We pretty much knew this was true when Nokia (NYSE: NOK) said last week that it would be closing its Seattle office, where its Ovi Share services were headquartered. But Reuters has confirmed today that Nokia will no longer be investing in the photo-and-video sharing site. The action marks the handset maker’s first major retreat in the Internet services space.
A spokesman for the company told Reuters: “Ovi Share … is planned to be maintained in its current state,” meaning that it won’t be investing in the service anymore, but will continue to keep the site up and running. The Ovi Share service was derived from Twango, a startup that was running out of a Redmond, Wash.-based basement office when Nokia bought it in 2007. Since then, Nokia leased a large office space in Kirkland, and planned aggressive goals to ramp up its presence in Seattle.
Nokia never said how many people were using Ovi Share, but Reuters said analysts suspected it stayed relatively low because of competition from already established sites such as Picasa, Flickr or Facebook. The company said it will rely more on third-party services going forward. The competition not only exists for Ovi Share, but for many of Nokia’s other internet services, such as mail and maps. The question is whether Nokia’s install base of handset users will start using Nokia services because they have a Nokia phone, or if they will gravitate to already strong brands, like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and Microsoft.
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