Can the Ovi Store find its way?

Location-based services appear to be where it's at. One in three smartphone users currently use a location service at least once per month according to a new study issued by market research firm Compete--weather solutions lead the way, followed by navigation services and retailer locator tools. Compete also notes that smartphone owners who use location services are more likely to spend more money each month on their total wireless bill. Not to mention that an additional 20 percent of smartphone users said they would be interested in using location applications if they knew more about which services are available and how to use them--in particular, these subscribers would embrace local alert services (e.g., traffic jam warnings or gas price notices) and special offers, assuming they knew how or where to find them.

The Compete study is no doubt encouraging news for Nokia; CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo this week said the handset giant will seek to more deeply integrate location-based services and social applications into its devices. "The phone knows where you are," Kallasvuo said Wednesday at The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference [1]. "It might know where you're going or what you're going to do." For that matter, Nokia's new Ovi Store mobile application storefront--which finally opened [2] Tuesday--is predicated on what the handset giant calls "social location," i.e., a customized and contextually relevant user experience determined by factors like personal contacts and physical whereabouts. But Nokia itself seemed lost in the hours after Ovi Store first opened for business: Both consumers and media alike complained of slow load times, outages and similar glitches, and the company even issued a public apology [3] on the Ovi Blog, blaming the performance issues on "extraordinarily high spikes of traffic."

The Ovi Store launch was an ambitious undertaking by any measure--while rivals Apple and Google rolled out their respective app stores on a market-by-market basis, Nokia went live across multiple markets simultaneously, with a mobile client available in five different languages and support for operator billing across Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom. Moreover, Ovi Store targets more than 50 devices in the Nokia portfolio, including the forthcoming Nokia N97. Still, given how long Nokia has been tweaking the Ovi Store in preparation for its debut, it's surprising and distressing that the store stumbled immediately out of the gate. "Nokia has over-promised and under-delivered, and the public has noticed," write Current Analysis' Deepa Karthikeyan and Emma Mohr-McClune in a scathing research note published Wednesday. "Nokia should view the Ovi Store's poor start as a business-threatening event, potentially compounding the recent N-Gage failure and poor market reaction to Nokia Comes With Music."

As the cliché says, you only get one chance to make a first impression. But even though the initial execution is sorely lacking, the Ovi Store concept is too good to simply write off. As the Compete study reminds us, there remain a staggering number of subscribers without even a vague idea of what kinds of mobile applications exist, let alone how to access and use them. The promise of social location is that Ovi Store can reach these subscribers directly, recommending them apps customized according to their individual interests, needs and behaviors--if it works (and admittedly, that's a big "if"), the content search and discovery complexities that have so long hindered the mobile user experience could become a thing of the past. As Kallasvuo said, the phone might know where you're going or what you're going to do--now it's up to Ovi Store to figure out where it's going and what it's going to do. -Jason [4]