Nokia responds to Ovi Share rumors, service effectively on ice
There's been some chatter today that an earlier Reuters report -- stating that investment in Nokia's Ovi Share service has been halted -- was false, so we reached out to Nokia for an official comment. In essence, it looks like Reuters was correct; a Washington-based office working on Ovi Share services is set to be shuttered, and while the media-sharing system will continue on in its current state, no further development is planned. It can be a little tricky to read through the corporate-ese, but the bottom line appears to be that Nokia's preferring to drop time, energy, and cash into building out its third-party APIs that allow more established sharing services to plug into Ovi rather than trying to pimp its own service; makes sense, really, since there are plenty already in the game and there's not much sense in Nokia trying to win. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, as they say. Follow the break for the official statement.
"These reports seem to be a reaction to our announcements on April 28th. On that day, Nokia announced that it was making changes in its business that will improve the user experience across its different services. In these changes it noted that the company is accelerating the development of a common platform for all of its services. Thus, naturally, investments in some legacy systems would not be continued.
Further, the company announced that it planned to open up API's to create more opportunities for integrating third parties. The integration of more third party image sharing and social networking sites to the image capture and sharing features on our devices will improve the experience for customers. This will enable consumers to share their photos and videos directly to these sites, and also have more choice in how they wish to share their files with friends. The company noted it will collaborate with industry leaders in this space, and announce these collaboration agreements later."
