Nokia halt investment

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia, the world's biggest cell phone maker, said on Tuesday it would halt investment in its first major Internet service push, a media sharing site, as part of a revamp of its services strategy.

"Ovi Share ... is planned to be maintained in its current state," a spokesman for the company said, adding Nokia would keep the service up and running.

Nokia built the service -- seen as one of the cornerstones of its services strategy -- on the acquisition of U.S. firm Twango in 2007, and opened it to the public at the Mobile World Congress trade show in February 2008.

"It seems like an admission of failure -- which is healthy at this point," said GC Research analyst Tero Kuittinen.

Nokia has not unveiled usage numbers, but analysts say these have remained low due to draw of already established sharing sites such as Facebook or Yahoo Inc's Flickr.

"They definitely need to collaborate with Facebook instead of trying to replace it. Same thing with Twitter and Flickr," Kuittinen said.

To cope with slowing phone demand Nokia is building a new business from Internet services -- such as games or maps -- but said on April 28 it would scale back separate investment plans due to the slowdown, and focus on merging the delivery of services.

Nokia, which reported its first-ever quarterly pretax loss for January-March, due to sinking phone demand, is in the middle of a big cost-cutting program, having shed 3,500 jobs so far.

Shares in Nokia closed 2.8 percent lower at 10.28 euros in Helsinki, compared with 0.9 percent weaker DJ Stoxx European technology index.

(Editing by Will Waterman)

goooogle new approach to search engine

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc unveiled a slew of new and future features on Tuesday, including one that will allow people to better coordinate Internet searches on their cell phones and computers and another that will produce sophisticated automated research reports.

At a briefing at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, executives demonstrated tools to knit its search product on personal computers more closely with cell phones, as well as products to automatically troll the Internet for research topics and generate detailed spreadsheets.

Google also showed off a new feature, available immediately, that lets users view only the most timely search results, narrowing the results for a topic to the past 24 hours or the past week.

Google said it will search blogs and news sites, as well as the general information available online, to provide a fresher picture of certain subjects.

This feature comes amid the rising popularity of so-called real time search products, like the search feature on microblogging site Twitter, which allow users to search up-to-the-minute developments about certain topics online.

Google said users will be able to display results by type of information, such as videos.

A new feature under development will allow a search performed on a desktop PC to automatically show up when the same user logs on to Google from a Web-enabled cell phone.

A tool called Google Squared, available next month, will automatically troll for information on the Internet to create spreadsheets about the topics a person searches.

In the demonstration, a search for small dogs generated a table that listed different breeds of dogs, with key information such as weight and height.

Google executives said they did not expect the product to increase friction with online content publishers who are concerned Google is profiting from their work.

In response to a question about this, Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer said Google Squared is very strong in citing where the content in the tables it creates comes from, ultimately driving traffic back to the content creator site.

"The tools we're launching today offer whole new ways of searching that haven't previously been available," said Mayer.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Gary Hill)

Nokia E75

The new Nokia E75 has just officially emerged and marks a new breed of Eseries device. Just as the E71 broke new ground, the Nokia E75 is set to follow suit, cementing its unique place on the email and messaging scene as an ultra compact communicator.
Nokia E75 doesn’t follow any conventional paths. Add the fact that it’s the first Eseries device to support N-Gage gaming and you get a flavour of how progressive and exciting this pocket communicator truly is - it barely stretches that tape measure to 111.8mm x 50mm x 14.4mm, with a QVGA screen that measures in at 2.4-inches.

Squeezed into this compact shell are all the hallmarks of a leading Eseries device. The Nokia E75 comes loaded with the new Nokia Messaging service for slick email HTML email support. Plus it’s packing a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, high speed HSDPA access, integrated A-GPS with Nokia Maps, and a music player with a 3.5mm standard audio jack.


Kai Oistamo, executive vice president at Nokia, had to say about the Nokia E75 and its inspiration:

“With the Nokia E75 we took a lot of inspiration from the Nokia 9300, which was our first mini communicator. Owners of the Nokia 9300 loved the messaging functionality a full keyboard provided, but also used the traditional phone keypad a great deal. With the Nokia E75 we kept these essential ingredients, significantly upgraded all of the features and made it as compact as possible.”