Friday, November 2, 2007

Nokia Mobile Mash-Up 2007


Yesterday, Nokia hosted its annual Mobile Mash-Up event here in Palo Alto. Nokia's CTO Tero Ojanperä kicked off the event with his fireside chat session, where he emphasized Nokia's full commitment to creating a vibrant ecosystem of application and service providers on its platforms and devices. The rest of the event was testament to that indeed with a lineup of 13 startups (including MyStrands) all doing groundbreaking work in mobile applications arena. The applications presented covered an impressive range from stress management games that react to signals coming from a physical sensor that the user applies his/her thumb on to avatars that mimic the user's facial impressions.

On behalf of MyStrands, I showcased our award-winning MyStrands Social Player app, which combines media management functionality with community oriented taste sharing use cases such as "What music are my friends listening to?". In alignment with the growing consensus that successful Mobile 2.0 applications should create synergies with web and desktop use cases MyStrands Social Player's integrated capabilities that leverage its users' online profiles and music listening habits on their PCs was very well received.

IMO Nokia has come a long way in walking the talk when it comes to having a more user centric model instead of an operator centric one. Given the fact that millions of Nokia devices are sold worldwide untethered to any given operator there is good reason to believe user adoption of 3rd party applications can accelerate as more advanced and viral functionality are introduced with the handsets. The N series and especially N95 has packed together a powerful set of those capabilities already but the price points are still out of reach for a larger portion of the demographics. At this stage I expect the early adopters to take the lead and be the ultimate judge as to what applications add value to their life and which ones are really worth raving to those friends that are left in the 20th century when it comes to mobile entertainment and productivity savvy. Without a doubt, the race has just begun!