Oracle And Nokia Make A Deal

Nokia Oyj has agreed to grant Oracle Corp’s customers access to its mapping products, as the wireless phone company attempts to expand its location services business.

The Finnish company, which bought the world’s largest digital mapping firm, Navteq, in 2008, has been looking for ways to boost the business and recently signed mapping deals with Groupon Inc and Amazon.Com Inc.

In stark contrast with Nokia’s troubled mobile phone operation, sales at the location business grew last quarter, though it still generates only 4 percent of group revenue.

Oracle has developed a link between its own software and the Nokia Location Platform software, Nokia said on Monday. This enables the U.S. company’s business users to access the mapping services through its products.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but Nokia said Oracle users would license Location Platform from Nokia for use in Oracle applications.

“Nokia has been on a mission for the last 18 months to sign mapping and location deals with large internet players. The deal with Oracle extends this,” CCS Insight analyst Martin Garner said.

Last week Apple publicly apologized after customer complaints about errors in its maps, which have been put on its latest phone operating system instead of Google Inc’s mapping service.

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RIM Unveils New BlackBerry Torch Phones

Research In Motion on Wednesday unveiled two more powerful versions of its touchscreen BlackBerry Torch, hoping to buy time until it can introduce a radically new software package in its smartphones.

The new smartphones, along with a Bold upgrade unveiled earlier, are part of what the Canadian company called its biggest global launch ever as it seeks to claw back North American market share losses from Apple’s iconic iPhone and a slew of devices running on Google’s Android software.

The three touchscreen phones, running on the new BlackBerry OS 7, each boast an improved screen display and pack a 1.2 GHz processor from Qualcomm, the most powerful ever for a BlackBerry phone. All three devices will launch with carriers globally by the end of August, RIM said.

The browser for the new phones is 40 percent faster than the original Torch, RIM’s last major phone launch which hit shelves almost a year ago.

But since co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis has already promised “superphones” next year using the QNX-based operating system running RIM’s PlayBook tablet
computer, analysts are looking beyond the launch.

“This is a necessary product refresh in advance of the big bang that we hope and expect will happen with QNX-based phones,” said CCS Insight vice-president of research John Jackson.

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Nokia Adopts Windows Phone 7 OS

Nokia will adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its main smartphone strategy, the company stated today, after days of speculation on what it would do to compete with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

The companies will also partner on mobile ads- Nokia will use Microsoft adCenter in mobile devices and on mapping- where Nokia Maps will become part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Nokia’s application and content store will be integrated into Microsoft’s Marketplace.

Before today’s announcement, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop had stated that Nokia needed to “decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem” to change its fortunes. In the end it decided to partner with Microsoft and join the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem.

Nokia will contribute its hardware design and language support to the partnership, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies, the companies said in an open letter from Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. R ead More……..