Smoked by Windows is Microsoft’s fun, social, and viral YouTube campaign targeting iPhone and Android users. But now it’s moving offline and going to network TV — ESPN and CBS — just in time for March Madness.

And Microsoft is taking specific aim at Samsung:

The ads feature Microsoft’s top Windows Phone marketing manager, Ben Rudolph, who told us that he has the best job in Microsoft when we chatted a couple of months ago. It’s his job as director of Windows Phone evangelism to convince hundreds of millions of Android and iPhone users to switch to Windows phone … and he’s pretty persuasive.

But this particular tactic won’t work for long — the new Samsung Galaxy S IV sports a 13-megapixel camera which is bound to be better than the S III’s eight megapixel effort. And likely to best the Nokia 920′s 8.7 megapixel camera too, in spite of the built-in image stabilization that does give the 920 great night-time photos.

In 2012, Samsung sold just over 30 million smartphones in China — a 300 percent increase from the previous year and good for almost 18 percent of the Chinese market. In a stat that shows just how explosive the Chinese smartphone market is, that 18 percent market share is up only 5.3 percent from 2011, despite the tripled number of units.

That compares to Apple’s 11 percent market share.

Apple, which has achieved astonishing success in China, including selling two million iPhone 5 units on its opening weekend, still does not have a deal with China Mobile, the big kahuna of Chinese carriers, with more than 700 million mobile subscribers. Morgan Stanley recently suggested that Apple could triple its Chinese market share with an “iPhone mini,” a clear sign that even a month ago, the data on Apple’s sales in the Middle Kingdom were not where they could be.

But the big loser in China was not Apple.

Eleven percent market share in a vast and growing market — with a premium product — is actually a very good performance. The title of biggest loser goes to Nokia, which lost almost all of its share, dropping from 30 percent to 3.7 percent in a now-familiar story.

Lenovo is now the number two smartphone seller, with 13.2 percent of the market in China. Huawei captured 9.9 percent, and Coolpad trailed with 9.7 percent.

photo credit: My Daily Sublime via photopin cc

“With Apple and Samsung in an epic battle over smartphone supremacy, the biggest issue that no one talks about is overall reliability,” FixYa CEO Yaniv Bensadon told me via email.

FixYa’s smartphone reliability report says that Samsung smartphone owners have consistent issues with microphone and speaker quality — plus battery life problems, particularly with the Nexus line. According to the report, Nokia users say their phones are laggy and have a poor app ecosystem — this is not a shock — and Motorola customers say their phones have too much pre-installed crapware, poor quality touchscreens, and bad cameras.

How did FixYa arrive at these conclusions?

The product Q&A site took 722,558 troubleshooting requests posted by smartphone owners to its site and analyzed the data to see what issues were reported most for each manufacturer. Then FixYa normalized the data for relative market share — as defined by Statcounter.org — and derived a Smartphone Reliability Score.

The upshot? Apple wins, big time, and it’s not even close:

1. Apple: 3.47
   26 percent market share, 74,163 problem impressions
2. Samsung: 1.21
   23 percent market share, 187,520 problem impressions
3. Nokia: 0.68
   22 percent market share, 324,439 problem impressions
4. Morotola: 0.13
   1.8 percent market share, 136,436 problem impressions

“Our newest FixYa report looks at lines like the iPhone, Galaxy, or Lumia,” Bensadon said in a statement. “The result is a scaled approach to fairly compare these top companies to truly see who is the most reliable, and who is barely even competing.”

FixYa also provided data on the most common problems for each smartphone manufacturer. Browse that data in the gallery below:

One big question I had was on the market share data … it’s not U.S. market share, certainly, where Apple had 53 percent market share last quarter. When I checked with a company representative, he said the data provided by Statcounter was for global market share.

It’s worth noting that Statcounter’s numbers differ somewhat from other reports we’ve seen.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More than a quarter of global internet traffic on mobile devices went through Apple devices as Apple led all mobile vendors for the first time in January 2013, according to web analytics company StatCounter. Nokia, which had been tops with 37.67 percent in January 2012, dropped to third as Samsung also broke past the declining Finnish company.

But in spite of its strong showing, it’s not all sweetness and light for Cupertino. Apple’s share is not growing — anymore — so much as Nokia’s is falling.

“It’s good and bad news for Apple,” Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, said in a statement. “Apple has been handed the number one spot despite its falling usage share. A decline in Nokia usage from January 2012 to January 2013 means the Finnish company ceded the top spot to Apple.”

Who really is growing?

Well, public enemy number one from Apple’s point of view — the company that Apple legal has been almost exclusively focused on for the past couple of years — Korea’s Samsung.

“Samsung, in contrast to Apple, has seen an increase in its usage share since January 2012,” Cullen added.

Apple’s share of mobile internet traffic actually dropped from 28.67 percent in January 2012 to 25.86 percent in January 2013, while Samsung’s grew from 14.84 percent to 22.69 percent. Nokia’s, meanwhile, had dropped from 37.67 percent to 22.15 percent.

One very important caveat: iPads not included

StatCounter, which is used on over three million websites and sees 15 billion web pageviews a month, the company says, does not count tablet web traffic in its mobile internet stats, only phones and pocket-sized mobile devices like iPod Touches.

That hurts Apple, which has traditionally had stronger share in the tablet market than it does in the smartphone market, since iPads so very frequently absolutely dominate the web traffic share stats for tablets. In fact, one study in December said that for every 100 web pageviews on an iPad, a Kindle gets 5, a Galaxy gets 3, and a Surface gets 0.22.

photo credit: digitaljournal.com via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Few things show the turning of the technological tide more than Gartner’s global semiconductor report, released today. Together, mobile device giants Samsung and Apple bought 15.2 percent of CPUs and other chips sold in 2012.

Both grew spectacularly, with Samsung up 28.9 percent, and Apple up 13.6 percent, while HP and Dell dropped 12.7 and 13.4 percent, respectively. Samsung’s purchases topped out at $23.9 billion, and Apple bought $21.4 billion worth of chips for phones, tablets, and other devices.

“Although Samsung and Apple continue to go from strength to strength, other leading electronic equipment makers fared less well,” Gartner research analyst Masatsune Yamaji said in a statement, adding that six of the previous top 10 reduced their demand in 2012. That top 10, who together consume $106.4 billion of the total $297.6 billion semiconductor market, includes Toshiba, LG, Cisco, and Nokia.

Speaking of which, Nokia was spectacular as well — if you count flameouts. The fading Finnish phone company dropped its purchase of semiconductors by a staggering 42.6 percent, representing $3.6 billion in chips. Overall, the market was down 3 percent, Gartner said.

But not only is the guard changing, the product mix is changing.

“The PC market still represented the largest sector for chip demand, but desktop and mobile PCs did not sell well, as consumers’ interest shifted to new mobile computing devices like smartphones and media tablets,” Yamaji added.

That has implications for overall profitability, as chips that go in phone and tablets cost lest than the latest and greatest chips for desktops and laptops.

Source: Gartner

Top 10 semiconductor buyers

photo credit: samsungtomorrow via photopin cc

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

In every year, we see winners and losers: companies, devices, or operating systems. Here’s our look at some of the biggest successes and failures of 2012.

