MONACO: From its roots as paper mill company, rubber works and its eventual move into mobile telecommunications, Nokia has shown that it is not adverse to reinventing itself to stay ahead of the curve.

At the recent Nokia Developer Summit in Monte Carlo, the largest handset manufacturer in the world detailed yet another shift in focus — albeit a less drastic one as opposed to its earlier years.

“We believe that the best (mobile) solutions provider will win,” said Nokia executive vice-president for services Tero Ojanpera in his opening keynote address.

He said that moving forward, it will not be about who is the largest device manufacturer or the best services provider but it will be the combination of the two when brought into the marketplace that will determine future success.

“That’s why we have begun to invest heavily into building our own services and we’re placing a really big emphasis on music, messaging, maps, games and media,” Ojanpera said.

However, he said that Nokia will probably fail if it tried to tackle building all these services on its own.

Instead, the key to the future is for Nokia to remain open to third-party innovation.

“Developers do matter. We have always believed in open platforms and are making sure that third parties do have an opportunity to work with Nokia,” he said, adding that consumers now need mobile apps more than ever and that Nokia can provide the right distribution channel.

New app store

The distribution channel in question is Nokia’s upcoming Ovi Store, which will be launched later this month.

“Until now, it has been difficult for everyone to find and distribute apps to consumers. That’s why Ovi is all about discovery as we can tap into our installed user base. We’re trying to provide a more conscious approach,” said Ojanpera.

Ojanpera also spoke about the potential of this distribution channel that will be able to reach as many as 50 million devices worldwide when it launches.

When taken into consideration that Nokia sold 13.7 million smartphones (S60) in the first quarter of this year alone, the potential user base for Ovi Store is certainly a tantalising prospect for developers.

In fact, Nokia is expecting to rake in 2bil euro (RM9.6bil) in Ovi Store sales and have 300 million unique store users by 2012.

Ovi Store, which is scheduled to have more than 1,000 applications at the time of its launch, will add to Nokia’s other existing mobile download channels. However, company officials said that those other channels such as N-Gage and Mosh will eventually merge into the Ovi Store.

One of the main appeals of the Ovi Store is its ability to offer apps and multimedia content specific to a user’s location. There will be eight country-specific storefronts with operator billing at the time of launch but unfortunately Malaysia will not be one of them.

However Ojanpera said that Malaysians would be able to download content from the international Ovi Store via credit card billing.

Ovi as a platform

While Ovi Store was an obvious highlight at the developer summit, it is only a part of the bigger Ovi platform that Nokia is promoting.

The company is also positioning Ovi as the software development platform of choice — the starting point of an ecosystem that provides tools to developers and then links them to consumers.

“Think of it as layers,” Ojanpera said when asked to elaborate on Ovi as a software platform.

The Symbian operating system is what lies beneath Nokia’s WRT (Web Runtime) and Qt development platforms, and Ovi runs atop those platforms to enable developers to create new capabilities for new classes of applications.

“It raises the abstraction level to make the underlying operating system less relevant,” Ojanpera explained.

To encourage more third-party developers onto the Ovi bandwagon, Nokia announced a number of initiatives to open up its development platform.

The company said it would make available some APIs (application programming interfaces) that would give developers access to Nokia resources in developing their applications.

One key area that Nokia is encouraging developers to wade into is Ovi Maps, where it announced a contest to submit ideas for an application that would make use of the location awareness technology behind Maps (tinyurl.com/ddjwjr).

Another big announcement was the launch of the Beta SDK (software development kit) for Nokia’s upcoming N97 device, which has garnered much hype on the Internet thanks to its support for third-party widgets on its 3.5in home screen.

According to the company, the SDK will offer a preview to developers of how they can publish their content directly to the device home screen.

This means the developer can provide customers with updates as constantly as they wish. The user does not need to open the application; he can be aware of what is happening simply by looking at the phone’s home screen.

Both native applications and widgets can take full advantage of home screen publishing, Nokia said.

Web applications for the Nokia N97 such as WRT and Flash, as well as other S60 fifth edition devices, have extensions that can access platform services. So, now, native functions such as camera, location and calendar can be incorporated into widgets to provide a more personalised experience, the company said.

A final version of the SDK will be released at the same time the flagship device is due to ship next month. The N97 will also be the first device to ship with Ovi Store out of the box.

In a Flash

Nokia also provided an update of its Open Screen Project Fund that it launched with Adobe in February.

The US$10mil (RM36mil) joint market development fund is designed to accelerate the creation of applications, content and services that leverage the Flash platform and run across mobile, desktop and consumer electronics devices.

The company announced the first five applications to receive funds through the initiative — MyFestival, Golfbox, Social Portfolio, Pocket Piano and Barking Seed.

Ojanpera said that several more apps have been approved and will soon be unveiled.

“Times have never been better for Flash developers as Nokia has more than 300 million Flash-enabled devices in the market,” he said.

And once Ovi Store comes online, it will connect these developers to millions of Nokia consumers worldwide.