Xbox Live, Office, enhanced maps coming to Nokia’s Windows Phones

At at joint press conference recently, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop gave us what is might be the hatch of this newly forged partnership between their two companie. Fans of Nokia hardware and the Windows Phone software can get excited about the prospects of Xbox Live, Office, and enhanced maps (a combination of Ovi Maps and Bing) coming to Nokia WP sets. And as for those who love Windows Phone in general can get excited about the world’s largest phone manufacturer throwing its weight behind the recently launched mobile OS. 


In a letter to developers, the companies noted that Qt would still be supported for Symbian and MeeGo — Nokia expects to ship 150 million Symbian phones during the transition; there was also mention of the first MeeGo device shipping later this year. The letter was quite clear in saying that Microsoft would “provide tools for application developers,” not Nokia. Translation: No Qt. This transition from Symbian to Windows Phone is going to be an interesting tightrope for Nokia to walk — especially in regards to developers. The aforementioned letter is waiting for you after the break. Have a look and let us know what you think in the comments.


Letter to Developers about Today’s News
11 February, 2011 10:05



Nokia and Microsoft today announced plans to form a broad strategic partnership that would combine our complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem, one we believe would have all the elements needed to fuel innovation – including search, location, advertising and exciting new devices.
As part of this, Nokia plans to adopt Windows Phone as our primary smartphone strategy, helping drive the future of the platform. This has not been a decision taken lightly by Nokia and we wanted to share some of the key points with our developer community.
Nokia and Microsoft together
The Nokia-Microsoft ecosystem would aim to deliver differentiated and innovative products and have unrivalled scale, product breadth, geographical reach, and brand identity. With Windows Phone as our primary smartphone platform, we would help drive the future of the platform by leveraging our expertise in hardware optimization, software customization, language support and scale.
Microsoft would make available the existing free Windows Phone Developer Tools; Visual Studio 2010, Expression, Silverlight and the XNA Framework to developers. Together, we will provide guidance for developers wishing to port their applications to Windows Phone.
Nokia and Microsoft would also combine services assets to drive innovation. Nokia’s Ovi Maps, for example, would be at the heart of key Microsoft assets like Bing and AdCenter, and Nokia’s application and content store would be integrated with Microsoft Marketplace for Nokia Windows Phones, to deliver a great single commerce experience for developers and consumers alike.
The Qt ecosystem
Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. Though our plans for MeeGo have been adapted in light of our planned partnership with Microsoft, that device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.
Nokia Mobile Phones
Nokia Mobile Phones will drive Nokia’s “web for the next billion” strategy, leveraging Nokia’s innovation and strength in growth markets to connect the next billion people and bring them affordable access to the Internet and applications. This represents a further opportunity for developers. Nokia will leverage our proxy browser technology on mobile phones, as well as continuing to enhance Java support and SDKs, with developers and publishers able to deliver their applications to consumers through the Nokia store.
Supporting our developers
As part of the change in Nokia’s organization announced today, the Services and Developer Experiences (SDX) unit will be responsible for Nokia’s global service portfolio, developer offering, developer community relations, and integration of partner service offering. Forum Nokia will be part of that unit and will continue to support developers for Symbian smartphones and Series 40 mobile phones.
We will strengthen our ability to support developers both globally and in local markets, ensuring that we can work with you wherever you are to bring your latest applications to our store and help you leverage the global revenue opportunity with Symbian and Series 40.
For Nokia Windows Phones, Microsoft would provide tools for application developers to easily and rapidly leverage Nokia’s market reach. The integration of Microsoft Marketplace and Nokia’s content and application store would provide scalable infrastructure and compelling consumer engagement for applications for Nokia Windows Phones.
The combined stores would offer unparalleled distribution. The Ovi Store already delivers content in 190 countries, with local specific content in 90 of those. We are now seeing 4 million downloads a day, with 300,000 users signing up daily and 400,000 developers now working on applications for Nokia on Symbian. In addition to offering operator billing with 103 operators in 32 countries, we plan to support the widest range of business models for our publishers and developers.
We plan to make it easy and profitable for all developers to thrive in the ecosystem, taking advantage of the enablers (API’s) offered by ourselves, Microsoft and other partners – including location, search, monetization and advertising.
What’s next?
As we said, this announcement is about our plans to work with Microsoft and the planning will continue. Our aim is to keep you informed as plans develop, through our Forum Nokia and Ovi Publish websites, newsletters and in person. In the meantime, we want to help you maximize the existing business opportunity, developing for the approximately 50 million Qt capable Symbian smartphones already in use and approximately 150 million more that we target to sell, as well as hundreds of millions of Nokia mobile phones.
We think this is going to be an exciting journey and look forward to having you with us!
Purnima Kochikar
Head of Forum Nokia & Developer Community

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What does Bing Stand For?