The winners

	Android What more can you say about Android? With 75 percent market share in the third quarter of 2012, the free mobile operating system from Google looks poised to take over the world.
	Samsung  Not many companies sell 55 million smartphones in a quarter. Samsung did, and it will probably do it again.
	Galaxy S III Samsung is hot in large part due to its top smartphone, the Galaxy S III. With over 18 million units shipped in the third quarter, and 30 million shipped in five months, it’s easy to see why.
	iPhone 5 Sure, it was Time’s gadget of the year. But more importantly, iPhone 5 catapulted Apple back into the smartphone leadership position, at least in the U.S.
	iPad Mini We called it immediately: light, portable, awesome, and expensive. And it even looked better up close and person in our review. But we had no clue it would become one of Apple’s best-selling iPads. And now that it’s probably going Retina in April/May, it’s just getting better.
	YouTube YouTube continues to be the online leader, by far, in online video with 800 million visitors and billion-view channels created by individuals and brands. Despite getting the boot from iOS6, YouTube just continues to grow, with 25 times the video streams of its nearest competitor.
	Twitter 2012 is the year that Twitter went mainstream, reaching 500 million users mid-summer and just recently announcing 200 million monthly active users. And despite major new API restrictions that soured its relationship with developers, a very public spat with Instagram, and an evolving shift from social utility to media company, the company continues to grow and solidify its space in fast-breaking news.
	Instagram With a sale initially priced at almost $1.3 billion and an exploding user count, not even a tone-deaf terms-of-service change that spurred a class action lawsuit and a possible exodus of some users can keep Instagram off our winner list.
	Google Android is hot — 75 percent market-share hot. Search is still a massive strength for the iconic company that runs an ad 30 billion times each and every day. And so Google makes over $100 million a day – and hits our list of hot companies in 2012.
	ARM With the vast majority of the chips in smartphones running ARM processors, ARM has people wondering whether the mobile juggernaut will challenge Intel for CPU dominance. That’s still a stretch, but not nearly what it was just a few years ago.
	Reddit With 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October — double the previous year’s numbers — Reddit is continuing its torrid growth. And it doesn’t hurt when the POTUS himself chooses your site to do an informal meet-the-people session — which required 60 dedicated servers.

Next page: The losers

Pages: 1 2 3

As previously rumored, Nokia has agreed to sell its head office building to a Finnish commercial real estate company, Exilion, for €170 million ($222 million U.S.). Part of the agreement is that Nokia has agreed to a long-term lease of the property.

“Owning real estate is not part of Nokia’s core business,” Nokia’s chief financial officer Timo Ihamuotila said in a statement, adding that “We are naturally continuing to operate in our head office building on a long-term basis.”

That long-term basis is very much in doubt, however.

For 14 years, Nokia was the king of mobile, selling more phones than any other manufacturer. That reign ended this summer, when Samsung took the title, but truthfully, it was over in effect before it was over in fact. In October, Nokia slipped out of the top three smartphone manufacturers globally, winning a pitiful four percent — four percent! — of the global smartphone market as Apple and Samsung took over half of the market by themselves.

That’s down from 31 percent in January … a precipitous decrease in a market that Nokia helped invent.

What that pitiful market share in the most profitable sector of the mobile market translates into is massive burn rate. In the first six months of 2012, Nokia burned through an incredible €940 million. That’s $1.3 billion U.S — a massively unsustainable cash flow crisis. At that rate, the $222 million in proceeds from the sale would only cover a single month of operations.

Of course, Nokia has been and will continue to cut costs, trimming 10,000 jobs in June of this year. And the company hopes to do better in the smartphone marketplace as Windows Phone, to which the Finnish company has hitched its wagon, makes strides in the market.

But even though the company still sells many, many phones to developing sectors of the market, Nokia’s future is very much in doubt.

Nokia has occupied and owned the building, which has 48,000 square meters (516,668 square feet) of office space, since 1997.

photo credit: Chiva Congelado via photopin cc

The videos all start with the same message from Microsoft employee Ben “the PC guy” Rudolph: ”Hi, I’m Ben, and today I’m showing people why Windows Phone is a better match for them than iPhone and Android.”

In the spots, Rudolph — no red nose in evidence — shows up apparently unexpectedly, surprising iPhone and Android users, and showing them something better about his Windows Phone. Cheeky, but effective, at least in the spots that made it to YouTube.

Here’s one of the iPhone 5 segments, which uses the Nokia Lumia 920, which has an 8.7 megapixel camera to iPhone 5′s 8 megapixels. Yes, that’s the same phone that Nokia famously used in its faked ad — the ad that led users to believe it was shot with the 920, when in fact it was shot with a high-end video camera.

But the camera is, actually, quite good:

A quibble: Ben doesn’t use the iPhone 5′s built-in flash. He doesn’t with the Nokia either, but if the Nokia is optimized for low-light capability, that could be seen as something of an unfair competition. Or, from the other side of the coin, as an example of why you want a diversity of devices in your mobile collection, with differing capabilities for differing user requirements.

Rudolph runs the same script by a family which has a myTouch Android phone from T-Mobile, with a 5 megapixel camera.  This time he uses HTC’s Windows Phone 8X, which has an 8MP camera:

Again, predictably, the Windows phone wins.

How effective these ads will be remains to be seen.

What is clearly visible, however, is that Microsoft is no longer content to take a backseat in the mobile device market, and with Surface and Windows Phone 8 is making a major push to become a significant player.

photo credit: smallritual via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The latest IDC numbers are out, and Android is by far the undisputed heavyweight champion of the smartphone world. If Android was Mike Tyson, iOS would be Peewee Herman, and everything else is dust on the floor.

That is, if shipping numbers are all that matter.

Manufacturers — mostly Samsung — shipped 136 million Android-based phones in the third quarter of 2012, capturing 75 percent market share. The only other growing phone ecosystem, iOS, shipped 27 million units, taking 15 percent market share.

After that, it gets really nasty.

BlackBerry captured 4.3 percent, which is, let us remember, more than double the percentage of Windows Phone — not bad for the embattled RIM, but both down and going downer. Symbian desperately clung to 2.3 percent of the market, and Windows Phone had two percent. Expect to see that number grow as Windows Phone 8 — and some positive Windows 8 and Surface tablet momentum — finally engage Microsoft’s mobile engines.

IDC’s numbers in all their glory

But the real story is Android and iOS, Google and Apple. And haven’t we seen this movie before?

I know that shipping numbers aren’t everything. And I know that the Apple ecosystem is still the strongest mobile/media/apps ecosystem in the world (well, I think I know that … some may disagree). And I know that iOS punches way above its weight in terms of actual use and usability — it’s only in the past month that the overwhelming majority of Android phones finally surpassed iPhone’s mobile web traffic share. And I know that Apple still accounts for a staggering proportion, almost certainly still the majority, of profits in the mobile device market.

But do you really think all that can continue to be true if iOS starts accounting for 10 percent of all mobile devices sold? What if it’s five percent?

I should add a caveat here: iPhone sales were probably a little depressed in the past quarter — July, August, and September — since the iPhone 5 was not released until late September. So we’ll probably see a bump in iOS market share in the next couple of quarters, which are traditionally strong for Apple in any case.

Source: John Koetsier

iPhone 5

But Android is a train that has left the station, and it is stopping for no one. (No, not even for Google — ask Amazon.) The number of Android phones sold in this quarter alone is greater than the total number of smartphones of all kinds sold in the entire year of 2007.

And, not to do the monkey dance here, developers follow users. Sometimes the other way around, too, but developers will develop for platforms that have users. Ecosystem partners, like media companies, tend to aggregate around platforms with scale.

Another caveat, for which Apple can get down on its knees and thank Google: Android is fragmented and fractured, and likely to get more so over time.

