That’s especially tough in a country like the U.S., where big phone subsidies mean that one has to compete against free iPhone 4 and Android devices. Even the top-end devices generally sell for under $200 with a contract.

However, with T-Mobile’s recent move away from phone subsidies, Nokia and Microsoft are pouncing on an opportunity to offer a new smartphone at a noticeably lower price.

The Lumia 521, which runs on T-Mobile’s network, sells for around $150 unsubsidized. That’s hundreds less than many other smartphones. It goes on sale at Walmart and Microsoft stores next week, after selling out during a run on HSN.

Speaking at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference earlier this month, Windows Phone boss Terry Myerson noted the difficulty that Microsoft and its partners have had in subsidized markets such as the U.S.

“If every phone is $200, we are the challenger at the same price,” Myerson said. “That’s a playing field that is a little harder.”

T-Mobile’s move away from subsidies could create more room for Microsoft — and for others targeting the low end of the market.

The Lumia 521 is a T-Mobile customized version of a low-end model that Nokia introduced back in February.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that Windows Phone needs to continue to come in less-expensive phones in order to effectively compete against Android.

“There’s definitely an opportunity to push to even lower price points,” he said.

Microsoft is also taking a harder line in its advertising, debuting an ad that goes directly after Android and the iPhone.

With a new TV ad, Microsoft is trying a little humor to make that point.

The ad depicts a wedding filled with smartphone fanboys and fangirls who break into a fight over whose phone is best. Two staff members look on with their colorful Lumia 920s and wonder if the wedding guests might feel differently if they had tried their phone.

“We have our own fans, of course,” Microsoft’s Michael Stroh said in a blog post. “And while they may be outnumbered (for now), they’re no less proud and routinely urge us to do more to get the word out about Windows Phone … There are choices. iPhone and Android smartphones aren’t the only — or even best — options out there for all smartphone buyers.”

The ad, posted below, debuted during the “Today” show on Monday, and is due for a national TV run.

An invitation to journalists on Thursday offered few details.

The words “See What’s Next” are barely visible against the invitation’s blue background, alongside a promise that “The Nokia Lumia story continues.”

Nokia has bet its smartphone future on Windows Phone and the Lumia line. It has won critical praise, but Microsoft’s operating system as a whole has been growing slower than Nokia or Microsoft would like.

The Finnish phone maker chose a busy time to make its announcements as it comes at roughly the same time as both Google’s I/O conference and BlackBerry World.

In a cryptic Monday blog post, Nokia said it will announce “something new” on Wednesday at 7 am GMT. The struggling smartphone maker offered few details beyond that — just a cropped photo of what appears to be a Qwerty handset, and passing mention that the announcement will be followed by a Q&A with an executive from its Mobile Phones division.

Not much to go on. But given Nokia’s recent difficulties with its bread-and-butter feature phone business, it seems likely that the announcement will focus on a new addition to that part of the company’s portfolio — perhaps a new Asha handset with a Qwerty keyboard.

In its first quarter, Nokia shipped 5.6 million Lumia smartphones, 27 percent more than it shipped the quarter prior. The company expects to sell some seven million in its second quarter. That’s respectable sales acceleration in a market that’s 90 percent controlled by the Apple-Google duopoly. So, good news.

Sadly for Nokia, there’s some bad news to go along with it. The company suffered a decline in feature phone sales during the first quarter — a contraction so nasty that there was no way rising Lumia sales could offset it. Nokia sold 55.8 million feature phones in the quarter, down from 70.8 million a year earlier, putting them at their lowest level in at least a decade.

A brutal drop, and one that presents quite a conundrum for the struggling Nokia. The company’s turnaround hinges not just on the success of its high-end Lumia smartphone line, but on the continued success of an old cash cow — its feature phone business.

That business is essential to competing in the emerging markets that will be key to its future growth. As Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said during the company’s Thursday earnings call, “Our mobile phones business faces a difficult competitive environment, and we are taking tactical actions and bringing new innovation to market to address our challenges.”

Better sooner than later. If this erosion of feature phone sales continues, it will threaten the progress Nokia’s making with its smartphone business.

The Espoo, Finland-based company said its net loss in the quarter shrank to €272 million ($354.4 million) from €928 million a year earlier, beating analysts’ expectations for a loss of €434 million.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Nokia / Flickr: NokiaOfficial

Two years later, the scenario is quite different, and Nokia’s once-bleak outlook is no longer quite so disheartening. Sales of Nokia’s new smartphone line, Lumia, powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, while not spectacular, have been rising, carrying the company’s fortunes with them. When it last reported earnings, Nokia posted a profit for the first time in seven quarters. So what can we expect when the company reports first-quarter financials later today?

