August 30, 2007
Nokia’s Ovi - a question of semantics
There is an old kids’ riddle which goes:
Q. When is a door not a door?
A. When it’s ajar.
And in a similar vein we can ask:
Q. When is a portal not a portal?
A. When it’s Nokia’s Ovi (door).
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia was reluctant to use the word "portal" yesterday at the launch of the Ovi service.
"I prefer to call it a gateway," in an FT interview following Wednesday’s gala news event.
Ovi means door in Finnish, and of course, "portal", "gateway" and "door" are all pretty much the same thing, semantically speaking.
But there are many reasons Nokia wants to steer clear of the "portal" word.
For one thing, mobile operators have portals and Nokia wants to minimise the sense that Ovi will be a competitor to these services. Although, of course, it will be. Ovi is designed to be a sort of jumping off point to access the mobile internet, a home page through which you can access music downloads, games and other services. A lot like what Vodafone Live or Orange World might offer.
Secondly, "portal" has mutated from its original Latin meaning of gateway and in today’s internet world has come to signify something closed, a walled garden where mobile operators steer you towards their own branded services and only reluctantly allow you to see the wider world. Nokia wants to stress openness. The Ovi can connect you to the wider internet, to Google or Yahoo or eBay as easily as it connects you to Nokia’s online music store.
By fostering a sense of openness, Nokia wants to make the mobile internet more enticing. It’s all about perception - the doors of perception in this case.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.”
William Blake, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
It’s about time mobile phones let the consumer get to the net ( in the USA this is still impossible) directly, aldo expect Verizon Wireless to reject this idea, their mobile phones only use proprietary tech. from Qualcomm, to watch video, to play games,music,etc., with Verizon Wireless everything goes through Qualcomm, isn’t insulting ? but hey !while in Japan and Korea they get 60 megabits/sec. on dsl for 40 dollars a month, Verizon gives you 2 to 3 megabits for about the same money in the USA, and Washington lets them handle the ‘08 Election lines, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN !….so let’s see what will happen with Sprint using WiMax compared to the Wimax experience in Asia, we have the neocons to thank for this criminal mobile Internet experience disaster, another strike ! ….at the end,the USA will be lucky to get the Negroponte olpc.org/ laptops , at least with the hand crank we wont have to pay royalties to the neocons in Qualcomm , and as so many insist here in the USA ,when are we going to get a full Investigation about how and why the U.S.Forces lost all their radios in 1995 in San Diego,Ca.?, Qualcomm now controls through CDMA all the radios the USA Forces were using until 1995 ! when are we going to get the truth ?
Posted by: blogger | August 31st, 2007 at 5:39 pm | Report this comment