Interview: Nokia’s Serena Glover Lays Out Vision For Ovi’s Future On the Phone

imageT-Mobile International joined Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) last week as two of the carriers on board with Nokia’s new brand of services called Ovi. Although there has been a lot of buzz about Ovi, a word that means “door” in Finnish, the extent of it all is a little hard to grasp. MocoNews caught up with Nokia’s Serena Glover in Bellevue for a better sense to get an idea of where it is all going. Glover co-founded Twango, the company Nokia acquired and made its first service branded under the Ovi name. As Nokia director of entertainment and communications, she heads up Share on Ovi, the social network platform where media can be viewed and shared with others. In upcoming months, more services, like music, games and maps, will transition under the brand. Glover remains in the Seattle area, where Nokia is opening up a substantial office this summer to handle its media-sharing strategy. They currently have 51 employees with plans to hire up to 30 more this year, and have enough room for 125. The office will be located in a creative part of Kirkland, home also to Bungie, the game studio that developed Halo, and Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) area offices. Some excerpts from our conversation:

– What is Ovi?: Last August, Nokia launched Ovi, and is the umbrella of a collection of Nokia services. Glover said the brand is spending a lot of time on the phone’s user interface, taking particular effort at creating clean and easy-to-use entry points for the customer. When the consumer opens the box, they should have an easy experience. For instance, do you want to create an Ovi account? If yes, which services are you interested in: media sharing, games, maps, pictures, etc.

– Openness: “We believe in open as well … consumers want the ability to choose. We never want to be the center of their universe. The person is the center.” Share On Ovi is available to anyone with a phone, not just a Nokia (NYSE: NOK). “We are going to make the best integration into Nokia devices, and make the experience really compelling, but we will be open to all.” Already, the photo-uploading services connect to Share, but also to Flickr and other popular services. What is less clear is what will happen with other services — if a person wants to purchase a song, would they be able to easily connect into Rhapsody or iTunes? Afterall, Nokia is trying to make money with its own music store. Glover said it will be a “good, better, best” scenario, where a number of services may be integrated, but Nokia will be a seamless experience.

– Browser vs. Client: Today, most rich experiences happen through an application on the phone, but soon the browser will be smart to handle some of the same functionalities. Glover: “Today, you have to have the application because you can’t hook the camera to the browser.” Nokia is working on bringing together these two worlds, “so you don’t have to have dual experiences.” Does that mean clients will go completely away? “In some cases, they will. .. . “With Ajax on the Web, there’s so much functionality — you can drag and drop and do more all the time. The same thing will happen on the device. This is a mobile computer — Nokia calls them multimedia devices. This is an area we are working on.”

– Ovi provides context: Glover said when users are mobile, it’s important to have context — the who, what, where and when. If you are on a business trip to Las Vegas, you likely know other people will be there, as well. “Why can’t you go to an app, and check to see what friends are here, and what media they’ve already uploaded?” In this scenario, the “who” is which friends are there, the “where” is Vegas, the “when” is this trip in particular, the “what” is the media. Those are all assets Nokia has access to — the address book knows who your friends are, the phone knows where you are (using GPS and maps), and the camera takes the media.

– Making money: “We believe we’ll make money in this space. It will be interesting to see how we make money, whether it’s advertising, subscriptions or transactional revenues…There’s going to be a mix. No one knows what that will be exactly.” In one scenario, Ovi could have profiles of music bands, where users can interact and upload media to their pages, but then also buy tickets, songs and merchandise. Advertising has a lot of potential since the devices have the context to serve relevant offers.

– Operator acceptance: “We have a very U.S.-centric view here, and the relationship between operator and others elsewhere is different. Since Ovi was announced, we have been having a lot of conversations with the operators, and they are positive. The reason is that the pie is getting bigger. We aren’t having to fight over the same sized pie.” Because data usage is going up, it makes sense to work together to make the pie is as big as possible. “Small operators love the fact that Nokia is doing services — they don’t have the resources to do it themselves. You have to be a big company to be in this space.” Nokia plans to collaborate with carriers to integrate unique services that will differentiate them when it comes to other carriers.

– The U.S.: “The U.S. will change dramatically over the next few years…The days of the ‘walled garden’ are numbered — I think everyone knows that. How fast it will happen, who knows?”

– Geotagging demo: Glover demonstrates the new N78 phone, launching this summer. She gets near her office window to make sure she has a strong GPS signal, clicks a picture from the 23rd story as she looks out at a clogged Interstate 405, and clicks once more to send it up to Share on Ovi (a Flickr-like experience). We wait, but the demo fails — something from the demo phone to the satellite signal to the test server broke. If it would have worked, the photo would have automatically be geo-tagged, and provided a map of Bellevue, WA.

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