Yesterday, in a room packed full of journalists and the able members of the Kampala blogsphere, the able, beautiful Dorthy Ooko presented and unveiled Nokia's latest product; NOKIA OVI; for publishers.
Journalists being who they are sat quietly through her talk but the bloggers and techies were clearly in a state. The guy from the Google Technology User Group Uganda [who looks like Matt Damon but is actually called Kyle] was wondering about licensing and technology compatibility while Revence was worried about control, content and how long a developer's application takes to go through the verification, certification and validation processes in order to star earning his developer's cash!
The journalists wondered whether this was not going to trigger another war in a market where Nokia is a dominant player and neither Apple nor Google have the set up structures to compete in User generated content management and application development. The latter two have made hundreds of developers worldwide wealthy by providing platforms on which they could develop applications for their different products and be remunerated by royalties paid from usage/purchase or downloads.
This in many markets has meant that applications virtually for everything have been developed to assist users in their day to day lives; from the ovulation calendar to shazam; an app that will tell you the name, album, artiste, year and number of any song just by listening to the beats in that song. Obviously creating millionaires out of the truly brilliant designers.
Another truth is that a lot of these products were either not designed for the African market [now often referred to as the Middle East and Africa market], therefore resulting in:
a) A lot of African designers not being able to design the apps they need to find bags, shoes, cheap beer, and cheap affordable food or housing for the communities in which they live.
b) They have inadvertently missed out on the billions of shillings that are there to be made from worldwide consumption of their applications.
And in the new world of marketing where you flex your muscles where it hurts Nokia has flexed its biceps. Every day, more than 1.2 billion people connect to one another with a Nokia device – from mobile phones to advanced smartphones and high-performance mobile computers. you imagine that kind of power, usage subscription and loyalty and you tell me its not going to hurt. the naysayers will argue that people in Africa don't have the money to sustain the Apple and Google market sizes but these guys at Makerere will say different, or the guys at Appfrica, or the guys at Node Six.
Their argument is that if you continue to go where the money is, you miss the bigger "share of heart" that stands to be gained from the masses. this is mainly because these masses, eat, they work, they clothe, they dream and live; therefore they communicate; which is why new market analysis will tell you that the people are where you go, not the money.
Whether this is Nokia's objective or not is yet to be ascertained but one thing is for sure, the support that Nokia has now committed to offer developers is an almost unprecedented first; offering the OVI platform as a place for all consumers to be able to get their email, music, share work, games, mapping and navigation capabilities. This will undoubtedly lead to an increase in the amount of local content online; the god of which i have discussed before in previous posts here. check it more out here.
Download the statement/ news release here
2 comments:
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