Last week, Nokia held an Ovi Developer Day in London, offering UK developers an opportunity to get up to date with Nokia's latest devices, services and developer offerings and to interact with some of the Forum Nokia team.
The event opened with a market overview summary, including a recap of many of the recent announcements at Nokia World, before moving on to a presentation of the opportunities for developers within the UK and Ireland markets. Mark Loughran emphasised that local contacts could help with a diverse range of activities, including the promotion of applications and content (e.g. the current N97 ad campaign in the UK includes promotion of local content), market intelligence (e.g. which devices to concentrate on) and with commercial leverage of the Forum Nokia organisation (connecting you to the right person at the right time). Incidentally, the presence of Mark Loughran at the Developer Day, Nokia UK's Managing Director (General Manager, Nokia UK & Ireland), underlines the importance that Nokia is now placing on developers.
Locally commissioned content - coming to Ovi Store in the UK soon
Rupert Englander (Head of GTM Nokia Services, Nokia UK) reviewed some of Nokia's Ovi services and explained that Nokia's aim was to deliver 'a complete and open services offering, connected through people and places'. Thus there are opportunities for third party developers to build on top of, and integrate with these offerings. The most developed examples of this are the recently announced Map Player and Navigation Player APIs, which are built on top of Ovi Maps, but there is much more to come.
Shane O'Brien (Multimedia Business Manager, Nokia Ireland) offered an insight into the Ireland market, noting that, although it is relatively small (4.5 million), it has one of the highest ARPU's in Europe. The developer community is relatively small, with 90% made up of 'hobbyists', but it also very active, with app stores a key focus. Example applications include iPub (locate your nearest Irish pub), Twecipe (cookery), Light Out (a game), Irish Baby Names and Next Dart (train time tables). Irish developers have found significant success, both locally and internationally. Shane then shared an interesting case study of the Irish National Anthem application (Amhran na bhFiann), which had been placed into the Ovi Store. The application had proved popular (partly because the national anthem is somewhat hard to remember and has a number of variations), especially among those attending international football and rugby matches. The application was featured on RTE News (one of Ireland's main TV channels). It is a good example of how the right application at the right time can capture the popular imagination, but also that there is much more than just technical skill involved in creating a successful application.
In the second half of the morning, Benjamin Roszczewski (Business Development Manager, Forum Nokia) led a session on 'Developing for the Ovi Store'. While there are still opportunities for developers to distribute content through pre-load, operators and content aggregators arrangements, Benjamin made it clear that Nokia see the Ovi Store as the primary route to market for developers going forward. Ovi Store now supports more than 100 device models, has active users in over 180 countries, developers from 65 countries and has over 5500 content items for the most popular devices. It's also growing quickly, with more that 500 content items added a week. While no concrete stats were shared, Benjamin did say that the number for August was bigger than June and July combined.
With the floor open to developers to share their experiences and ask questions, it was no surprise to see a lively level of conversation. In general, there seemed to be an acknowledgement that Nokia was heading in the right direction, but needed to keep its eye on the ball and swiftly address developer frustrations. The Ovi Store Quality Assurance (QA) process came in for particular criticism, with developers noting that it was a black box, with no clear guidelines as to what the QA criteria were. Moreover, it was clear an application could fail QA without any clear reason being communicated as to why it had failed. Signing, a long running contention in the Symbian world, was another pain point, although developers did acknowledge that this has got better and further changes were underway. Indeed, the main area of frustration was around the lack of information on what type of Java certification to use for which device.
At the beginning of his presentation, Benjamin asked the assembled developers what they thought were the three key issues that Nokia needed to address as a priority. By the end of the day these were narrowed down to:
- Transparency and information about the certification process in publish.ovi.com.
- The inefficiency and complexity of the QA process for publish.ovi.com, especially with seemingly arbitrary evaluation criteria.
- Improve search and discoverability on content on the Ovi Store.
Janaina Pilomia (EMEA Product Marketing Manager, Forum Nokia) introduced a number of UK-based winners of Nokia's recent Calling All Innovators developer competition, who shared some of their experiences. Mippin, who produced a mini content (news) delivery application described how it had added some 32 applications to the Ovi Store and racked up some 200,000 downloads. Half of these were made up of just two applications - Men's Fitness and NME. Touchnote, which lets you send physical postcards from your phone, shared the experience of going through QA on the Ovi Store. Initially the application failed because the icon featured a lady with a v-necked jumper - while far from salacious, this was deemed unsuitable for some markets. A good illustration of how it is often necessary to think outside your own market when considering application distribution.
Janaina also announced Calling All Innovators UK, a Nokia developer competition that seeks local content for the UK and offers £30,000 in cash prizes. The competition runs across four categories: Social location, Business and productivity, Communications and social networking, Games and fun, and is open for submissions until the 30th November.
Finally, Martin Rasmin (Senior Manager Total Experience Management, Maps Ecosystem, Nokia) offered an introductory presentation on Ovi Apps and Ovi SDK. This is the technology which allows developers to build content on top of Nokia's Ovi service platform, initially Ovi Maps. It's the realisation of the promise of apps on maps, which we wrote about earlier this year. We'll be covering this topic, in more detail, in a dedicated feature, in due course.
Having attended a number of Nokia developers events over the year, the overriding impression for me is the way that Forum Nokia is trying to change the way it communicates with developers. Rather than handing down edicts about what developers should be doing and how they should be doing it, there was a much greater willingness to engage the developers in conversation and ask them what Forum Nokia could do for them. The developers I spoke to welcomed this change, with a particular appreciation for both the honesty around problem areas and the ability to successfully communicate and converse with individuals, but did note that Nokia would also need to follow through with execution to address the problems that developers continue to face.
You can download many of the presentations from the Ovi Developer Day on the Forum Nokia website.
Rafe Blandford, All About Symbian, 30 Sept 2009