Decent news, considering this quarter is a seasonally weak one for Nokia. Consensus calls for a loss of about five cents — an improvement over the 10 cent per share loss it posted in the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, quarterly shipments of the company’s Lumia phones are expected to hit 5.6 million units, up from 4.4 million in the fourth quarter.

If Nokia hits those numbers, it will offer further proof that a comeback isn’t entirely out of the question. With rising smartphone sales and improving finances, the company can buy more time to execute the turnaround strategy that CEO Stephen Elop has mapped out for it.

“Nokia has been largely headed in the right direction,” RBC analyst Mark Sue said. “Smartphone units may grow 26 percent year-over-year in calendar 2013 with growth driven by emerging markets, where Nokia is well positioned and Nokia is tailoring Lumia/Asha smartphones for features vs. affordability just as smartphone demand shifts to the mid-tier/low-end. … Nokia needs to continue to innovate in order to compete more effectively with other players in the smartphone market as Samsung, Apple, Sony, HTC, BlackBerry and others have revamped or are in the process of updating their flagship models.”

There is but one remedy for the Glass wearer — a bucket of ice water in the face whenever you suspect he has taken you unawares

With the public beta launch of Google Glass, there has been a lot of discussion on why it will or won’t fail. The ultimate benchmark for success is high: After someone has tried Glass, can they imagine life without it?

It’s the wrong question.

Glass is Google’s unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy. Our traditional bogeyman for privacy was Big Brother and its physical manifestation — closed-circuit TV — but the reality today is closer to what I call Little Sister, and she is socially active, curious, sufficiently tech-savvy, growing up in the land of “free,” getting on with life and creating a digital exhaust that is there for the taking. The sustained conversation around Glass will be sufficient to lead to a societal shift in how we think about the ownership of data, and to extrapolate a bit, the kind of cities we want to live in. For me, the argument that Glass is somehow inherently nefarious misses a more interesting point: It is a physical and obvious manifestation of things that already exist and are widely deployed today, whose lack of physical, obvious presence has limited a mainstream critical discourse.

As a product that is both on-your-face and in-your-face, Glass is set to become a lightning rod for a wider discussion around what constitutes acceptable behavior in public and private spaces. The Glass debate has already started, but these are early days; each new iteration of hardware and functionality will trigger fresh convulsions. In the short term, Glass will trigger anger, name-calling, ridicule and the occasional bucket of thrown water (whether it’s ice water, I don’t know). In the medium term, as societal interaction with the product broadens, signs will appear in public spaces guiding mis/use¹ and lawsuits will fly, while over the longer term, legislation will create boundaries that reflect some form of im/balance between individual, corporate and societal wants, needs and concerns.

So Shoot Me

Of all of the companies and organisations that could bring Glass to market, I’m pleased that Google is the one making a significant investment: A company with a recent record of genuine innovation that stretches/defines social and behavioral norms² with a strong revenue stream and deep enough pockets to have a fighting chance of medium to long-term success. It also helps that the project is considered of strategic importance, and has key executive sponsorship. Less obvious, but no less relevant in this equation, is that the company has a lot to lose, is no longer the media darling, has fucked up enough times in public to know it can do so again (and again), has been humbled by more nimble competitors, has experienced talent drain and understands the impact of this on its culture and its bottom line. Of course, Google can financially afford to fail again: Experimentation and failure is a critical part of its DNA, but while privacy-snafu fines are low, the internal and external cultural costs of Glass failing are high.

All technology challenges the status quo, and if a technology is noticed by consumers/users/constituents at all, it presents for some an opportunity and for others a threat. The perceived and actual threat from Glass comes not from crimes against taste. (Many have commented on the perceived inelegance of the design.) Google’s design team appears to have done a sterling job, if you assume that particular design direction and constraints. Our sense of what is tasteful succeeds or fails as part of a far broader narrative, which they, too, are exploring. Yes, you can find a hundred and one designs of “wearable computing” from the past decade that look similar, but very few are packing the same experience into the same form factor. However, as a connected, sensing object, it is capable of recording and transmitting photos, video and sound directly through content analysis or indirectly through proximate connected devices, other data such as location, temperature, trajectory and so on. In other words, in a worst/best case scenario it could record and measure “everything,” and associate that data to a person. How will this play out?

