It is going to take hundreds of millions of euros (or dollars) to build and maintain a Web platform to support the wide range of internet services that will come to rely on a user’s location, or the location of other objects. Ultimately, probably only Google and Nokia are going to have the staying power to make that investment.

That was the contention of Michael Halbherr, who runs Nokia’s maps platform, when I caught up with him in California for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference this week.

Yahoo! and Microsoft, among others, might have something to say about that, and in a key area like geo-data its hard to see the Web ending up with only two platform providers. But to judge by the scale of Nokia’s own investment, Halbherr might at least be directionally right.

Of course, it depends a lot on how you define the scope of the platform.

Nokia’s definition is a very broad one. It paid more than Euros 8bn to buy mapping company Navteq. According to Halbherr, it is now spending a “couple of hundred million” euros a year to develop and expand the Navteq database - including, for instance, enhancing it so that it is more suited to pedestrian navigation using mobile handsets, rather than just automobile navigation. He also said Nokia was spending as much again adding GPS chips to its handsets.

Nokia is behind Google in trying to open up the capabilities of this platform for other internet developers, but is now racing fast to catch up. It recently started an effort to win developers over to its Ovi Maps service, under a programme called Apps on Maps. At Where 2.0 it has just announced an Ovi Maps player so that Web developers can add tailored maps to their own sites, including “fly-through” animations that  trace routes between different locations.

For a mobile company, location-based services of all kinds certainly feel a like core capability, so the focus on mapping and geolocation makes sense (though you can still quibble about whether Nokia actually needed to buy Navteq). Also, Nokia’s 40 per cent share of the global handset business puts it in a unique position to spread the cost of this massive investment widely. The company has narrowed the investment focus for its Ovi internet services onto a handful of core areas like this, again a move that makes sense.

Most developer attention, though, is still focussed on Google. In its own presentation at Where 2.0, the search giant extended its platform with the announcement of a Maps Data API. This is a hosting service that lets developers store and serve data that is connected to maps: another way for Google to tie developers more closely to its online maps platform. One side-effect will be to add to existing concerns about how much sensitive data Google holds, but the company should be able to assuage these fears, according to Brady Forrest at O’Reilly.

Nokia has an uphill climb ahead of it. The technical challenge of building an integrated platform that spans the traditional Web and mobile, and is easy to use for developers, will be a hard one. Nor does it have a history as a platform company - but then, neither did Google when it first decided to open its mapping API. With so much money already invested, this has now become one of the biggest tests of Nokia’s ability to make it as an internet platform player.

Tags: google, maps, nokia, Where 2.0

May 21, 2009 7:12am in Mobile | Comment