In spite of all Google is doing to try to connect and unite and consolidate the versions of Android that users have on their phones, powerful ecosystem frenemies, like the carriers, and just plain old-fashioned enemies — or at least freeloaders — like Amazon, have opposing strategic imperatives. As do Chinese carriers, who might love what Android can do for them but have little incentive to keep Google in the mix.

Because of that, and because Apple earns vastly disproportionate amounts of income from its slice of the mobile market, I’m not saying that things are going to be the way they were when “beleaguered” was the adjective du jour for every article about Apple.

But there’s no doubt that there are clear parallels. And while I love Apple’s extreme devotion to not building crap as much as anyone, there’s a very valid question here: Was it truly impossible for Apple to build a mid-market or even low-end phone two or three years ago, and possibly be in a very different position today — possibly not as wealthy, but perhaps with a larger market share?

Some will say market share is irrelevant. To them I say, go get a job at RIM. Or Nokia. Market share does matter. And there will also be some who will say that profits matter most, and Apple’s got the mostest of those. To them I say, revenue and profit are trailing indicators that reveal a lot about what you have done, not so much about what you will accomplish.

I guess, in a sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just not in quite the same way.

photo credit: Insomnia PHT via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Lies, damned lies, and product demo videos.

Nokia will conduct an independent ethics review of the now-notorious faked Lumia 920 video, the company told Bloomberg. In an effort to demonstrate improved image stabilization technology in the coming phone, Nokia shot video with a high-end video camera and allowed viewers to believe the video was from the actual 920.

Source: Fox News

The fatal cameraman reflection

That was the original infraction, caught by the Verge. Since then, it turns out that still images for the smartphone were also faked.

Oops.

Little cluetrain message, Nokia, for free: Save the dough, just commit to doing the right thing next time. A second free piece of advice? Don’t make the confession worse than the original sin.

A company spokesperson told Bloomberg that “it was nobody’s intention to mislead, but there was poor judgment in the decision not to use a disclaimer.” I’m sorry, but that is just not believable. When will companies — and PR reps — learn that when your hand is caught in the cookie jar, you can’t believably claim you were just checking how many were left?

The only reason to make an ad is to sell something. Making the image better than the reality is the name of the Madison Avenue game … quite literally in this case.

Just suck it up, own it, apologize, and commit to never doing it again. Cross your heart and hope to die.

Unless you really want to spend the money. I can always whip up a quick invoice for a few hundred K.

photo credit: PIX-JOCKEY via photo pin cc

That is despite the fact, of course, that the latest smartphone market share numbers say that Android and iOS dominate smartphone sales with a combined 82 percent market share, and that Samsung, Apple, and LG have a combined 60 percent market share of all phones sold, including feature phones.

Almost all of those phones have virtual, not hard keyboards.

Ouch.

The surprising fact, of course, is that Nokia is right: all other things being equal, a physical keyboard is probably superior to a virtual one. Most can touch-type, type faster, and make fewer errors with an actual keyboard.

There’s only one little problem: All other things are decidedly not equal. And the difference between a big screen for big media and a small screen with limited space means that most consumers who buy smartphones are choosing the big screen.

But the funniest part of the Nokia blog post?

Mastering predictive text (aka T-9) should be a rite of passage for every young (or old!) person getting to grips with their first mobile phone.

My first mobile phone was a Motorola flip phone in the last 1990s, and I had a succession of dumbphones since. I never, ever learned T9. Now, of course, I never will.

Did you?

photo credit: fensterbme via photo pin cc, KhE 龙 via photo pin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

ComScore just released its June 2012 U.S. mobile report, and the results were mostly predictable.

The unholy trinity of Google, Samsung, and Apple captured 50 percent of the mobile phone market, and 84 percent of all smartphones run either Android or iOS. But Apple is growing slightly faster in both categories.

Samsung manufactured 25.6 percent of all phones in use in the U.S. as of June 2012, ComScore says, while Apple had a 15.4 percent share of the entire mobile market, which includes both smartphones and feature phones. Motorola, which is owned by Google, came in at 11.7 percent, while LG has almost 19 percent market share.

Source: ComScore

Top mobile manufacturers

When it comes to smartphone platforms, Google is in the undisputed lead, with a 51.6 percent share. Apple has a 32.4 percent share but grew 1.7 percent over March 2012 numbers — faster than any other platform vendor. In fact, the only other mobile operating system to grow was Android, with an uncharacteristically anemic .6 percent growth rate.

Source: ComScore

Top smartphone operating systems

Predictably, RIM was down 1.6 percent, and Symbian (Nokia) also dropped.

Windows Phone, supposedly a platform of the future, also dropped a small amount. Most likely that drop was due to turmoil around Windows phones and upgradeability: If devices on the shelf right now can’t be upgraded to Windows Phone 8, what’s the point of purchasing a Windows Phone today?

ComScore also asked the 30,000 survey respondents a few usage questions. The highlights include:

• 75 percent of mobile subscribers send texts
• 50 percent use downloaded apps
• 36.9 percent access social networking sites via their mobile device
• 33 percent play games on their phones
• 27.6 percent listen to music on their phones

Image credit: David Hammonds/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There’s a war brewing. Apple and Samsung are selling half of all smartphones and the two technology giants will increasingly fight for the remaining turf, IDC researchers said Friday. Overall, the smartphone market grew just 42.1 percent in the second quarter of 2012 — the lowest since late 2009.

Globally, 406 million smartphones shipped during the second quarter of this year,  up just slightly from the 401.8 million units during the second quarter of 2011. Samsung is the No. 1 smartphone producer, selling 50.2 million devices in the second quarter, for 32.6 percent of the market, according to IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. That’s a 172 percent increase over the same period in 2011, when the South Korean company shipped 18.4 million smartphones for 17 percent of the market.

Apple saw its number of smartphone shipments increase, but its marketshare slide. The Cupertino, Calif. iPhone maker shipped 26 million smartphones in the second quarter, for 16.9 percent of the market. That’s compared to 20.4 million units and 18.8 percent of the market during the same period in 2011.

“Samsung and Apple have quickly become the global smartphone heavyweights though both deploy different approaches to the market,” IDC analyst Kevin Restivo said. Samsung uses a ‘shotgun strategy’ producing many models for a wide range of markets, he said. Apple, on the other hand, creates only a few high-profile models. Both companies “will inevitably come into greater conflict as both try to generate additional gains,” Restivo said.

The battleground likely will be emerging markets, such as China and India, where demand for mobile phones remains high despite the economic uncertainty that has held North American and European consumers hostage. The emerging markets due to their size and growth will “continue to be strong contributors” to smartphone sales, the research firm said.

Signaling how much the mobile phone market has changed, Nokia — once the king of the hill — now has a single-digit market share of 6.6 percent. The company, which is attempting to change horses in midstream, saw a 38.9 percent drop in smartphone sales in the second quarter, according to IDC. Nokia sold 10.2 million smartphones for the quarter, it’s market share falling to 6.6 percent from 15.4 percent a year ago.

Despite Nokia’s defection to Windows 7 and Intel’s difficulties finding new partners for the open-source project, the beauty of open source is that the code always lives on … in this case, with a small group of former Nokia employees and open-source diehards, Jolla Group, who have now amazingly, incredibly, unbelievably struck a distribution deal with a Chinese retail chain: D.Phone Group.

The news was first announced in a tweet — Jolla Group‘s site is not yet live:

Great news: Jolla has just signed its first sales deal. What a start for a new exciting week – follow the news today! #meego #jolla—
Jolla (@JollaMobile) July 16, 2012

According to Androidistica, the chairman on Jolla, Dr. Antti Saarnio, said in a statement that “this agreement with D.Phone is a major step in Jolla’s journey towards becoming a significant player in the global smartphone market.”

