What is Nokia Thinking!
There’s a battle line drawn for local mobile search, with carriers on one side and Web properties on the other side. Sure, we’ve seen a few carrier-managed and distributed POI apps; sure, we’ve seen Web property efforts to make local search available with manual address inputs; but without freely available lat/long, no one has really fired a shot yet… except Nokia. In a neither here nor there purgatory position, some suggest they are confused over which camp they live in, evident by their distancing dance from the stodgy telecom world, while simultaneously trend-following some sort of hip mobile ‘2.0 something’. This suggests that even the best in their business are struggling with identity as Telecom and Internet forces collide on the ‘commputing’ battlefield. But, with so many application areas to tackle in commputing, why are so many (including Nokia) fixated on mobile local search? With 2 billion sets of connected eyeballs out there, that equates to a lot of ad cash. Lots of folks want that cash, which has historically gone to those who owned yellow & white pages print (yep, that would be the Telecom companies). Add to this a Telecom-world acceptance that ad-subsidized services as the way forward for mobile data consumer services in general, and someone (ah hem, the carriers) just got quite concerned that the Web guys are good at what they do. Mix in a handset provider bystander perspective to these dynamics in motion, and well, we now have a three way battle. This is going to get uglier…
This entry was contributed by Jonathan Spinney
