Nokia is engaged in close combat with the internet’s leading companies as their incursions increase into its domain of the cellphone.

It gave a frosty reception on Monday to Google’s Android mobile phone software platform, which will rival the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system.

Then there was a strong riposte on Wednesday with the announcement that its internet portal Ovi will be included by Vodafone on its high-end handsets.

The deal with the world’s biggest mobile operator by revenue is a tangible win for the company compared to the vague promise of the Open Handset Alliance to Google.

Following on from a similar deal with Telefonica last month, it shows operators are willing to give a place to the handset maker’s internet services alongside their own content and services.

Smaller battles are also being won and lost.

Google acquired a company from under Nokia’s nose last month when it bought Jaiku, an Helsinki-based rival to the Twitter mobile microblogging service.

Jaiku was founded by ex-Nokia employees and the leading handset maker had adopted its technology, so it would have made a natural acquisition for a company looking for Web 2.0 smarts.

It already has Mosh, of course – a three-month-old service developed in-house that allows its members to upload and share content such as photos, videos, ringtones and games.

Mosh, short for mobilise and share, is proof that Nokia can think outside the box, or handset. It was thought up a year ago by Americans and Finns locked up in a hotel outside Helsinki for a month. “We were told to come up with something game-changing,” says George Linardos, Director of Experience, Forum Nokia.

So far, it has attracted more than 6m downloads of applications and content since its launch on August 9 and works on all Web-enabled devices.

The service will launch Seek next month, allowing users to request customised content such as a specific video or detailed map of an area for their phone.

With Mosh, Nokia beat another internet company, at least to the name. Legal letters were exchanged when Yahoo’s new social network Mash was under development with the title Mosh.

Nokia pointed out it got there first, and a mishmash over Mosh was avoided.

Mark Zuckerberg was in rare form today as revealed the "social ads" that form the core of Facebook’s long-awaited new advertising technology. Not only did the young Facebook founder wear a rather dapper pair of closed-toed leather shoes in place of his trademark Adidas sandals, he also turned uncharacteristically emotional as he displayed Facebook’s new ads to the assembled audience of advertising and marketing execs.

In a move out of the Steve Jobs playbook, the 23 year-old internet mogul said the ads, which companies will pay to have appear on users’ Facebook pages, were beautiful and made him very happy. But will Facebook’s users feel the same?

For the time being, Facebook users will not be able to opt out of receiving social ads, which will appear on users’ profiles when they post photos, write reviews or do other things on special Facebook pages designed by their favourite brands.

Zuckerberg indicated yesterday that he might consider an opt-out system for social ads, if users demanded it. Until then, the default will be for users to participate in Facebook’s money-making gambit.

It seems that Dave Winer, the software guru, is not impressed with Apple’s new Leopard operating system:

I’ve given Leopard a chance, but it’s pretty clear, this is not a good operating system release. […]

Talking with a friend a few days ago, he asked what I thought of Leopard. He had installed the new version, like me, the first day it came out. "I’m not liking it," I said. He said something that was simple, profound and revealing: "It’s like Windows." It is. It’s that unpleasant to use.

Winer goes on to list a series of shortcomings, from system crashes to a tricky new interface, before reaching the conclusion that "Apple doesn’t understand how many people depend seriously on their Macs."

Winer may have switched back to Microsoft, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. Continue reading after the jump.

(more…)

Despite fires in San Diego closing its factory there and forcing evacuations of its workers, Sony Electronics says it has now caught up with orders and is expecting a bumper holiday season in the US.

“It could be the best holiday season in the last couple of years,” Stan Glasgow, its president in the US, told us at a press event in San Francisco on Monday night.

His confidence is based on orders from retailers for Sony’s current third quarter and he also expects returns from a $100m marketing campaign in the US.

“You will see more advertising than we have ever done before,” he said. The emphasis will be on High Definition , with Sony’s HDNA campaign prominent.

Sony also showed off the new version of its Sony Reader and an 8Gb Walkman that competes with the iPod Nano. Significantly for Sony, its proprietary Atrac format is gone and it now seems more open format than Apple, with WMA, MP3 and AAC music files supported.

Mr Glasgow said Sony’s announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January would emphasise integration between Sony’s different product lines – a key goal of Sony’s chief executive, Sir Howard Stringer.

His US president was particularly critical of supporters of the HD-DVD standard, which competes with Sony’s Blu-ray DVD players. He said Toshiba and perhaps Wal-Mart had substantially subsidised an HD-DVD player that went on sale for $99 at the retailer last week.

He also claimed that HD-DVD supporters had paid the Hollywood studios as much as $500m in incentives to bring out movies in that format. The studios are also reported to have asked for incentives from Sony and the New York Times reported in August that Paramount and Dreamworks alone had received $150m for choosing HD-DVD over Blu-ray for their releases.

My usual routine for booting my home computer is to turn it on, then go away, make a cup of tea and come back 10 to 15 minutes later, knowing it’s safe by then to click something and get some kind of response.

The only fast part of the whole process is the initial boot of the BIOS, the piece of software that sits on a memory chip and checks everything is powered on, then tells the PC where to find the operating system.

The name that briefly flashes up on my screen and on millions of others is Phoenix Technologies, the leading maker of this system firmware.

Phoenix had been in decline until a new management team came in a year ago with a plan to revitalise its product line. Its biggest step so far is the HyperSpace platform announced today, in what amounts to a reinvention of the humble role of the BIOS.

HyperSpace enhances the BIOS by adding a mini operating system of its own that should provide almost instant access to web browsers, email programs, instant messaging clients and media players that are written for it.

Phoenix is using new virtualisation capabilities being built into Intel and AMD chips, which allow such environments to be compartmentalised for greater security.

Applications have yet to be developed for the platform and Phoenix could face competition from other software companies, including Microsoft, by the time of HyperSpace’s full launch on notebook PCs in the second half of 2008.

But Rich Arnold, chief strategy officer, expects Phoenix will find enough partners to exploit HyperSpace’s instant-on capabilities for people wanting fast access to standard applications while on the go.

“We want to be a Blackberry inside the PC that has all the same functionality,” he says.

“This will give access to just the applications you really need and probably give you an hour of extra battery life.”

You think it’s starting to sound expensive? Getting into nose-bleed territory? Take a deep breath, relax, and consider this:

1. Wall Street no longer needs to feel so antsy about Google’s ballooning payroll. After adding more than 3,500 employees over the last six months, revenue per employee - a metric that Google had said would be an important measure of its productivity - tumbled by more than 10 per cent, to $266,000 a quarter. Not good. But think of it this way: Google’s MCPE (market cap per employee) has gone up 20 per cent in the same period, to $14m. Doesn’t that make you feel much better?

2. That multiple of 45 times this year’s earnings doesn’t sound so bad when you think the shares were trading at 80 times prospective earnings at the time of the IPO. (OK, so Google was growing at more than 100 per cent a year back then, compared to 50-60 per cent now, but does the law of large numbers really apply to an exceptional company like this?)

3. When the shares hit $600 last month, Sergey Brin offered a reason for not splitting the stock: There’s no need to buy ten shares for your portofolio, just buy one. With the shares moving this fast, when does even one get probitively expensive for the children’s college fund? Back in the dotcom boom, stock splits always did wonders for already over-heated share prices, so imagine the celebration that a Google split would induce. (Note: Berkshire Hathaway’s A shares are trading at more than $131,000 each, but professional funds were set up long ago so that small investors could combine their savings to get a piece of Warren Buffett. Google Funds should be coming soon.)

So, what’s not to like?