What happens when you own the mapping data that everyone else uses for their mapping service? As an advertiser do you bother joining the multiple ad networks that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Map Quest run or do you go straight to the top, to Nokia, who now owns all this rich information and will most likely use it to build an advertising platform? Nokia acquired Navteq for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, but they also purchased Enpocket recently. Who knows the mobile market better than the manufacture who controls over a third of that industry? What exactly is their vision going forward?
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, said that in a few years he hopes 25% of his company’s revenue will be generated from advertising, a market currently worth a little over half a trillion dollars per year. Now I know Nokia isn’t Microsoft, but they are fighting the same fight. Desktop operating systems and mobile devices are quickly becoming a commodity. Many of the things people do on their PC today will be experienced via a browser or rich internet application in a few years. Likewise, what you do on a mobile phone today is currently restrained based on the J2ME implementation or operating system your vendor decided to slap on, but we’re finally seeing Sun get their J2ME act together with MIDP 3.0 and Adobe delivering a rich platform that can leverage video thanks to Flash Lite 3.0, not to mention more and more devices are shipping will full HTML browsers.
The internet is the new platform and the people who own the services that vendors use to build fantastic applications will get a piece of the pie. Google was the first to hit with Adsense, now we just need to see what Nokia does with their advertising platform. After the ink drys on the Navteq deal you do realize that every time an iPhone user turns on Google Maps, every time someone uses Google Maps on their desktop, Microsoft Live Local, Mapquest, etc. Nokia will make money? It all makes sense now that I think back to the Go Play event in London where a video played during the Ovi introduction that showed all of these internet brands flying across the screen. Nokia will build an internet application or two, Twango and MOSH are clear signs of that path, but it realizes that there are other players out there, players who have open API’s and when their services are combined with Nokia’s ad network … that is when revenue streams that take care of themselves are created.
That is when Nokia can pour even more money into R&D and stay ahead of everyone else in the mobile phone space, hopefully. What do you guys think?
Update: Two posts about the internet as a platform via S60’s Widget platform and S60’s Location API have stumbled in my RSS reader. The first video is about an hour long, watching it now so I can’t comment on the content. The second on the Location API is definitely a nice sum up of Nokia’s dedication to location and offering developers to use their platform of choice to use the location data; 13 minutes long.