These days, we can definitely say that we are blessed with great technology. Because of the advancement of computer and the Internet, our life is already considered a lot easier than before. Nowadays, searching the web for hard-to-find information is already very hassle-free. This is made possible by many search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Because of this great success, many companies have decided to create their own search engine in competition of the already established big ones. One of these is none other than Microsoft’s Bing search engine or bing.com. However, up until now, many are still confused as to what the word or term “Bing” means? So, what does Bing stands for?
 Bing basically means “Because it’s Not Google”. The definition of this acronym primarily targets it main competition, which is Google. As we all know, Google is considered as one of the best search engines out there. This is actually used by millions of people all over the world. This led Microsoft to create its own search engine, which is the Bing. Because of its name many critics and web users have compared its benefits and uses to Google and most of them have concluded that it is nowhere near as good as the latter. This is even led to some people changing its name from “Because it’s Not Google” to “But it’s Not Google”. As we can see, the meaning or the message given by the alteration has changed a lot. It basically shows that its features and benefits are still not as good as Google. Despite having a very high budget for advertising this engine, Microsoft was still unable to replace Google in the top spot. Aside from this, setting a very good ad for this new release have set greater expectations, which was not able to meet by Bing. Some experts have stated that for a new thing or gadget to replace an old, it should be at least ten times much better in terms of its benefits and features. This, nevertheless, was not able to fulfill by Microsoft since Google is still nowhere near the point of being replaced basing on its daily number of visitors and popularity.

However, Bing is still very plausible in giving us the things that we are trying to find or search. Nevertheless, Google is still preferred by many based on its benefits and performance. This is the reason why, if Bing wants to be known as “Because it’s Not Google” rather than “But its Not Google”, then it should make a huge step in improving its features in order to upstage Google. This might be very hard to do, but it is still very possible. Now, we already know what Bing stands for.

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Bing vs. Google: The Content Wars

The race to capture the bigger market has begun. Google is now thinking of different ways to catch the attention of users. It is working hard on its features like Google TV and Chrome OS notebook etc whereas Bing is speeding up with its Facebook addition. To know who wins the race you need to question your favorite search engine through PC, mobile television or even Facebook.

Earlier, Bing publicized their new feature with the association of Facebook that it will show user’s friends Facebook likes and dislikes while searching for a particular thing using Bing search engine. In answer to this, Google makes a similar social search feature associated with Twitter. It also plans on launching a social networking service. Since people use Facebook more than Twitter, so the results for Google wouldn’t be much satisfying.
Google is bringing novelty and making their search engine better. They are moving way ahead in the areas like Google TV. Devices such as set-top boxes from Logitech and HDTVs from Sony is used to combine web with broadcast television, like if you to watch a particular show or a movie, simply enter the name and it will provide you with the list of local TV and websites offering you what you want to see.
Both the companies are working hard to provide us with the best of Digital Life. Although Microsoft is the biggest competitor when it comes to windows OS, Google also plans to introduce its application Google Chrome OS netbooks. However, it appears that it can’t capture the market the way Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has.
Taking in account ComScore’s results for U.S search engine, Google again proved to be the king in the market as it ranked on number one taking 65.4% of the entire U.S search. Yahoo stood in the second position with the percentage of 17.4, whereas, Microsoft’s Bing took the third position capturing 11.1% of the U.S searches.
Microsoft had to buy Yahoo’s search queries to get close to Google. Even then it couldn’t beat Google or came even close to it in market share. Considering the research done 16 months earlier, right after 10 days Bing was introduced, Google still managed to attract 1.2% more users. Hence, if you combine Bing’s search percentage with Yahoo that makes a total of 28.5, still way behind Google’s market share.
 There may not be any competition when it comes to web traffic, but the struggle for social web on mobile devices has just started.

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Google keeps growing while Facebook and Microsoft make classic mistake

Google went up to 66% in the share market and now dominates the world of search engines. Facebook and Bing( Microsoft) are partnering to improve search results on Facebook which many view as a mistake.

It’s the breakthrough in Online Advertising that made Google develop this fast. Facebook audience is growing at a rapid pace but the profits for each page is insufficient in comparison with Google. Bing has 11.2% of all the searches but the profits are fewer than that.
Google works as both search engine and advertising company, but the advertiseing wing keeps things camouflaged although it’s the ads that are bringigng in all the profits.
Google has spent a large sum of money to enhance its search engine which is the reason it broods about the online search service.
Advertisers in most cases believe that marketing via Google has profited them more than advertisements any place.
Facebook needs to improve the quality of its online search service to supersede Google in the future.

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