| Tue, Jun 09, 2009 |
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Secure Line VoIP Firm Cellcrypt Gets Second Round Funding
London-based VoIP firm Cellcrypt has raised an undisclosed sum in second round of VC funding led by Notion Capital, the investment vehicle set up by founders of Messagelab. Stephen Chandler of Notion will join the Cellcrypt board and the investment will go towards further international expansion. The company, which recently opened a US office, offers a high-security, encrypted voice calls through its own technology for Nokia (NYSE: NOK), BlackBerry and Windows Mobile handsets and fixed line phones. Cellcrypt says its services are mainly used by governments, businesses and high-level executives. Release.
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| Tue, Jun 02, 2009 |
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Nokia Hopes To Sell At Least 10 Million N97s
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has begun shipping its flagship N97 mobile phone in more than 75 countries, the company said today. The phone, which sports a touch screen and Qwerty keyboard, is meant to compete with Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry devices, sales of which ate into Nokia’s share of the smartphone market last year. In the UK, the N97 will be sold through 3, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U, all of which have not yet disclosed tariff costs. Nokia stores will sell an unlocked version for £499.
Nokia’s VP for N series handsets told Bloomberg that the N97 “should not be a niche product,” and that its goal was to have similar sales to the N95, which has sold more than 10 million units as of the end of March. According to Gartner, Nokia’s share of the smartphone market fell to 41.2 percent at the end Q1 from 49.4 percent at the end of 2007, while RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) doubled its share to 19.9 percent. Apple’s share has shot to 10.8 percent of all smartphones, from none two years ago. Read more on sister site mocoNews.net.
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Nokia Hopes To Sell At Least 10 Million N97’s
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has begun shipping its flagship N97 mobile phone in more than 75 countries, the company said today. The phone, which sports a touch screen and Qwerty keyboard, is meant to compete with Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry devices, sales of which ate into Nokia’s share of the smartphone market last year. In the UK, the N97 will be sold through 3, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U, all of which have not yet disclosed tariff costs. Nokia stores will sell an unlocked version for £499.
Nokia’s VP for N series handsets told Bloomberg that the N97 “should not be a niche product,” and that its goal was to have similar sales to the N95, which has sold more than 10 million units as of the end of March. According to Gartner, Nokia’s share of the smartphone market fell to 41.2 percent at the end Q1 from 49.4 percent at the end of 2007, while RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) doubled its share to 19.9 percent. Apple’s share has shot to 10.8 percent of all smartphones, from none two years ago. Read more on sister site mocoNews.net.
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| Tue, May 26, 2009 |
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Nokia’s Ovi Store Opens For Business; Experiences Early Hiccups
The Ovi Store has opened for business. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) today officially launched its mobile content and application store, which some analysts are calling the Finnish handset giant’s “last castle”, as it tries to shore up slowing handset revenues with services sales.
UPDATE: Tricia adds: Nokia said today on its Ovi blog that shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, they began experiencing “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi.” Nokia said they began to add additional servers to fix the problem, but that also caused in intermittent performance improvements. For those who were accessing the store through the downloadable client, “there were no reported issues.” Nokia said: “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users and encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we develop the service further.”
The failures led TechCrunch to call the launch “an utter disaster.” It also pointed to some flaws, such as applications appearing and then disappearing. The All About Symbian blog was also critical, mentioning slow wait times while pages loaded, and the fact that it took three clicks to buy an application. In a brief trial on the 5800 XpressMusic, I found the web site was fairly fast. It took some time to figure out that the store had to be downloaded from the Menu screen on the device, rather than the website, like the BlackBerry App World. Once downloaded, the experience was improved compared to the mobile internet version. Likewise, it was very easy to look for apps on my computer, and send them to the phone via text message—although you had to wait 30 seconds between apps. Clearly, with a worldwide roll-out of this magnitude, there will be hiccups, but nothing at this point seems like a total failure—just a work in progress.
The store is available to what the company estimates is a global audience of 50 million Nokia device owners across more than 50 of its various handset models through store.ovi.com on mobile browsers, or as a downloadable application. Customers in eight countries, including Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom, will be able to pay for their apps directly on their mobile phone bill. As emerged earlier, there will be no carrier billing in the US. To counter this blow, Nokia also announced that AT&T (NYSE: T) plans to make the Ovi Store available to its customers later this year. No word on the particulars of this specific deal, but given how hard Nokia has tried to court the US carriers, it will be interesting to see what AT&T was able to extract from it.
Analysts, meanwhile, are skeptical that the much-awaited Ovi Store can match the runaway success of Apple’s App Store, which recently clocked up its one-billionth app downloaded less than a year after its launch. Global Crown analyst Tero Kuittinen told Reuters that the Ovi Store was “in some ways the last castle for Nokia” in which the handset giant “tries to re-group and muster its forces for a counter-offensive.” He noted that Nokia past attempts to offer mobile content haven’t been particularly successful and called its gaming service N-Gage and its unlimited music offering, Comes With Music, “industry laughing stocks.”
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Updated: Nokia’s Ovi Store Opens For Business; Experiences Early Hiccups
The Ovi Store has opened for business. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) today officially launched its mobile content and application store, which some analysts are calling the Finnish handset giant’s “last castle”, as it tries to shore up slowing handset revenues with services sales.
UPDATE: Tricia adds: Nokia said today on its Ovi blog that shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, they began experiencing “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi.” Nokia said they began to add additional servers to fix the problem, but that also caused in intermittent performance improvements. For those who were accessing the store through the downloadable client, “there were no reported issues.” Nokia said: “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users and encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we develop the service further.”
The failures led TechCrunch to call the launch “an utter disaster.” It also pointed to some flaws, such as applications appearing and then disappearing. The All About Symbian blog was also critical, mentioning slow wait times while pages loaded, and the fact that it took three clicks to buy an application. In a brief trial on the 5800 XpressMusic, I found the web site was fairly fast. It took some time to figure out that the store had to be downloaded from the Menu screen on the device, rather than the website, like the BlackBerry App World. Once downloaded, the experience was improved compared to the mobile internet version. Likewise, it was very easy to look for apps on my computer, and send them to the phone via text message—although you had to wait 30 seconds between apps. Clearly, with a worldwide roll-out of this magnitude, there will be hiccups, but nothing at this point seems like a total failure—just a work in progress.
The store is available to what the company estimates is a global audience of 50 million Nokia device owners across more than 50 of its various handset models through store.ovi.com on mobile browsers, or as a downloadable application. Customers in eight countries, including Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom, will be able to pay for their apps directly on their mobile phone bill. As emerged earlier, there will be no carrier billing in the US. To counter this blow, Nokia also announced that AT&T (NYSE: T) plans to make the Ovi Store available to its customers later this year. No word on the particulars of this specific deal, but given how hard Nokia has tried to court the US carriers, it will be interesting to see what AT&T was able to extract from it.
Analysts, meanwhile, are skeptical that the much-awaited Ovi Store can match the runaway success of Apple’s App Store, which recently clocked up its one-billionth app downloaded less than a year after its launch. Global Crown analyst Tero Kuittinen told Reuters that the Ovi Store was “in some ways the last castle for Nokia” in which the handset giant “tries to re-group and muster its forces for a counter-offensive.” He noted that Nokia past attempts to offer mobile content haven’t been particularly successful and called its gaming service N-Gage and its unlimited music offering, Comes With Music, “industry laughing stocks.”
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