 110 chairs while the rest was standing room only, and even with that they turned people away at the door.

Mobile Monday is the Nokia-founded networking group that began in Helsinki in 2000 and now has spread to a total of 45 chapters. Other than Helsinki, it seems the Beijing, London and Silicon Valley chapters are the most active. I helped start two local trade associations, and it’s rare that I’ve experienced a group with this kind of energy.

Photo by Mobile Monday organizer Mike Rowehl via Flickr.

Technorati Tags: mobile phones, Nokia, location based services, Web 2.0