As much as I am impressed that this tiny group of developers is taking the Meego code-base and actually releasing a product with it, that statement is ridiculous.

A sales and distribution agreement with an unknown Chinese retailer is not a major step. The mobile platform wars are full of powerful and wealthy competitors. And it’s all about developers now … which means that a tiny, almost unknown platform with little distribution has a snowball’s chance in hell of survival.

Alas, it is time again to “bring out yer dead:”

Not dumbing down the information network experience for the hundreds of millions of people still carrying around feature phones, Twitter has today released a native mobile app, consistent with its iPhone and Android offerings, for all Nokia Series 40 devices.

The brand new Nokia app, available now on the Ovi Store, introduces a native, fully-featured Twitter experience to a massive pool of people with Nokia S40 devices. Nokia said in January that it had sold more than 1.5 billion of these feature phones.

The application comes just two days after Twitter released new applications for iPhone and Android meant to bring parity between to its web and mobile products.

The Nokia release is also a part of a concerted effort on Twitter’s part to reach every person on the planet, and especially those with feature phones, a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Previously, Twitter updated its mobile web app. The company also just announced a partnership with MediaTek to bring the information network experience to more people in emerging countries.

Photo credit: Honou/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nokia has at least one thing in common with a classic automobile that needs lots of work done: Breaking it down and selling off its parts is more valuable than leaving it intact.

The Finish-based company would be worth 52 percent more if it is split up into pieces and sold off, according to Bloomberg. Nokia has a market value of $25.6 billion, which is a far cry from its peak of $300 billion.

The company could be broken up into three different divisions — mobile phones, infrastructure equipment and mapping software — and sold to the highest bidder. If you combine the predicted sales from those three portions with all of Nokia’s patents the total is $39 billion, according to Bloomberg’s estimates.

So, who exactly would be interested in buying scrap pieces of Nokia? Microsoft clearly has the most interest in Nokia’s mobile division, but the company already has agreements in place that might mean it wouldn’t make sense for Microsoft to buy it. Samsung, HTC and Motorola might also be potential buyers if a Nokia breakup ever does come to pass.

Earlier this week the company indicated revenue for its handsets and services would be substantially lower than its predictions for the quarter and scrapped its yearly forecasts. Such news may lead major shareholders to decide that Nokia better off broken up and sold.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This post was written by Janet Rae-Dupree and is brought to you by Nokia.

With more than seven million mobile app downloads in 215 countries, Mexico-based Inode Entertainment knows a thing or two about international software distribution.

Tip number one: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

When Jaime Enriquez and partners formally incorporated Inode in their hometown of Chihuahua three years ago, he took advantage of every opportunity that came his way. While an American developer might have focused exclusively on Windows Mobile 6 (which had just replaced the Pocket PC operating system) or Apple’s iOS (known at the time as iPhone OS), Enriquez knew that Symbian already was a huge player across the globe. So when Nokia released a set of development tools for that operating system, Enriquez didn’t hesitate to use them.

Now two of those apps – Ming Zhou and Mayan Raiders – are among the growing company’s most popular games, and that’s via exclusively Nokia Ovi store distribution. Both games are scheduled for release in iPhone versions “very soon,” Enriquez said, but Inode hasn’t felt the need to rush it.

“In the beginning there was a lot of question about why we should focus on the [Nokia] Ovi store, but at this point we’re making as much money there as we do on any other store, and perhaps more,” says Enriquez, who has seen Inode grow to 26 employees in just over three years.

A key driver in both games’ success, he believes, is that they’re both logic-based “thinking games” that challenge users to find their way through increasingly complex mazes. The addictive nature of such puzzles lead Inode to under “thing two” about international distribution:

Give enough of the game away for free and happily addicted users will pay to work their way through greater complexity.

“We found out that being nice to the users and sharing the experience was the best advertising we could have,” he said. “Challenge them, make them think, and they will pay for more.”

While Inode’s strength so far has been in games, Enriquez says the company has been expanding its international presence by moving into every form of mobile application they can. Think of it as a corollary of international distribution Lesson 1: Sell a bit of something for everyone.

“We do Twitter clients, tourism apps, wallpaper, even event apps,” he said. “Companies putting on big sporting events have hired us to develop apps for them and we use Nokia tools to develop those because it serves an international audience so well.”

Inode , Enriquez says, wants to be “a role model for other companies in Latin America,” so it is becoming known now as Inode Technology and plans to establish offices in Canada and Jordan this year. He doubts the company would have made it so far so fast without Nokia’s tools.

“They have the best developer program in the industry,” he said.

For years now, the world’s largest phone maker, Nokia, has been in cold decline in the U.S. market. Right now, it seems left with a few trial phones and no serious attempt to distribute here. Nokia has a 5 percent market share in the U.S., well below its 38 percent global share.

Meanwhile, wildly successful new smart mobile phone platforms have launched from the U.S. — including the iPhone and Android — inspiring users with new interfaces and features that now seriously threaten Nokia’s stature as world market leader. These smartphones are showing robust growth, not only in the U.S., but across the world.

Nokia has finally admitted its mistake, and is now aggressively pursuing deals to attempt to at least double its market share in the U.S. over the next year. “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president and chief development officer, told me last week. After years of ignoring U.S. carriers, upset at their insistence to exert control over phones and customers, Nokia is working closely with Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to work with them after all. There was a good story in the New York times about this a few days ago.

In the latest sign of that about-face, VentureBeat has heard from sources close to Nokia that the company has even agreed to launch a phone in the U.S. market with AT&T using a Qualcomm chip. While details are slim (the final points are still being negotiated, we hear), and the launch date is unknown, this is surprising for a number of reasons. For years, Nokia and the San Diego chip company squabbled over Qualcomm’s ownership of a patent governing the chip that runs on CDMA networks. Nokia and Qualcomm finally declared a truce earlier this year.

Now they’ve done more than make up; they’ve jumped into bed with each other: Qualcomm was a gold sponsor at the SEE event here in London, hosted by the Symbian Foundation, the group that manages the operating system behind most Nokia phones. And Qualcomm today announced it has joined the Symbian Foundation board, meaning it will support Symbian-Nokia phones (see Q&A with Rob Chandhok, Senior Vice President, Software Strategy, Qualcomm). Qualcomm also appears willing to develop chips for AT&T’s phones, even though the carrier has used a GSM network, not supported until now by Qualcomm. Qualcomm, already a member of Open Handset Alliance which is behind the Android phones, seems to be interested in hedging its bets. Chandhok told us in the interview: “We want relationships with all platform players. We want to input to Android, Windows, Symbian phones… There are different demands from our customers, depending on their geography. Yet, we are not picking a winner. That’s not our role.” (Nokia just launched a phone with China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA networks, China’s proprietary standard that is an off-shoot of CDMA.)

Nokia plans to launch a number of other phones in U.S. market. It plans to launch the high-end N900 next month (see video links below). This is the touch-phone that runs multiple applications at the same time (something the iPhone can’t do), and does so in a way that doesn’t drain battery power within a few hours (something the Android phones have been criticized for). The reason is that Nokia has worked hard on optimizing integration between its phone hardware and software layers. I had a chance to try it out, and it’s a step up on previous Nokia phones. The N900 has a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard and uses a Maemo operating system (Nokia’s Linux version, as opposed to Nokia’s traditional Symbian operating system). It replicates a lot of the iPhone’s features, and thus that big “UI experience” gap with the iPhone has been closed. I wouldn’t say yet that the N900 phone is better. There are pros and cons to each. iPhone users won’t like the courseness of the N900 touch technology; its edit features lack the touch-induced magnifying glass and things like pinch and expand, for example.