I want you to try a little experiment. Find somewhere where you can sit and observe people interact with one another. Pick somewhere just out of the throng — the edge of a cafe looking in, a park bench, a doorway close to a market. It’s easier if you choose somewhere you don’t know so well, you’ll have less to unlearn.

Give yourself 30 minutes to view and reflect upon the scene in front of you: Who visits that space, and why; the differences in ritual greetings, and indeed whether or not a person is greeted; how people project who they are; things that signify status and social hierarchy; where objects are placed; the level of interaction with those objects when not in use. What can you see being documented online or off? What can you imagine being documented? Pay particular attention to things that fit your definition of “technology” and reflect upon the things in front of you that once fit this definition but no longer do (my list of were-once-technologies includes the pencil, the wristwatch and the smartphone).

If you’re close enough to other people, you’ll overhear conversations plus bits of conversations that the speakers will allow you to hear, raised, projected, sotto voce and in whispers, combined with body language all serving to emphasize what is said, and the intent of what is communicated. How much of that conversation is directed at the “listener” and how much of it is directed at others in proximity, including you? This rich social choreography is playing out hundreds of billions of times a day across our planet, and is as subtle and delicate as anything appearing in a BBC2 nature documentary.

Of course, people and systems are already capturing (and channeling) content and data in this space in the form of photos, video, background noise on phone or video calls, who is connected to what, and what they are doing. It is likely that Google, Microsoft and Nokia’s Navteq (to name but three) have already systematically mapped this space and are serving up street views online. The difference with Glass is that it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether it can support sustained recording for long periods or not; what matters is that the form factor supports this, that it could at some point, and that we all know Google is in the business of selling ads against insight drawn from large volume of data. Continuous, indiscriminate recording in this space is the dragnet fishing of data collection — it’s a destructive technology, a conversation- and privacy-killer.³

Back to our experiment. Take in the scene in front of you. Who owns this space, both legally and figuratively? Who has the rights to do what? By what authority? Who enforces that authority? How do these rights differ for regulars or a first-time visitor? What are the ways people signal the beginning or the end of an activity? And how does that signalling make something more or less acceptable? The obvious clue to activities people have deemed socially unacceptable are often found on hand-scribbled “do not” signs, as in “staff will refuse to serve customers who are on their mobile phone,” or “do not ask for credit.” The more sustained the infringement, the more official-looking the sign.

Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other people in proximity.⁴ Not having a persistent record allows us to present a nuanced identity to different people, or groups of people; it provides the space to experiment with what we could be. The risk that what we say will be broadcast, or narrowcasted, to people we don’t know, or may bubble up at some point in the future in the hands of someone serving up ads, fundamentally changes what we want to talk about. The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership fall on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven.

Social Interaction

A number of years ago, while I was working at Nokia, I was asked to explore use cases using an appearance model (a non-working prototype) of a form factor similar to Glass, but clunkier and definitely less refined.⁵ In the first phase of this make-it-up-as-you-go-along-and-see-what-works study, we hired students in Tokyo to act out various scenarios, including content browsing, viewing and game-play using gestures and voice commands, in a range of contexts: At home, on a commuter train, on a long-distance train, in a hotel lobby, in a park, a cafe, and while walking along. The research team then noted interaction issues with the glasses, carefully observing social reactions from people in proximity before finally interviewing the actors/actresses for their own experience.⁶

Fans of Milgram’s New York subway experiment will be happy to note that our actors and actresses felt extremely self-conscious about wearing nonstandard glasses, and awkward about acting out the scenarios, particularly in contexts where there were others in close proximity. A number of the things we learned from this study surprised us:

