Nokia OVI store ready to tackle apple store

MONACO (Reuters) - Nokia Oyj said on Tuesday it would combine its different Internet services tighter together as the world's top cellphone maker tackles Apple's hugely succesful App Store.

To cope with slowing phone demand Nokia is building a new business from mobile Internet services -- like games or maps -- but is scaling back separate investment plans due to the slowdown, and focusing on merging the delivery of services.

"We are moving into Ovi, into a platform strategy," Tero Ojanpera, head of the entertainment and communities operations at Nokia, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the Nokia developer summit in Monaco. Ovi is Nokia's much-anticipated online store which is set to launch in May.

Nokia, which made its first ever quarterly pretax loss in January-March, is cutting annual costs at its key handset unit alone by more than 700 million euros ($911 million) to counter plunging demand.

Nokia said on Tuesday it would cut up to 360 jobs at its Internet services unit, while it would cut an additional 90 jobs elsewhere in the organization.

The Apple store has proved the market for software supermarkets in the mobile world, with one billion applications downloaded in less than a year.

"As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it's a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry," said Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecoms consultant Northstream.

"Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that has never done it before," Nordstrom said.

Many of the operators are now embracing different software stores aiming to generate more data traffic from its clients and to avoid customer turnover.

"We are going to make it as easy as possibly for our customers to buy from whatever shop," said Steve Glagow, vice president for marketing operations at Orange.

But not all operators -- Nokia said operator billing would not be available in the United States when its Ovi store opens, as it had said earlier.

SCALE KEY VS APPLE, GOOGLE

Nokia's market is potentially bigger than Apple's -- it says the Ovi store will reach some 50 million consumers when it opens in May, while Apple has so far sold some 20 million iPhones.

"Nokia's timing is absolutely right," said Patrick Bossert, director of marketing strategies in Europe and Asia at telecoms services firm Convergys.

"Like any publishing market, its about the economies of scale," Bossert said.

While hundreds of millions of people use its phones every day, Nokia has yet to match Apple's success in getting people to pay for software downloads, while it has also lagged Apple in creating a major following among software developers.

"Nokia's biggest challenge in the developer space is to win mindshare from Apple and Google, to provide tools and a platform to facilitate rapid development of innovative experiences," said Ford Davidson, CEO of Seattle-based Dashwire, which makes software for linking cellphone content to the Web.

Nokia's Ojanpera said the firm was trying to attract iPhone developers to create attractive programmes for Nokia phones.

"We will have the richest and the most interactive platform for the developers," Ojanpera said in the interview. "This is not only about high-end, this is about scale."

Nokia said it also hopes to benefit compared to other stores from its faster publishing of submitted applications or content, and more liberal policies on content which goes head to head with its own software offering.

"We are Switzerland, essentially," Eric John, head of media products marketing at Nokia told the conference.

The overall mobile phone market is expected to shrink 10 percent this year, as consumers rein in spending and handset sellers try to clear out unsold phones. Including the job cuts announced on Tuesday Nokia has slashed some 3,500 jobs across the organization to cut costs this year.

($1=0.7683 euros)

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Mike Nesbit and Jon Loades-Carter)

Nokia to shutter its "Mosh" success story

HELSINKI (Reuters) - To spearhead its push into Internet services, Nokia put users in charge when it opened in 2007 the networking site Mosh, which lets people post anything they want.

Less than two years later the world's top cell phone maker has decided to put an end to "people power", killing a site that attracted a wide audience around the globe, unlike most of Nokia's new fledgling services.

Mosh (http://mosh.nokia.com/) is a simple website customized for access from any feature phone or smartphone, but it can also be used from a personal computer.

It has been compared by users to the origins of the Internet, where people can access content and share it with others for free.

"We don't know where it exactly goes and we are not entirely in control," one of the founders of the site, George Linardos, told Reuters shortly after it was opened.

There is no official date for closing Mosh, but Nokia is expected to launch its Ovi store in May, merging its software Download! store with Mosh and widget service WidSets.

Like the Internet, Mosh attracted loads of pornographic content, and it also stoked tension between Nokia and record labels, with whom Nokia is in close cooperation for its music offerings.

Mosh has so far reached 137 million downloads. The takeup has been slower than Apple Inc's App Store, but there has been no marketing machine pushing Mosh.

"It was never going to last for ever, I'm surprised that it lasted this long," says artist Derrick Welsh, who goes by the name "moshing" on the site.

Welsh said he could not use Mosh from a public computer room of an art gallery in Newcastle, England, due to its explicit content.

Nokia is the first handset maker to move strongly into content space with services like its music store, gaming service N-gage and its upcoming online Ovi media and application store -- which will compete head-to-head against Apple's App Store.

The Apple store has proved the market for software supermarkets in the mobile world, with more than 500 million applications downloaded in only half a year.

David MacQueen from Strategy Analytics said Nokia has been able to learn a lot from Mosh -- how to run an open store, how to get developers products quickly to the market and how user recommendations should work.

"Mosh will die, but I would contend that in many ways the new Ovi Store is the child of Mosh rather than the child of Download," MacQueen said.

Nokia has not unveiled user numbers for its other new services, which are being slowly rolled out in various parts of the world.

The new Ovi Store is the official reason for closing Mosh, as the company is merging smaller services into one and starting to charge for their use.

"As a content provider, revenue from the downloads would be welcomed," said Welsh, who is investigating ways to expand messaging on phones from text to drawing.

"My wife likes what I'm up to, but she does want all this research to actually generate some cash one day," he said.

But gone will be the freedom of posting anything -- Nokia says it will screen all content before it is added to the Ovi store.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)