Niklas Savander on opening up Ovi Maps to developers
Nokia is opening up its Ovi Maps service to external developers, allowing them to make use of it in their applications in the same way they can use Google Maps on iPhone and Android.
EVP of Services Niklas Savander has just taken the stage at Nokia World to announce the news in his keynote speech, but ME sat down with him yesterday to get an early preview.
“We are publishing an SDK and opening up our APIs, first on location, but that is just the first step,” he told us. “Five companies have already been working with it, and it is created in such a way that developers can do it with totally standard web tools: JavaScript and cascading style sheets.”
Among the apps being shown off today are one by German rail firm Deutsche Bahn, which has created an app to show train locations in real-time. Savander says this app was developed in just two weeks, which he says shows the ease with which developers can get to grip with Nokia's new SDK.
“It's important, because we need to provide the tools and get out of the way,” says Savander. “Of course, we need to pick a few places where we can add a lot of value as well, but innovation typically happens when you open stuff up and then see what happens. No one company can have the sole rights to innovation.”
Today's announcement is of a closed beta, so Ovi Maps is not being opened up to all developers straight away. Savander says Nokia wants to work with hundreds initially, to iron out any remaining wrinkles in the technology and SDK. Lonely Planet is another company that's already been given early access, and is showing its app off today.
Savander agrees that maps and location are a much bigger priority for Nokia this year, with the dust having settled from its acquisition of NavTeq and launch of Ovi Maps. “It's something we are putting most of our effort on, mostly because we have the biggest assets to play there ourselves: both ownership of the digital maps, and ownership of the application layer.”
He says that Nokia is, like Google, seeking to get lots of developers working with its maps to create location-aware mobile apps – for more on his views on the contrast between the two companies' approaches, see yesterday's story.
Savander is also enthusiastic about yesterday's news that Facebook and Nokia are working together on a social location app, which will see people uploading content from their Nokia phones to the social network automatically appending links to Ovi Maps showing where they did it.
“Once you post, you don't have to specify the location, it's automatically embedded in the post,” he says. “You're going to see a lot more the social networks trying to morph between the digital and the physical – it's no longer about just being in the cloud. It's becoming about seeing stuff and people appearing on the map in a more dynamic way.”
Further out, this kind of service may mesh with Nokia's work in augmented reality, where people are using their phone camera to identify local points of interest, says Savander.
Of course, all this location innovation raises issues of privacy: what if people don't want the world to know they just uploaded a photo from a certain place? Or what about teenagers, for whom the ability to share their location may be fraught with risks – not to get too tabloid scare-story about it.
Savander says he spends an increasing amount of time grappling with issues of privacy and security in relation to these services.
“We have a very important role in both being very explicit about how we manage privacy and people's data, and also providing them with the tools to manage that data,” he says.
“I don't think anybody wants to broadcast where they are all the time, so you will see from us a lot more tools that are very explicit about what your status is, and how wide and in which way you broadcast it.”
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