More here:
Getting started with N900
See what else the N900 can do
Maemo browser tips and tricks
Behind the scenes
N900 interaction
The new nokia N900

Nokia will also launch its x6 phone (see video) in eight weeks. The lower-end phone (pictured at top of this article) again replicates much of the iPhone’s interface (kinetic scrolling, touch screen, landscape-capable technology), but will launch at a much lower price point: Free, if bought with a contract. This phone will run on Symbian, and is cheaper because Symbian performs well when running on smaller, lower power processors (the iPhone and Android need higher-power processors). It’s new for Nokia, but at the same time, the sophisticated touch interface features of the iPhone (including pinch, expand and slide features) won’t be replicated by Symbian’s operating system until the second half of next year, with the release of Symbian version 4.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, says Nokia will double its market share next year in the U.S, and predicts most of the headway will come from stealing customers from RIM phones. He says the iPhone’s momentum is still too strong to stop within a year, but hopes to curb the iPhone’s gains after that. The Android phones, meanwhile, show signs of splintering, because of Google Android’s willingness to allow manufacturers to dictate interface decisions — something that Symbian will exert more control over.

Matthaus Krzykowski contributed to this piece.

On hand at the conference will be Nokia executive Tero Ojanpera, who I’ll be speaking with in a fireside chat. Ojanpera said the earnings release before the conference opening will give him more room to talk openly about the company’s recent progress.

He wouldn’t comment until Thursday about what the earnings will reveal, but said he hopes to clarify some misunderstandings related to the performance of Nokia’s smartphone business, as well as talk about how the OVI store is coming along

OVI is Nokia’s online store where you can download applications for your Nokia phone. It is supposed to be an answer to popular mobile app stores offered by Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android phones and an increasing number of other players, including Vodafone and other carrier stores.

However, judging from the comments of several developers, the OVI store has been a disaster. Steve Boom, chief executive of Mig33, a social communication application popular on Symbian phones such as the ones Nokia sells, told me recently that his company has been frustrated because it has been unable to get Migg33 listed at the OVI store. After the store launched in May, Mig33′s logo was listed briefly at the store, but when you clicked to download, you got an error sign. Since then, Mig33′s team has continued call on Nokia’s business development representatives to point them to the error. At first, Nokia’s representatives admitted there were problems, and were responding to calls. However, the problem is still not fixed, despite months of time, and now Nokia’s representatives are simply not returning calls. There’s apparently something really, really wrong.

Ojanpera talked yesterday about the problem, he acknowledged only that the company had some server issues initially “in the early hours,” but that subsequently the company has done better and that downloads are now “surging.” He said the company is now busy taking next steps to resolve remaining issues, but that the company is now getting more positive feedback from developers — from things like billing and other services that have until now been more targeted to markets outside of the United States. At the bottom of the post are some early statistics the company is revealing about the OVI store performance.

Ojanpera also said there’s a perception that the company’s marketshare in smartphones is dropping. While market share did drop to about 38 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, from about 50 percent before, it stabilized in the first quarter, and even went up slightly. He would not comment on the second quarter performance, which will be revealed Thursday. However, he said that Nokia’s overall market share in the non-smartphone market is also about 38 percent. So the 38 percent level for smartphones appears more normal, in this light, especially considering the relative lack of competition in the smartphone marke earlier on, he said. With the arrival of a series of competitors such as the iPhone, Android phones and others, you’d expect market share to go down. The only question is, how much.

I’m sure we’ll have an in-depth conversation during the fireside chat, which opens at 8:45am on Thursday, and which will also include Palm’s executive Michael Abott, and Google’s Vic Gundotra. We’ve already written about Nokia’s embrace of QT, a platform that allows mobile developers to write in a web run-time environment. This aligns with efforts by both Google and Palm to push their own platforms that serve developers with ways to write predominantly for the Web standards instead of for more arcane proprietary operating systems and frameworks — such as Apple’s.

[By the way MobileBeat2009, our conference for mobile executives, is almost sold out. The last few tickets can be obtained here.]

Stats on OVI:

• About 3500 content items available for the popular Nokia devices (Update: Nokia got in touch and told me this number applies only for N97, and that consumers with older device models will see much more).
• Users from 180 countries have an active Ovi Store account
• Top 5 downloading countries in alpha order: India, Italy, Spain, UK & US
• Developers from 60 countries have uploaded their content to Ovi Store
• Ovi Store is accessible from over 75 Nokia devices in 5 languages
• Ovi Store has mobile billing from 27 operators from around the world

Content recently added:

• Tower Bloxx Deluxe – a highly popular casual game on Facebook is now available
• Ice Age 3 is out this month, July, and Sid is running wild across games, wallpapers and a video.
• Lonely Planet has 23 items including city guides, videos and phrase books to make travel easier.
• WorldMate 2009 is in the spotlight – the #1 travel app for S60 includes a currency converter, weather report & flight alerts.

Cool news apps include:

• BandFan by Earthcomber (5800/N97) a great new touch based music app that lets you quickly & easily find where your favorite band is playing
• kSnap & Translate – Snap a picture of any printed text & translate it in real time. Offered in Finnish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, French, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, German & Spanish.
• Pixelpipe – Connect Ovi Share to distribute photos, vid, etc to social networks, & blog services. Works with over 85 services across the Social Web.
• EA Games added: Monopoly World, Tomb Raider Underworld, Sims 3 and more
• New personalization content from: Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Coldplay, Pearl Jam and others
• Nokia Messaging is available & supports thousands of leading global/local email providers
• Guitar Hero World Tour is ready to rock your phone!

Popular Downloads:

• “Star Trek Ringtone” is the number one downloaded item cumulative since launch
• In June, the # 1 app in revenue was “Gravity”, developed by one person in Germany
• In June, “Photo Twister” is #1 app in volume

The conference comes at a time of considerable tension in the mobile industry: Apple is getting ready to release the next version of its iPhone this month, containing a bunch of new features, even as other players such as Nokia, Palm, Google/Android and Microsoft are unleashing — or are about to unleash — credible alternatives.

Kicking things off will be a panel featuring Tero Ojanpera (top left), board member of Nokia and head of the OVI store which launched last week, to some controversy (more here). The launch marks the start of Nokia’s effort to regain the initiative on the mobile application front. Nokia is the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, but has been under represented here in U.S. in part because it has refused to submit to the heavy-hand tactics of local carriers.  

Apple’s iPhone has stolen most of the thunder here in the U.S., with its sleek design, multi-touch interface and easy-to-understand application store. Everyone has asked what Nokia’s next step will be. Nokia, we hear, is yearning to showcase its stuff to the market, including the ability of its main operating system, Symbian, to actually operate more than one application at a time in the background — an area where Apple’s iPhone falls flat on its face. (Using an Nokia N97 or E71, you have three days of battery life, can scrobble while plugged into Last.fm, browse the web, hop over to post on Twitter, grab RSS feeds, upload photos on Facebook, scan email, and check your calendar through Exchange — all at the same time). Of course Android can do this, too, so Symbian must now show how it can keep up.

Symbian has only really been open source since December. Also, Symbian is now becoming a public brand, after previously communicating primarily with industry partners.

