Richard Bloor recently caught up with Lee Epting, vice president of
Forum Nokia, Nokia’s global developer program, and took the opportunity
to find out how she views the changes in S60 over the last year,
including the increasing role of open source software.Lee Epting, a software developer relations executive with over fifteen
years experience in the technology sector, is Vice President of Forum
Nokia, Nokia’s global developer support community. In this role, Epting
is responsible for driving the business connections between Forum Nokia
and more than 2 million registered Forum Nokia software developers,
mobile network operators, content aggregators and enterprises.Source: Symbian One
This is the key point:
Richard: What do you see as the challenges now?
Lee: The real challenge now is getting the great
innovation developers are creating into the hands of the consumer. We
are addressing this with Nokia Content Discoverer, where we are putting
a catalogue of software on devices. There are some 50 Nokia device
programs [which includes Series 40 phones] committed to shipping the
catalogue client. As a result, we expect this initiative to reach the
phones of 20 million consumers by the end of 2006.At the same time we still need good old fashioned sales and
marketing; to make consumers aware of S60 as an open extensible system
they can add applications and content to. This needs to come from us in
Nokia, operators, aggregators and application developers.
I couldn’t agree with you more, a ton of work needs to be done on connecting the developers and consumers. Right now, you’re failing horribly at it.