Nokia's WidSets grows up with entry to the developer forum
The PC players, like Adobe and Microsoft, talk up their large base of developers and promise to make it increasingly easy for them to port their applications to mobile systems too. But until the mobile internet becomes really open, and more users have powerful web-enabled handsets, the mobile-oriented developer communities drive the agenda, and the largest of those is Forum Nokia. In the wake of Nokia putting its key development frameworks, along with the Symbian operating system, into the open source Symbian Foundation, it hopes to attract a far wider base of programmers, before it even has to worry about PC crossover (something that it hopes will largely be addressed on its behalf by its focus on cross-platform Java). Now it is spreading the Forum's wings even wider, bringing WidSets - its widget-based mobile content creation and sharing platform - into the fold.
This will open up the tools, technical information, support and distribution channels open to its global developer channel, to creators of WidSets mini-applications. These widgets will also now be available for download to the Nokia Forum's whole user base, not just through WidSets' own engine and partner portals. This indicates a coming of age for the widgets activity and for Nokia's mobile internet play as a whole. When it set up WidSets in October 2006, the initiative was one of its first web software units and was run as a separate business, but now it is being placed firmly at the heart of the company's overall strategy, where it can better enhance the developer program, and try to fend off the threat from other majors like Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft, and potential majors like Google Android. All of these are racing to create developer tools and support/distribution programs to attract the widest range of applications, and to set up apps stores to lure end users.
Nokia's initial focus on widgets was designed to make it easy for individuals or companies to create applications or generate content, without programming expertise, and these were optimized for individual mobile devices by the Nokia back end engine, and distributed via the WidSets' site and the portals of supporting operators or enterprises. The emphasis was on stimulating mobile web uptake by making apps cheap and cheerful to create, but now widgets are being pushed up the value chain, and WidSets will be supported by a comprehensive developer offering of tools and technologies, equivalent to that available to all Forum Nokia participants.
That support offering unravels the intricacies of dealing with the underlying technology and processes within a device. But the next step is just as important, and that's bringing those complete applications to market, and giving developers a way to get rich off the back of their programming efforts. This will usually be the most important factor in attracting those developers in the first place. Over the next two years handsets will be transformed by these kinds of efforts, and the cellphone will be the new PC, with every techie around the planet trying to build a killer app, in the same way that Facebook applications are springing up every day.
Nokia is keen that this trend should be driven most strongly by its own mobile optimized technologies, and by Java, rather than by developers crossing over from the PC internet, taking the Google view that 'there is only one internet' and no need for special skills and features for mobile platforms. In this important debate, Nokia has now gained an edge,
because it has already put Symbian into open source - well ahead of Android or other proven mobile Linux systems - and all developers know that they can deliver applications that will work on an installed base of about 500m devices running Nokia's Series 60/Series 40 system, (about 300 models currently support WidSets). This 500m number should rise rapidly with the increasing uptake of smartphones and the opening up of S60/S40, so that its adoption on non-Nokia handsets should increase.
"The Forum Nokia developer community welcomes WidSets with open arms," said Tom Libretto, vice president of the Forum. "Our developers consistently create innovative applications and services. With the addition of the WidSets developer offering, they will now have the ability to easily create and publish widgets through WidSets and collaborate with other developers while doing so."
As developers publish new WidSets widgets directly to an already extensive widget library, consumers gain access to popular web content optimized for mobile including news feeds, multiplayer games and a large variety of user generated content. Widgets are not only about making a host of apps available to Nokia handset users. Some of them have strategic importance in their own right for the Finnish giant. A recent example is Baidu, the Chinese search engine, which has pledged to provide a Chinese mobile search platform to be pre-loaded in Nokia phones. WidSets already has 4m subscribers in China.
This is a relatively small pigeon step or a company as embedded into the fabric of the cellular world as Nokia, but it shows that it is beginning to understand the war for developers that it is engaged in. This comprehension may already be making a mark on Symbian too, following its acquisition by Nokia and the promise that it will be transferred to the Eclipse open source program by next year. Symbian has also announced a new developer program to attract applications and contents creators. The new Symbian Partner Network (SPN) is intended to enable members of the ecosystem to develop and collaborate more closely on the platform.