Joining Ojanpera on a key panel to discuss the mobile ecosystem will be Michael Abbott (top right), SVP of application software and services for Palm. The Palm Pre’s launch later this week is the other key mobile development: Palm’s fresh, Silicon Valley-based open operating system, “Web OS” represents a frontal attack on Apple’s iPhone, Symbian and Android. Just this week news came out that the Pre will sync with iTunes. Palm says its operating system represents the next step for mobile platforms – best for developers because Palm says its platform will be the easiest to develop for, and best for consumers because application are integrated on the Pre to such an extent that the user interface experience surpasses anything that has come before it. Until now, you’ve had to got your address book to make a call, and to your messaging interface to send an IM. But with the Pre, you can do all of this from a single place: From the address book, you’ll be able to make voice calls, text, access social networking, and so on.

We may be announcing another speaker on this panel shortly.

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If you’d like to sponsor MobileBeat, please contact Andie Rhyins.

See our recent post about other speakers, including Matt Murphy of the iFund, Rick Segal of the Blackberry Partners Fund, and Russ McGuire, of Sprint.

Here’s a sampling of their responses:

“I know what’s out there. I’ve been running free events in the Bay Area for more than five years now to try to bolster the mobile community when nothing else would. I’ve been working in the industry for about three times as long. I’ve developed for just about every platform, and I know the ecosystem extremely well. It’s not that I’m blind to everything else. I know everything else that’s out there, and because of that I’ve chosen to develop for iPhone. . . . Is the Nokia store supposed to challenge Apple? Or Microsoft supposed to? Or RIM? You know what folks, you had your chances. If you want to impress me, if you want me to start developing for your platforms again, get your houses in order. Once things change, once you get your stores developed, released, and proven as a good commercial channels to end users — then we can talk again. Until then we’re all just going to keep laughing at you and developing for iPhone.”
– Mike Rowehl on his blog This Is Mobility.

“The developer support on the iPhone side is years ahead of the other platforms both in terms of code objects, documentation, and quick constant positive feedback from friends and partners who all own the device. A national marketing campaign that emphasizes applications as the primary device feature doesn’t hurt either. Speaking as a developer and for fellow developers, iPhone development is fun and enjoyable development again. No one is going to do S60 or WindowsMobile dev for fun and those companies haven’t proven anyone will make money either. Big houses like Google, Facebook, Myspace,will all support all platforms. They can afford to. Smaller houses, not so much. Higher development costs + higher marketing risks. . . . Many of the iPhone apps are created by 1-3 person shops. Many part-time. They are supported an amazingly large number of books, blogs, screencasts, code samples, community gatherings, and apple developer resources covering the iPhone supported by a first-rate development environment with a toolkit that supports creating good looking apps easily (cheaply). Type “blackberry programming book” or “blackberry development”. Scant scant resources. Symbian/s60 too. . . . Nokia and Blackberry’s hardware and carrier focus has thus far led to lack of investment/interest/capability in software SDK design & developer support.”
– “Diesel McFadden” in response to my story.

“. . . Some people seem to write off the real enthusiasm that Apple has been able to stir up in the consumer and developer communities as some sort of cultish devotion that has no basis in reality. You know what? . . . It’s time to foster your own counter-cult or get out of the way.”
–“Jon Bell” in response to Rowehl’s post.

“As of now, Ovi is not a very developer-friendly place. Developers should get the VERY expensive ‘Java certified’ status for each app (a certificate that cost a decent list of devices could easily run up to $60k+). Nokia won’t do the app-verification process. Without doing anything to verify the app, Nokia takes a 30 percent cut on apps sold. Nokia is like the most tip-demanding waiter in a self service restaurant.”
– “Rapidmortal” in response to my story.

“. . . Developing for Symbian is extremely painful. The tool chain is cr*p on Windows platforms and even worse on Mac.”
–“Jim” in response to my story.

“RIM does not get it either. I tried to read their instructions on building html pages for the Blackberry, and I had to download a pdf file instead of reading it on an html page. To a developer that spells clueless.”
–“Dan Cornish” in response to my story.

“I would add Palm to the list as well. They had a great ecosystem before but flushed all of that down the toilet.”
–“Zen” in response to Rowehl’s post.

“I don’t blame developers for being leery of Palm. Palm screwed its Palm OS developers royally, beginning with its adoption of WinMo, and any serious businessperson would be foolish to forget that. Palm has suffered from bad management for an astonishingly long time – and WebOS doesn’t fundamentally change that fact.”
– “thegeniusfiles” in response to GigaOm’s coverage of the Skyhook Wireless study.

“I love how Apple sent a wake-up call to the mobile phone industry, and now they’re all scrambling to catch up! Reminds me of how Microsoft has for decades treated developers to garbage products because they didn’t have incentive to produce quality. I hope the desperate attempts at copying Apple fail for all these wanna-be players. And I hope the iPhone puts them out of business, with no hope for a bailout.”
–“Jim Bob” in response to Rowehl’s post.

Other respondents were a bit more hopeful:

“Whilst I don’t believe that you’re blinded by iPhone-lurve, it’s not the only game in town. There are profitable businesses running across other devices, and have been for years. iPhone has *absolutely* shown a better way and shaken up an industry for the better. I can’t wait to see what happens to the industry when the market leaders in mobile devices are as helpful as Apple have been. Whether that comes from Apple becoming the market leader, or the incumbents emulating them, I neither know nor care. It’s going to happen, and that’s a good thing for all of us.”
–“Tom Hume” in response to Rowehl’s post.

And Symbian offered up a response of its own:

“The frustration is well understood. I can wax poetic about the trials and tribulations you highlight and fill up many pints of beer with stories about the reasons why the barriers, control points, and technologies are set up this way in a Symbian and a Nokia marketplace. Rest assured, there have been many individuals involved that have been paying attention and have been acting on these needs well before the iPhone came around. It’s a big industry, and there are many strategies and initiatives to align and evolve. The Foundation we have formed and the asset distribution model we proactively endorse enables us to overcome many of those same barriers. You now get the addressable market, and many, not one object of desire. It took us a while to get here and now we have not only listened, but will continue to learn.”
– Lee M. Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, in response to Rowehl’s post.

By the way, a recent study of location-based app developers by Skyhook Wireless (and covered here by GigaOm) shows that Google’s Android platform may actually be drawing more developer interest than the iPhone — although the numbers are a bit hard to interpret: 58 percent of developers surveyed expressed interest in developing for Android versus 40 percent “of non-iPhone developers” who said they were interested in porting their apps to the iPhone. Still, the survey bears out the lack of interest in Nokia’s Symbian. Only nine percent considered porting apps to that platform. RIM, Windows Mobile, and Palm registered 26 percent, 20 percent, and 8 percent interest respectively. But again, remember, the survey was limited to location-based app developers.

MacLeod asked a panel of developers if they’re focused on the Ovi Store, which is projected to reach 400 million supported handsets by the end of 2010. (By comparison, Apple has sold 30 million combined iPhones and iPod Touches and is estimated to have a base of 15 million mobile users based in the U.S.). The response? Crickets chirping in the night. Of four iPhone developer “rock stars,” as MacLeod described them, only Alan Wells of Zynga said his company was “thinking about” creating products for the Ovi Store. The other panelists — Ben Lewis, founder of TapJoy; Jonathan Zweig, CEO of Jirbo; and Mike Kerns, CEO of Citizen Sports — expressed no interest.

One explanation: manpower. “Most iPhone developers are one- to three-person companies,” said Steffen Frost, creator of carpool application Carticipate, who was at the event. He considered developing for the Nokia platform a few months ago but decided it was irrelevant. “Only companies with very large resources can afford developing on that [platform].”

