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Posts Tagged ‘Nokia Phones’

Apple retaliates: requests US import ban on Nokia phones

As expected, Apple just responded to Nokia’s ITC request to ban Apple device imports with a US embargo request of its very own. Notice of Apple’s complaint (without any detail) was posted yesterday on the website of the International Trade Commission — a government agency tasked with protecting the US market from unfair trade practices. As you might recall, the whole Nokia v. Apple legal spat started with Nokia suing Apple for infringing upon Nokia patents relating to GSM, UMTS, and WiFi; a claim later expanded to include “implementation patents” covering a wide range of items including camera sensors and touchscreens. While the ITC hasn’t agreed to investigate either Nokia’s or Apple’s complaints, it is customary to do so with investigations usually taking about 15 months to complete. We’ll post more when the details of Apple’s patent infringement complaint are revealed.

Apple retaliates: requests US import ban on Nokia phones originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 07:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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2 Cross-Publishing Services Get Acquired in 1 Day: Critical Path Buys ShoZu

ShoZu Goes to Critical Path – Cross Network Publishing Doesn’t Seem to Be a Stand-Alone Business

Hours after high-profile Silicon Valley social aggregation service Seesmic announced that it acquired angel-backed cross-network publishing service Ping.fm, a similar deal was announced in Europe. Identity management service Critical Path, maker of software called Memova, announced that it has acquired mobile uploading service ShoZu, a company that had received an enormous amount of venture capital.

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Rumors of the deal were first reported in mid-December by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch. Now the deal is done, reports leading European mobile blogger Ewan Spence. We’re hearing that the announcement will be officially released later today. Update: We just received the official press release as well.

ShoZu raised more than $30 million to build a mobile app that allows users to publish photos, videos and text to more than 50 different destination social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blip.tv and more. The service has long been popular on Nokia phones and sells an iPhone app for $5. Shozu was voted one of our readers’ favorite mobile apps in 2007. For more about ShoZu see this Techcraver interview with the company’s CEO.

Critical Path is a little like a combination of Plaxo and Verisign. It offers messaging and social apps, APIs, Identity Management and Access Control.

Was this the big exit that ShoZu’s investors sought? Almost definitely not. Critical Path is an innovative service that’s got some big customers like BT, France Telecom and Orange, but it’s unlikely that ShoZu came at a high price. Spence alludes to the same when he writes that Critical Path “saw the potential of combining their Memova platform suite with ShoZu’s engineering.” Update: In the official release, ShoZu Board Director Nigel Pilkington from lead investor SEB Venture Capital UK, called the deal “a successful outcome for us.” Maybe that’s being polite, maybe it’s true or maybe it was a small success financially.

It’s most likely a talent deal and evidence that cross-platform publishing tools like ShoZu, Ping.fm and competitor Pixel Pipe are probably not stand-alone businesses. Just like FriendFeed’s aggregation across scores of APIs wasn’t enough to make it a success outside of being scooped up by the much, much larger Facebook – these other companies that create the pipes for the tubes just aren’t compelling enough to a large number of consumers.

They do make nice acquisition targets, though, and show that the future of the social web may not be found in reading and writing to one single network like Twitter or Facebook. The savvy companies that are building value on top of those networks are also dedicating resources to bring on engineers skilled at working with far more networks to publish to or read from.

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Foxconn To Launch Retail Stores In China

Taiwan-headquartered Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, will launch up to 10,000 consumer electronics retail stores in China, says China Daily. Until now they have not had a significant retail brand or presence.

What will they sell? Probably some of the many products that they build for well known brands, including the iPhone, iPod, iMac, Sony Playstation, Sony Vaio notebooks, Amazon Kindle, Nokia phones and Nintendo Wii.

But part of the plan, we’ve heard from an independent source, will be to use the retail presence in China to win manufacturing business as well. HP, Dell and others can move more of their business to Foxconn, along with a promise to get retail presence for their electronics in the Foxconn stores in China.

Foxconn exports $55.6 billion of electronics from their factories in China, says the article, or about 3.9% of China’s total exports. And that number may be lowballed. Our sources say no one outside of Foxconn even knows the real size of their exports, and that $100 billion/year or more is the street rumor in Asia.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Nokia readies mobile payment service Nokia Money

Nokia said today that it’s going to be entering the mobile payments market next year with a product called Nokia Money, powered by mobile payments startup Obopay. With it, users will be able to send money to other people using their mobile phone numbers, as well as pay merchants and bills.

The mobile device manufacturer isn’t revealing too many details yet about how the service will take on competitors like PayPal Mobile. It sounds like it won’t just be for the owners of Nokia phones, though, since the company says it will work on “virtually any mobile phone.” (Though whether someone who owns a non-Nokia phone would want to do that is another question.) Nokia plans to demonstrate the service at the Nokia World conference on Sept. 2 and 3, and then to start rolling it out in early 2010.

