The Social

The world got its first look earlier this week at Nokia's XpressMusic phone, a music-focused handset with loads of media-sharing and social-networking features including Facebook. According to a Wall Street Journal story on Thursday, it appears that there may be a deeper partnership forming between the social network and the handset giant.

The two companies are reportedly just in talks, the Journal said, and there is not yet an indication as to which Nokia handsets would have the Facebook app. But it's possible that a compatible Nokia phone could link directly to Facebook profiles in its address book.

This is a big deal because Facebook, for all the hundreds of millions of profiles in its system, doesn't currently offer a great system for managing contacts. When blogger Robert Scoble attempted to use a script to export his Facebook friends' information to address book service Plaxo, Facebook promptly suspended his account. Facebook mobile applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry make it relatively easy to call or text a Facebook contact whose phone number is in the system, but you can't sync your contacts with a phone's main system.

The Journal article noted that Facebook also has been in talks with both Palm and Motorola regarding potential partnerships.

With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way--iPhone 3G, I'm looking at you--there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services.

The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up still in private beta.

Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008, were not disclosed. Plazes, which is based in Zurich, Switzerland, but works primarily out of Berlin, will become part of Nokia's Software and Services division. Plazes' technology will likely be worked into future mobile apps.

It's good news for Plazes, which has 13 employees. The track-your-friends-on-a-map application was in a tight market that kept growing tighter, with no clear winner emerging.

"When we started in 2005 the potential of that space might have been obvious, but it was an uphill battle nevertheless, with so many concepts gone sour before," a posting Monday on the Plazes blog explained.

Indeed, the first breakout start-up in the space, Dodgeball, was quickly acquired by Google. And instead of gaining mass-market success, it faded away.

Since then, start-ups like Loopt (which had some prominent stage time at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this month), Whrrl, and Brightkite--many of which do more or less exactly the same thing--have popped up and gained minor to moderate buzz. By getting acquired, Plazes has pulled itself out of the fray and, in effect, has ensured that it won't go under like some of its location-aware start-up brethren surely will.

"If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices," the Plazes blog post read. It will still be available as a standalone service, and its iPhone application is still on track.

MIAMI--A tech conference just wouldn't be a tech conference without a few wacky parties. The Future of Web Apps event in Miami this week is no exception.

Handset manufacturer Nokia decided to take advantage of the fact that no official FOWA parties were on the books for Thursday night by throwing its own soiree at an awkwardly named Miami Avenue bar called Dolores, But You Can Call Me Lolita (if it's going to be literary, can't the name at least be a little shorter?) as a promotion for its S60.com smartphone software.

The party was appropriately timed in conjunction with the gathering of many developers because the Symbian-based S60's hallmark is the fact that it accepts third-party applications.

We tried really hard, but BricaBox's Nate Westheimer and I couldn't find a way to make the pink Nokia S60 hats look tough.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

The highlight of the party, besides the free drinks, was a screaming contest. Yes, a screaming contest. Attendees were divided into groups based on the color of a smiley-face sticker on their badges, and each group was given an S60-equipped handset with an application installed that measured the volume of whatever was getting spoken or shouted into the phone. The group that could raise the volume highest by screaming into the handset was awarded with a Bluetooth headset for each member.

My group didn't win. After the screaming contest, I spent a bit of time talking to entrepreneurs from a few local tech companies, such as Grooveshark and Scrapblog. Then I went to sleep. The end.

In Nokia's swag bag? A memory stick (OK, I can deal with that), an extra-large T-shirt (beach cover-up!), breath mints (do they really think FOWA-ers are going to be making out?) and a pale pink baseball cap. Um, hello? The S60 party was about 95 percent male. Heck, even your average female wouldn't put on one of these hats.

And despite our valiant efforts, as you can see in the accompanying photo, even BricaBox founder Nate Westheimer and I couldn't make those hats look hard-core.

Nokia acquired media-sharing start-up Twango last year, and now it's finally doing something with it.

Twango has been folded into Ovi, a new brand for Nokia's mobile Web services such as gaming, social networking, and mapping.

"The Twango brand will be a fond memory," a blog post from Twango director of service development Jim Laurel reads. "We are now Share on Ovi."

