MoCoNews is running an interview with Serena Glover from Nokia, where she talks on the main points of Ovi, including the rather high level 'what is it?' to the more important 'how are you going to make money?'
Read on in the full article.
MoCoNews Asks Nokia 'What is Ovi and Where is the Money?'
It will be interesting to see how we make money, whether it’s advertising, subscriptions or transactional revenues...There’s going to be a mix. No one knows what that will be exactly
That's surprisingly honest of them, and they're probably right, no one knows how the money will be made. That's why it's possibly best to spread your bets with a wide range of services and methods for obtaining them (notice all Nokia's experiments with direct purchases, subscriptions, advertising and all-you-can-eat payments?).
The success of services on mobile devices is notoriously unpredictable: WAP failed despite lots of hype while text messaging was a huge success without any hype at all.
No one knows what the next SMS will be, but personally I'd put money on pedestrian GPS sat nav services being a massive massive hit on low-end phones (imagine waiting for a bus and seeing it progress towards you on your phone's map, or finding out where the nearest public toilet is, that's the kind of thing everyone would use).
Nokia makes money by selling mobile phones. If they can hook users with service that holds up all your photos etc and it is easy to use it, it is more likely that user will buy a new nokia phone when its time to get a new one.
Nokia makes money by selling mobile phones.
They do right now, but that's not going to last forever. The average price of a mobile phone has nosedived over the past few years, and eventually the profit margins will be fairly small.
Reading between the lines, what seems to be driving Nokia into internet services is the need to find the next big profitable industry for them to be in. They've done this lots of times before over the past 150 years: they originally made paper, then cables, then rubber boots and tyres, then computers and TV sets, then mobile phones. They had to keep reinventing themselves to stay profitable.