Another reason developers are looking to the iPhone first is market share. iPhone claimed a 50 percent share of U.S.-based online ad requests to AdMob in February, according to a recent AdMob report. Nokia, on the other hand, doesn’t even register in the U.S. market. While Nokia led worldwide ad requests, with a 43 percent share, the iPhone wasn’t far behind, with a 32 percent worldwide share.

There are other reasons, too, as MacLeod blogged after the event:

I felt like a pariah as the panel began to dissect their reasoning. The path to cash is unclear. It’s a massively fragmented handset population. It’s not centrally controlled and beautiful like the App Store. The Ovi Store doesn’t appear to be that ‘easy’ to work with. The capabilities of the development platform are unknown (at least within the Valley)… and so on.

[Update: Developer and blogger Mike Rowehl has since blogged that he's flabbergasted at the assertion mobile app developers are blind to platforms beyond the iPhone. He writes that there are clear and compelling reasons developers like himself are steering clear of those platforms.]

There were more than 100 developers attending the event, and the panel primarily addressed the challenge of discoverability in the iTunes App Store. AdMob organized the event to promote its new Download Exchange, which helps companies promote each others’ apps.

MacLeod expects developers will catch on to other platforms. “Effort is driven by monetization,” he wrote on his blog. “If Ovi, Blackberry and Windows Mobile deliver on their promise, I’m sure the majority [of developers] will give them the time of day. But right now it’s iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, and I don’t blame them.”

[Update: For some insight into how iPhone and Android are communicating with developers in a way Nokia and other platform owners haven't yet, check out our earlier story on a new trend in phone marketing].

For more on the Ovi Store, see our previous Q&A with Nokia and coverage of Ovi Store app Kinoma.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The most striking fact is the prediction that by 2011, the majority of music sales, 56.5 percent, will be online or mobile, with physical music sales falling by nearly two-thirds from 2006 to 2011. Also worth noting is that by 2011, mobile music sales will draw nearly even in sales to online — $7.3 billion in mobile sales versus $7.5 billion online. Scarier for the music industry as a whole, however, is that total music sales will decline by over $5 billion dollars from 2006 to 2011, with the skyrocketing growth of online and mobile failing to replace to revenue lost to slumping physical sales.

Nokia’s Comes With Music plan, which promises users of Nokia Music Store-compatible handsets a year’s worth of free downloads, has proved attractive to labels worried about these falling revenues. Warner Music Group, the third-largest record label, announced on Monday they would be releasing their catalog to the Finnish handset manufacturer. This means three out of the Big Four record labels, Universal, Sony BMG, and now Warner Music Group, have released their catalogs to Nokia’s program. The last remaining holdout, EMI, is said to be in licensing talks.

What’s attracting them? Perhaps the fact that the labels are taking a pound of flesh from Nokia in the deal. The Register reported in April that Nokia’s agreements with labels means the company must offer a wholesale per-unit price after a set number of downloads, rumored to be 35. In other words, in addition to the per-handset fee Nokia is already paying to labels, if any Nokia handset users decides to download more than 35 songs, Nokia must pay extra. And remember, these downloads will be free to the user, meaning there’s little reason not to download as much as possible. As the Register puts it, “Nokia is left with a crippling liability, which punishes it for the very user behaviour it’s trying to encourage.”

[Check out MobileBeat, our mobile conference on July 24. Also, vote for your favorite mobile application or service company.]

Ebay’s Kijiji tries to tar Craiglist’s reputation — The NYT has a story about Kijiji, a competitor to online classifieds company Craigslist. The remarkable thing about the story is that it lets Kijiji executives associate Craigslist with offers of “sadomasochistic encounters and prostitutes,” without some sort of response from Craiglist. Kijiji, meanwhile, is positioned as family friendly.

Nokia has agreed to acquire Apertio, a UK mobile data network management provider for about €140 million — Details here.

IBM has acquired Israel’s data storage technology company, XIV for a rumored $350 million — Details here.

Venture firm Sevin Rosen splitting apart — All four of the venture capital firm’s Silicon Valley firm are leaving the Texas-based firm, including Nick Sturiale, the investor in Xensource, the virtualization company recently acquired by Citrix for $500 million. Sturiale will be a managing director at Carlyle Venture Partners, we’ve confirmed. The split was first reported by PEInsider.com. It’s part of a longer process of decline at the firm, and of general hardship in the venture industry right now.

Blekko is the umpteenth start-up to go after Google — Never mind that Google has won the search engine wars, or that Microsoft and Yahoo have poured tens, if not hundreds of millions, into trying to keep up, or that scores of other companies have launched to fulfill every conceivable search engine niche. Start-ups trying to take on Google keep coming. The latest is Blekko, a secretive company to be launched by Rich Skrenta, who co-founded the Open Directory Project and news site Topix. Skrenta says Google doesn’t have any competition, but we’re wondering where he was when a tsunami of search engines that hit in 2006, not to mention new ones like Mahalo last year and now Wikia Search to emerge in a few days. Anyway, it’s always great to see people think big, and we wish him well. He’s raised $2 million in seed funding from Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures and two early Google employees, David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur. [Image is from the placeholder on Blekko's site]

Peter Thiel says venture industry need to be shaken up — The WSJ has a notable story about Peter Thiel’s view on the weaknesses of the traditional venture industry. However, the piece also says the value of his seed investment in Facebook has increased more than 50 times, which seems understated based on Facebook’s reported valuation of $15 billion now. You’d think the a seed investment would have been made at far less than $100 million, and that the value of his investment may have increased 1000-fold or so. We’ll do some checking on that…

Google’s corporate blogging outshines most others — Here’s a piece about how well Google’s corporate blogging effort is doing, and how few others are manging to do the same.

Marc Canter gets $400,000 for his PeopleAggregator.com — Canter has been working his platform, which is supposed to encourage more open social networks, for some time now. Here he writes his latest thoughts, and discloses his funding. See our previous coverage.

Dash Express, the Internet-connected GPS navigation device for your car, to sell for a whopping $600 — The Silicon Valley company, Dash, has raised closed to $42 million in backing from big-name venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. But who is going to buy this device at such a price, when you can get mobile phones or devices that offer much the same thing — more phones are GPS enabled and they’re sporting services like Google which provide increasingly accurate local search? And the Internet connection on Dash is unlikely to reliable while driving around. Dash lets you do things like find a Chinese restaurant while driving somewhere, but you can do that easily on a phone. In addition to the $600, Dash charges fees of between $10 and $13 a month, GigaOM reports. (Our previous coverage ).

The Google investing Mafia — The New York Times has the story about all of the former Googlers who left to start investing in companies, including Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Paul Buchheit, Georges Harik, Satya Patel, Salman Ullah, Sean Dempsey, and Andrea Zurek. Only PayPal has rivals Google in spawning so many eager investors and entrepreneurs in the Internet industry. Particularly noteworthy is the example of Meraki Networks, the WiFi router company, which is both co-founded and backed by ex-Googlers.

Edgeio’s asset sold — Looksmart acquired most of the assets of Edgeio, the online classifieds company that shut down a couple of weeks ago.

Google Android smartphones phones could launch in February, according to rumors by APC — Although, while Google’s Android is stumbling on deadlines, phone standards around Linux are being rolled out by a consortium including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Access. The group has included an APIs for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging, and presence functions, as well as new user interface components.

Netcape dies, while co-founder Jim Clark stumbles in real estate pursuit — Netscape, once a leading Web browser, has finally shut down. This comes, coincidentally, as one of its co-founders, Jim Clark, who left Silicon Valley a few years ago saying the tech industry boom was over, stumbles on his subsequent endeavor: real estate. The founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and WebMD went to build condos in Florida, starting a company called Hyperion. The New York Times reports about problems the company is having repaying a $110 million loan and with customer complaints.

