As of 2012, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo wants Nokia to have 300 million service subscribers. In an aggressive first step, he's planning on expanding the Ovi applications environment. But he needs to act quickly as in the past year the company's shares have fallen by 50%. In a recent interview with the Financial Times Kallasvuo admits he is trying to change Nokia's direction from being a handset provider to a service provider. With a formidable rival like Apple, it will certainly be an uphill battle.
While tax season is always a scramble, one of the best perks of being self-employed is the fact that you can generally arrive to the office / living room in your pajamas. Think about all the blogs you read on a regular basis. Now imagine those people in their underwear, because that's honestly how the foremost technology bloggers are dressed as they deliver you the latest news. But video chat threatens to unsettle this wonderful world of pants-less utopia. This past weekend, Google announced the launch of iGoogle voice and video chat.
I've decided I really, really, really don't want to die. Anyone know where I can make a secure off-site backup?
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A couple of interesting new events this week on the ReadWriteWeb events guide, including a Twitter-driven documentary about Twitter. Download the calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
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In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we poll our readers on their 3 most exciting web apps or services, analyze the latest Twitter client stats, report on MySpace's acquisition of Facebook app iLike, review the state of the netbook market, talk to Tim O'Reilly about his vision for a government web platform, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
There's a seemingly infinite list of startup companies based on adding one form of value or another on top of Twitter. One called TipJoy closed its doors this week, despite a remarkable set of blessings that thousands of developers throughout the Twitter ecosystem would be wildly jealous of.
TipJoy offered a service that would let people pay small amounts of money as tips for online content, with the transaction being processed via messaging on Twitter. That wasn't the only way TipJoy worked, but the company was very closely tied to Twitter.
Imagine a random web.
Your favorite current affairs news blog, which couldn't survive on Viagra ads, is now charging subscriptions. Your e-tail site of choice keeps recommending country music, which you outgrew years ago. And your default social network's constant entreaties for donations finally annoy you so much that you do the unthinkable: switch to MySpace (at least it is supported by News Corp's old-media money).
This is too much. So, you pick up a copy of Portfolio magazine and browse the ads for financial products, reassured that at least this medium knows how to target its audience.
Jeremiah Owyang knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, fast. Just short of two years after joining Forrester, the second biggest professional analyst firm in the US, Owyang announced yesterday that he's decided to leave. From working in the marketing department of Hitachi Data Systems to joining business podcast network startup Podtech to becoming the first blogger to be hired as an analyst - Owyang's last five years have been a model of professional advancement through social media.
He hasn't disclosed what he's going to do next yet, but his so-far brief career as probably the most social-media savvy member of the relatively conservative analyst industry offers a rich snapshot of how this important part of the business world is changing. Owyang has already played a big role in changing it.
The launch of Wolfram Alpha in May is still one of the most exciting product launches we have witnessed so far this year, even if the enormous hype around it also meant that it disappointed a lot of people who expected a "Google killer." In the last couple of months, however, the Wolfram Alpha team has been working quietly on improving Wolfram's 'computational knowledge engine.' According to Stephen Wolfram's latest post on the Wolfram Alpha blog, things are moving ahead as planned. The company has used the summer months to tweak and extend Wolfram Alpha quietly as it got ready for more people to use it more heavily once the fall semester begins in the US.
