As of 2012, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo wants Nokia to have 300 million service subscribers. In an aggressive first step, he’s planning on expanding the Ovi applications environment. But he needs to act quickly as in the past year the company’s shares have fallen by 50%. In a recent interview with the Financial Times Kallasvuo admits he is trying to change Nokia’s direction from being a handset provider to a service provider. With a formidable rival like Apple, it will certainly be an uphill battle.
Apple iPhone owners can choose to download approximately 65,000 services from the App Store, meanwhile Nokia’s Ovi only offers 4,500 applications. According to the Financial Times, “While Apple has just one phone, Nokia is trying to put mobile applications on 75 of its handsets. It is a far more challenging task.” Nevertheless, Nokia aims to level the playing field with web technologies.
One way the company is hoping to catch up to Apple across all its devices is by hosting competitions to encourage Flash Lite-based development. Most recently, Nokia announced the finalists in its “Calling All Innovators” global developer competition. Categories include web applications and runtime widgets, Adobe Flash Lite-based applications, emerging market services and location-aware services utilizing Ovi Maps. While each of the category winners will receive cash awards, the Flash Lite category winner will receive an additional prize of $10,000 from Nokia’s Open Screen Project Fund. Nokia needs to fund efficient distribution across 75 devices and multiple platforms, and Adobe needs a mobile poster child to sing its deployment praises across mobile, desktop, and consumer electronics devices.
If Kallasvuo wants to increase Nokia’s revenue, he needs mobile developers to choose to work on web based applications before building their services with the iPhone software development kit. From here, the application marketplace that offers the best revenue split and most downloads is certain to come out on top. While no individual Nokia handset will compete against Apple’s iPhone or Research in Motion’s Blackberry Curve, the number of devices sold might tempt developers to make the switch.
