Why I like Nokia's Ovi Store

I attend Nokia Code Camp 2009 today. This event is to prepare developers for the upcoming launch of Nokia's Ovi Store in May. I was quite privileged to be invited as one of the speakers.

As I saw the unveiling of the Ovi Store, there are a couple of things that I thought was a marked improvement over Apple's App Store:

Tapping into device APIs: this turns out to have many useful implications such as saving your the information from your air ticket directly to your calender

Social recommendation: recommending what your friends have bought or downloaded

Country specific recommendation: recommending applications that are relevant to where you are

(and I foresee)

Device specific recommendation: recommending applications that suits a device's main demographic user.

All these boils down to the fact that Nokia is giving applications context, which is something the App Store sorely needs. Applications are like content. They need context to make them more relevant and useful to the users.

What I hope Nokia can do is to push that thinking further and allow for user generated context.

-How can I create and share my 'playlist' of applications with my friends?
-How can I know when and why my friends download certain applications?
- What other meta data can I add onto the applications beyond reviews and ratings?
- How can Nokia aggregate all these context and develop new ways of recommendations and search?
- What kind of applications can startups built to take advantage of context to help users navigate the huge number of potential applications coming up?

Posted in: mobile,Personal