First Apple, now Nokia. We guess opening a store in China is the fashionable thing nowadays. Nokia is opening its seventh retail store worldwide in Shanghai. The store will even include some ridiculousness that sounds good in a press release but probably doesn't sell phones: "Consumers will be able to send text messages to change the glass walls in the store to colors of their choice." Ah yes, that really makes me want a craptastic Finnish phone. [WSJ]
Apple's third quarter was a blowout all around, but the real question is how the iPhone is faring. Now that we've got a quarter's worth of data, we can compare it to the competition, and gauge the effect of blogosphere scandals like the recent episode of iPhones "bricking" after a software update — sure, tech pundits got worked up, but did people stop buying iPhones? The bottom line: Steve Jobs & Co. entered a daunting market and performed quite well.
WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Does Nokia wish it were Facebook? Or Apple? Anssi Vanjoki, an executive at the Finnish phonemaker, can't seem to make up his mind. Nokia's introducing Ovi, a "context-sensitive" social network. Oh, and the N810, with which Nokia hopes to horn in on the iPhone's computer-in-your-pocket market. This is, surely, the ultimate bitches-just-jealous corporate strategy. We can only think that Motorola CEO Ed Zander is delighted to hear his rival's getting out of the phone business.
Motorola CEO Ed Zander claimed that his company considered buying Navteq, the mapping-services company rival Nokia snapped up last week, but decided to pass. "We are not in the applications business," said Zander. Right. That explains, of course, why Motorola bought Good Technology, an email software company, last year. We have another theory: Bitches just jealous.
It's been a banner day for Apple, Google, and Research In Motion, as shares of all three companies hit all-time highs.
Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is buying Navteq for $8.1 billion. The company's mapping service powers Google Maps, among others — including the Google Maps application for Apple's iPhone, a competitor to Nokia's handsets. (That's an exceedingly roundabout attack on a rival, but it's so obscure it just may work.) Nokia also says it will provide many more phones with GPS capabilities in 2008. [GigaOM]
Nokia is leaping into the mobile advertising arena with its plans to acquire Enpocket, which sprinkles mobile Web pages with video and banner ads. With mobile phones seen as one of the great unmapped frontiers of advertising, Nokia is preparing to battle with other prospectors like AOL's Third Screen Media and Google, which just announced AdSense for Mobile. Of course the big problem, as Advertising Age points out, is that consumers are hardly begging for ads on their phones' cramped screens. But advertisers are attached to the long-held vision of location-based advertising, stalking their customers through the streets, pinging them with coupons for nearby stores.
Early adopter? Late adopter? Surly adopter? Nokia and Apple (or rather, an opportunistic Apple retailer) are vying for your affections. When you Googled "iPhone" earlier today, targeted ads for Nokia's Mosh social network showed up, taunting iPhone buyers for having overpaid. In response, Apple an Apple e-commerce affiliate placed ads telling "late adopters" that they could get "all the iPhone" for two-thirds the price. The ads no longer appear on Google, but we suspect this was more of a competitive tweak than a long-term marketing strategy. Update: Turns out the Apple ad was a fake, placed by a third-party affiliate. (Screenshot by Search Engine Land)
A spoof Nokia ad featuring a cat that attacks a ceiling fan, gets stuck on the blade and ends up spinning around the room and eventually hitting the wall with a thud is getting the Puma treatment from Nokia.
The Puma ad: here we go again...with Nokia this time [AdRants]
Uproar over Nokia ad video [CourierMail]