Google about to sign deal with Japan phone giant NTT DoCoMo — This will give Google a potential 48 million in a market where Yahoo has traditionally dominated. Details here.

Web 2.0 Summit, co-hosted by O’Reilly Media and CMP, kicks off this Wednesday at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. A who’s who list of Web 2.0 digerati will converge for three days of deal making, partying and more deal making.

If you didn’t have the budget to nab one of the $3,595 tickets for the event, fret not – VentureBeat reporters will be on hand to bring you frontline dispatches.

In preparation for the event, here’s a quick preview of what’s expected during the week, which includes some product launches by MadeIt, Userplane, Radar and Nokia.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will all be speaking — and ears will be perked for the latest on reported acquisition talks between Microsoft and Facebook, and Google’s response to this.

EBay’s Meg Whitman will be speaking Thursday, right before her company’s Q3 earnings announcement the same day. Friday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about eBay’s struggle to juice its slowing growth rates. We also hope the moderator asks her questions about the departure of Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, and about eBay’s associated $900 million write down. Speaking of Mr. Zennstrom, the Skype founder curiously disappeared from Web 2.0 Summit’s list of speakers sometime over the last few days. As recently as last Wednesday according to the Google cache, Zennstrom was listed as a speaker at the conference, where he was to participate in a session entitled, “Show Me.” Oops. Today, all references to Zennstrom are removed from O’Reilly’s conference agenda.

Wednesday evening, MySpace will host a dinner with News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdock and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. We hope he speaks about his pending acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, and how he sees his new media properties meshing with his old media properties.

Several companies are expected to show off their latest Web 2.0 wares.

Thursday night, at a party promoted here, MadeIt.com, a new Web 2.0 online invitations site, will make its public beta debut. MadeIt.com plans to take on market leader Evite.com by adding social networking features to “keep the party going” after the party’s over, such as online photo sharing, video sharing, slideshows, story sharing, message boards and widgets. The company was founded by CEO Stephen Weir and his advisor, Jonny Hendriksen. Weir tells VentureBeat the company has been self-funded to date with about $80,000 in capital. The company is looking to do a seed round of up to $300,000 in the next three months to get to proof of concept stage, at which point it may seek a Series A. However, it enters a very crowded sector, filled with the likes of Socializr, Renkoo, Skobee, MingleNow and the related events sites such as Going.com.

On Wednesday morning at an invitation-only breakfast, cell phone maker Nokia says it will introduce a new N series handheld computer that promises to marry the mobility of a multimedia device with the Internet (yes, this is frustratingly vague, but we don’t know anything else). Other handheld computers in N Series family combine many of the features of an Apple iPhone – such as Internet browsing, photos, videos, games and maps, without the phone part.

Userplane, which provides hosted communications applications such as chat, messaging and voice recording for online communities, plans to announce Userplane Feeds, a collection of free APIs so that developers can build the applications into their own sites.

On Friday, Radar Networks’ CEO Nova Spivack, who in a previous life founded EarthWeb, will unveil and name the company’s first Semantic Web application, most likely an online personal data organizer, according to a July feature in the recently shuttered Business 2.0 magazine. The San Francisco company, which is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Leapfrog Ventures and angel investors, has been in stealth for a few years, yet has been been aggressively promoting its business, technology and ideas for the Semantic Web for quite a while (this is one of those “pseudo stealth” companies, promoting itself in public relations pitches to media outlets, even as it feigns secrecy). Friday’s anticipated announcement will also mark the start of the private beta for the not-so-secret service. In addition to naming its first product, the company says it will announce a strategic partnership. Stay tuned for later this week when VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison reports on Radar Networks’ product launch and tells us if the company’s first Semantic Web application is ready for prime time.

We’ve noticed a couple passes listed for sale on Craigslist here and here, or you can always crash the conference and join the unofficial Web 2.0 Summit LobbyCon unconference in the lobby of the Palace hotel.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

Jajah tries to exploit Skype dissatisfaction, releases button for eBay — Now that eBay has admitted the Skype acquisition didn’t pan out as expected, and that the Skype co-founder Zennstrom has left earlier than the desired retention date of 2008-2009, eBay is probably pretty fed up with the Skype story. Well, Jajah, a competing Internet service, is rubbing it in. It is bringing its new button (see our coverage) eBay, an invading what should be Skype’s turf. As we mentioned, Jajah’s button is perfect for small businesses wanting a toll free 1-800 number, just the sort of customers eBay has, and which Skype was supposed to serve. From Jajah’s statement: “With Buttons, JAJAH goes beyond Skype –beyond the headsets to calls received on all phones, beyond the regular quality concerns and beyond the limitations of the closed nature of the Skype userbase. Unlike other Internet calling solutions, JAJAH Buttons on eBay: 1. assures the merchants privacy 2. can be customized by when they want to receive calls and from what countries 3. it does not require a download, headset, contract or broadband and 4. works on every phone….” The list goes on. here’s an example.

Mobile-phone company Nokia has agreed to acquire electronic mapping company Navteq, for $8.1B– This should shake things up a bit. Google uses the mapping-navigation software from the company, and it comes at a time when Google is about to release a major mobile phone offering (depending on the market, Google will offer varying services; few people believe its actually manufacturing its own phone; it will leave that part to the vendors). Now Nokia has swallowed it, and it could leverage this against Google, or in talks with Google about services offered with its phone. Navteq’s technology is behind vehicle navigation devices and is allowing mobile-phone applications with location-awareness, good for things like shopping, emergency services and targeted advertising. Statement is here.

YouTube introduces Adsense to run alongside videos — It’s just the latest effort by Google to monetize YouTube after it shelled out $1.6 billion for the company.

Yahoo introduces “universal search” features — Yahoo continues to lag behind the rest of the field on innovation on its search results. Google, Ask and Microsoft have all introduced something that has come to be known as “universal search,” or providing all kinds of content in results beyond the traditional ten text links. So now Yahoo jumps on the bandwagon and is now also offering things like video and images in its results when you search for certain things, such as rock bands. It’s also introducing something called “suggestive search,” a technology that guesses what you’re typing in the query box if you’ve already written a word and hesitate for a second. It gives you more clues to what you’re trying to find, and is an obvious feature to offer. Yahoo’s market share in search continues to drop. It won 19.9 percent of total search market share in August, down from 24 percent the same month last year, according to Neilsen/NetRatings.

Technorati gets a new chief executive — The blog search engine has lost its way, recently redesigned its site, but has yet to articulate a clear direction. It’s not certain what a new chief executive Richard Jalichandra can do to help it turn around. Announcement here.

Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman says company will stand by digital rights management — As companies like Apple and Amazon do their utmost to abandon DRM, Viacom will continue the battle in its support. Speaking at an antipiracy summit, Dauman said that his company prefers to deal with the piracy issue in a free market, rather than introducing new laws. However, he also suggested that piracy might be better addressed through international trade agreements, seemingly implying that sites like the Pirate Bay could be stomped out by placing more pressure on their home countries. Dauman’s speech shows that the internet’s copyright battles are far from over; he called the upcoming court decision on Viacom’s case against YouTube, now owned by Google, a “landmark case that will clarify the rights and responsibilities of all media and content owners.” A decision against Google could carry serious implications for dozens of smaller sites. Via CNET.

Costs of a start-up, broken down —Redfin‘s Glenn Kelman breaks down the various costs, from rent to salary and more, of a start-up. So when your VCs and advisors are asking you to come up with those dang financial models, you have somewhere to go. Very useful.