Futurize Korea

The San Jose Mercury News takes a look at Nokia's newest research center in Silicon Valley :

Basing a team of technologists in Silicon Valley, Iannucci said, is critical to helping Nokia stay abreast of the rapidly advancing developments in mobile computing revolution - the convergence of wireless, the Internet, computing and multimedia.

Nokia's airy Palo Alto quarters is at the heart of a division called Nokia Research Center, a far-flung effort involving about 800 research engineers based in six countries.

Nokia hosted a media briefing on their research into mobile communications at the end of October called "The Way We Live Next". You can hear from most of the presenters in brief podcast interviews posted to the briefing website. InformationWeek also wrote up a summary on the briefing.

CIO UK has a profile on Nokia's CIO and senior VP John Clarke and his push to adopt social networking to transform the company:

The 20-year veteran of IT explores issues such as: how do social networks form? What is the flow of information? How do business processes work? This questioning is important, because Nokia is undergoing a transformation designed to connect its human resources with the business value. The programme, called Nokia Way of working, or Wow for short, is based on engaging employees and encouraging feedback to create a “flat, networked organisation”.

New mobile applications are already coming out from Nokia's bid for mapmaker Navteq:

Nokia's Halbherr said his company's aim was to bring detailed maps for pedestrians to the hundreds of millions of Nokia phone users worldwide, enlisting the help of those same customers to keep its maps up to date.

"Mapping will go to the next level. That's one of the things where communities can help," Halbherr said. "We have the world's biggest media-capture device. It means people can capture content, put it on the map and share it with others."

Halbherr said owning a mapmaker meant Nokia would be able to direct its own strategy in areas previously of little interest to a car-focused industry.

Xerox PARC recently demoed their new mobile application called Magitti for the Japanese mobile market combining a recommendation engine with location tracking technology:

PARC's software, which was developed for the Japanese company Dai Nippon Printing, is an example of a burgeoning trend to add more intelligence to handheld devices. And in many cases, this intelligence gives gadgets the ability to learn more about the person who operates them. As phones become more powerful, and more acquire sensors such as accelerometers and GPS, researchers are looking to artificial-intelligence algorithms to make sense of the data.

And a final report from the Australian IT on Nokia's plans to bundle new services along with their handsets:

Consequently, Nokia no longer sees itself as simply a mobile phone company.

"Nokia is a sizeable services company and a major force in defining what is going to happen on the internet," Mr Vanjoki said.

"We're very much a software company, but our software is mostly monetised inside the hardware. Now we're also expanding outside our hardware and offering services and systems."

Also, check out Chang's essay from last year on the chances of mobile phone manufacturers having a shot at being a leading provider of Web 2.0 services.

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