Nokia made the announcement Monday, though Laurel's blog post is dated last Monday, February 4. Go figure.

Twango originally pitched itself as a more functional alternative to photo-sharing sites like Flickr; people can also share video and audio, organize it into "channels," and selectively share it with other individuals. Back in 2006, we billed it as a "great sharing site that no one uses."

Twango users without Nokia devices will still be able to use Ovi for media-sharing, but they will apparently be missing out on some perks. Laurel's blog post goes on to say that the former Twango team has developed downloadable software so that Nokia handsets (N95, N82, and N73) can automatically upload media to the service.

Also part of Ovi is Nokia's new navigation service, which was announced Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The main Ovi.com home page gives a few teasers as to impending services from Nokia, and encourages visitors to "come back soon and see what's new."

With primaries in more than 20 states next week, MTV has announced "Super Tuesday" coverage plans for its hand-picked citizen journalism corps.

In each state with a Super Tuesday primary, a member of the "Street Team" will be streaming live coverage from the video camera of a Nokia N95 handset; N95s can upload video directly to the Web, and this will be the first time that MTV has experimented with live mobile-to-Web coverage.

The content can be accessed on the MTV News site and on MTV's "Choose or Lose" election site. An online map will indicate which bloggers are live at a given time as they report from polling stations, rallies, and other locations deemed of interest to young voters.

MTV is also co-hosting a final "presidential dialogue" with MySpace.com and the Associated Press on Saturday; in addition to already-confirmed candidates Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama and Ron Paul have announced their plans to participate.

Reuters and the Nokia Research Center have announced that they are working on a joint project to enable journalists to file and publish stories and multimedia news content from handheld devices instead of computers. Called Reuters Mobile Journalism, the initiative relies upon connecting peripherals to Nokia's high-end N95 device--a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard, a small tripod for video interviews, and a microphone that can plug into the mobile handset--as well as software to make it easier to put together text, images and streaming media.

The Nokia N95

(Credit: Nokia)

"By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene," Nic Fulton, chief scientist of Reuters Media, said in a statement from the two companies. "This saves us time and benefits our audience by ensuring that they receive high quality news that is absolutely up-to-date."

It would also, of course, require that the reporter in question be equipped with an N95 handset.

Over the summer, Reuters ran trials of mobile journalism in situations as varied as the U.S. presidential primary campaign events, the Edinburgh TV festival and New York Fashion Week, where stories were filed from the field. Currently, the plan is to make the finished product available to professional journalists, but a number of university students will be used for a trial run to see how the "toolkit" fits into the ever-growing citizen journalism niche.

Twango's home page.

(Credit: Twango)

Media-sharing site Twango updated its Web site on Monday to announce that it's been chomped up by cell phone manufacturer Nokia. With its cool new toy, Nokia hopes to make it easier for handset owners to share multimedia content among desktop, Web, and mobile platforms.

"The Twango acquisition is a concrete step towards our consumer Internet services vision of providing seamless access to information, entertainment, and social networks--at any time, anywhere, from any connected device, in any way that you choose," said Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's executive vice president and general manager of multimedia at Nokia, in a joint statement We have the most complete suite of connected multimedia experiences including music, navigation, games, and--with the Twango acquisition--photos, videos, and a variety of document types."

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

A sexy Nokia N95

(Credit: Nokia)

I played around with a Twango account for a bit after testing it out when the Redmond, Wash.-based start-up (yes, it was founded by Microsoft alums) came to the DigitalLife trade show in New York last October. It's sort of like a mix between Flickr and multimedia "channel" creator Kyte.tv, facilitating the storage and sharing of a variety of media types and allowing them to be organized into "channels." To be honest, the structure of the site confused me somewhat (are "channels" like Flickr "albums" but with audio and video too?) Then again, I also can't seem to wrap my head around all those fancy Nokia N-series handsets that you can play with at the company's nightclub-like flagship store in midtown Manhattan.

But the match makes sense: it's clear that both companies pursue a strategy that focuses on the ultra-functional, the feature-heavy, and the if-it-counts-as-media-we'll-help-you-share-it mentality. It's unlikely that this acquisition will affect a whole lot of people who aren't Nokia customers (and it's not yet very clear as to how Twango itself will change) but it'll be interesting to see how this affects mobile media-sharing.