Nokia to streamline services, re-focus investment, cut jobs

Nokia announced plans to streamline operations across its Services unit, an effort that will trim about 450 jobs worldwide. According to the handset giant, the initiative will create a stronger, more simplified user experience across its services in addition to opening up new opportunities for third-party developers--moreover, Nokia will now focus investments on fewer projects, and accelerate the creation of a common platform across the firm's various offerings.

Chief among the changes: All mobile games will become available via Nokia's soon-to-launch Ovi Store application storefront, but will also remain available through existing channels like the N-Gage service. Nokia also said it will turn to partners like digital imaging sites and social networking services to bolster the image capture and sharing features on its devices, promising to enhance the user experience for customers who actively use third party services. Nokia adds the changes will realize cost-efficiencies in a number of areas.

Nokia's evolving relationship with the developer community is the focus of the Nokia Developer Summit 2009 conference, taking place this week here in Monte Carlo. Nokia executive vice president of services Tero Ojanperä encouraged the 345 developers in attendance to think of the Ovi initiative as a programming platform, not just a service. "We're going to expose and open Ovi through APIs in a completely new manner," Ojanperä said. "Look at Ovi as a platform you can develop applications on top of--to enhance the experience, and to build value." Ojanperä reiterated Nokia's commitment foster a developer environment that cuts across platforms and leverages a large number of handsets, and said the company ultimately plans to offer applications optimized for all of the devices in its catalog, not just smartphones.

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