The news isn’t a big surprise — after Nokia’s investment in Obopay earlier this year, it was clear the company planned to get involved in mobile payments; it was just a question of what form that involvement would take. Simple mobile payments could have the biggest impact in emerging economies in Africa and Asia, where phones are many people’s primary or only connection to the we. In the announcement, Nokia notes that that there are far more mobile phones in the world than bank accounts (4 billon compared to 1.6 billion).

[photo:flickr/whiteafrican]

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Nokia And Microsoft Make An Unholy Alliance To Bring Office Mobile To More Phones

Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks “the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones,” says Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. There are 200 million Nokia smart phones out there, and Microsoft wants its software on all of them eventually.

But initially, the alliance is targeting enterprise customers and will be integrated into Nokia’s E Series business phones. The Microsoft software and features that will be ported to Nokia phones include:

The ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents on more devices in more places with mobile-optimized versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote

Enterprise instant messaging and presence, and optimized conferencing and collaboration experience with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile

Mobile access to intranet and extranet portals built on Microsoft SharePoint Server

Enterprise device management with Microsoft System Center

But the alliance aims to go “way beyond email and Office,” says Nokia’s Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö. Microsoft and Nokia are focusing on communication and productivity apps (Office, IM, Sharepoint), but the alliance opens up those 200 million Nokia smart phones to future Mobile apps from Microsoft, perhaps including Mesh (which will sync all apps across all devices).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Nokia Phones to Aid Against Malaria Deaths

This weekend millions of North American children diligently completed their homework, did their chores and stayed on their best behavior in the hopes that they’d attend Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince in theaters. Meanwhile, half way around the world, thousands of children work for the magical protections of mosquito nets and running water. Their Voldemort is malaria. Between 1-3 million malaria deaths happen every year with the majority of the victims being young children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, thanks to the work of a Berkeley research team, help may be on its way.

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In so many malaria-endemic countries, the lack of health personnel, equipment and accessible hospitals are a major barrier in ensuring timely diagnosis. But Daniel Fletcher and his team at the University of California in Berkeley have modified a Nokia N73 phone in the hopes that it will alleviate resource issues and aid in early detection of malaria.

With the N73 as the kernel, the team added a battery-powered LED lamp and a series of filters. The result is an extremely inexpensive portable microscope with the potential to detect malaria, sickle-cell anemia and tuberculosis from fluid smears.

Microscopy-based detection of malaria is possible by taking a pinprick from a patient, smearing their blood onto a treated glass slide, and examining it under a microscope. Malaria parasites are detectable when they react to the treatment on the glass (Giemsa stain). According to a New Scientist article published this morning, the modified phone or “CellScope” makes it possible for field doctors to test for the disease as well as send their images to labs via a wireless network.

If cell images are coupled with patient details and locations, the CellScope can help reduce disease-based death rates by guiding grassroots health workers in deploying resources, treating those affected and stopping the spread of disease across townships.

For more mobile phone based health solutions, check out NetSquared’s list of projects.

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Adobe: Mobile Flash to Get Accelerometer, Multi-touch Support Early Next Year

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said at a company event for analysts today that a full featured version of Flash for mobile phones will be available in beta by the end of this year and by early next year the technology will be making use of multi-touch and accelerometer features on smart phones.

Ted Patrick, Adobe’s Senior Manager of Developer Communities, put it like this: “I think we will see Flash on different devices support the soul of the device in capabilities and APIs” – including GPS. That’s an exciting trajectory and more than we’ve heard before. Full Flash on phones by the end of this year is more or less on schedule, but the integration of these physical features certainly revs up the imagination.

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The company’s presentations were reported live on Twitter by multiple analysts present; the multi-touch and accelerometer integration forecast was first tweeted by Redmonk’s James Governor and then quickly passed around between attendees.

“As Apple has shown,” Governor told us by phone, “the User Experience elements are really important – it’s not just how you draw screens. Adobe has understood this and will be offering APIs accordingly. What’s most important is that they support a new interaction model because that’s what developers want. Augmented reality apps, being more gestural about how you interact with applications – that’s a big deal.”

Governor, whose analyst firm counts Adobe among its clients, says that things will get really interesting when the Flash developer tool Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex Builder) integrates mobile and mobile features like accelerometer and multi-touch into its development environment. That’s not currently on the public road map, but seems like the next logical step. “There’s all these really cool phones beyond the iPhone, like Nokia phones, that have APIs for things like accelerometers, but the functionality hasn’t been taken advantage of,” Governer said. “If Adobe can simplify access to this functionality for new interaction models then it can, through tools, democratize sophisticated development on these platforms.”

We’ve had only initial contact about this with Adobe at press time but will update coverage if we get more information.

While we tend to focus here on non-gaming mobile apps, it’s not hard to see that multi-touch, accelerometer and GPS use by Flash apps will probably have the biggest impact on games.

The mobile Flash demonstrations shown today by Adobe were all on Android devices, still no world on Flash for the iPhone. (”It’s up to Apple,” was the line again today.) A bevy of beautiful, touchable, turnable, location-aware Flash apps on Android could create a pretty compelling competitor to the contents of the iPhone app store.

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