• Most of what we “see” at any time is out of focus in the periphery where as long as the things going on in peripheral vision don’t trigger a threat response will probably pass the glance test. It will be interesting to see whether Glass is perceived as a threatening object and thus may force others in proximity of a wearer to maintain a hyperawareness of the wearer and their own actions — whereas today they are currently able to relax. This would be, in effect, like a blanket tax on the collective attention of society.⁷
• Spoken interaction is awkward for almost everyone in confined spaces on systems with less than 100 percent accuracy. An interface built around short responses to contextually understood events will be the dominant form of interaction.
• Gesture interaction is just as awkward in close spaces, and in many instances will restrict regular use and/or in a vocabulary of “quiet gestures.” To get a sense of how this plays out, the next time you are on the subway and have people sitting on either side, raise your hands in front of your face or look down and move your hands in your field of vision. Even simple gestures require upper-arm/shoulder movements, which, when you are sitting shoulder to shoulder, impact fellow passengers. A Glass wearer who wants to maintain the social cohesion in that context (and not all will be that self-aware or considerate) can mitigate this by pausing interactions for the moment when they are appropriate, or more likely by avoiding interactions in that context.
• In contexts where social interaction is required — sitting with friends around a table in a cafe, say — Glass will create a situation where people are not sure whether they or the contents of the display are engaging the wearer.
• In-ear or close-to-ear (inductive) audio changes the wearer’s enjoyment of food and drink — a problem for an otherwise prime use case: Watching movies at home, where snacks and beverages might naturally be consumed.
• Humans tend to fall asleep in contexts where they are seated, safe, and there is minimal physical movement — providing opportunities to design for disengagement.
• Humans have a vested interest in tracking changing emotional states of the people around them. This will introduce “Are you lookin’ at me?” moments where others in proximity assume that a smile, tear or frown is triggered by their own presence, and will spur people to send inappropriate content to their Glass-wearing peers, with a weary inevitability that will include this but is far less likely to include this (or is it the other way around?). In some contexts, these moments will lead to confrontation. Read the footnote in this article in the Atlantic, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and imagine introducing erratic behavior into the equation. Amplify to billions of social interactions a day.

What starts out as a fairly broad set of use cases rapidly starts to narrow.

Tooling Up

I’ve got a confession to make. Frog, the design and innovation consultancy where I work, has recorded thousands of conversations around the world, videotaped many more, tailed people around town and nosed around people’s homes — opening cupboards and drawers, asking personal questions where there were none. All with their permission, and all in the name of research. There are a few things we’ve learned that relate to the broader discussion of what is collected by whom, how and why, and how it is used; you’ll see why these are relevant in a moment.

Any idiot can collect data. The real issue is how to collect data in such a way that meets both moral and legal obligations and still delivers some form of value.

• Ownership. People are naturally suspicious of what they don’t know. The simple act of giving them control over the process or the objects/technologies we carry defuses initial suspicion. A few simple field-research techniques can rapidly build trust. These include handing someone you’ve just met on the street a $5,000 camera and then ignoring them to concentrate on a conversation with their friends. This shows we trust them. And then they trust us.
• Clear On/Off States. Most people have (at least initial) concerns about being recorded. There are numerous effective ways that we in Frog’s design research team emphasize the transition between on and off: From how a camera or other recording device is held when not in use. It is useful to think of a camera as a gun: Understand the impact that bringing it out can have on any given context; only take it out if you’re prepared to use it and be careful where you point it.
• Reciprocity. Today it is easy to maintain a persistent connection between the researcher and the participant — often in the form of a social media account or email address. You’ve asked something of them, and they have the right and now have a channel through which to ask something of you.
• Full circle: We give participants the opportunity to review, delete or own any of the data collected on them by the research team. This is normally carried out at the end of the session, after any reward is handed over (so they are not pressured into letting us keep data) and before any data consent form is signed (so they better understand the implications of what they are signing). A team that knows the data will be reviewed by the participant changes what they collect in the first place; it becomes self-policing. More than any training, this simple principle helps keep teams honest and operating within social norms.

A few simple steps lower the more obviously anti-social aspects of Glass. The evolution of body language that helps communicate Glass’s current state, e.g. pushed above the head to show that it is not in use; a literacy around the spoken commands that communicate the current task that the user is engaged in “take panorama” or “grindr lookup”; and showing whether the camera and other recording mechanisms are in use or disabled.

Glass has four design principles for developers that focus on the Glass wearer’s user experience: “design for Glass,” “don’t get in the way,” “keep it timely,” and “avoid the unexpected.”⁸ As challenging as it is to find a compelling use-case (beyond porn), these principles are aimed at the wrong people — Glass wearers, rather than those in proximity.

Two complementary principles will go some way toward accommodating the concerns of people in proximity and lower social barriers to adoption:

• Proximate Transparency: Allow anyone in proximity to access the same feed that the wearer is recording or seeing and view it through a device of their choosing. Make it easy to identify the Glasses themselves and to trace them back to the wearer. This simple act can help demystify the technology, create a broader sense of ownership of its inclusion in any given space. The reality is that very few people would be interested in jacking in and the act of having an open stream will change the behavior of what is watched. For many this won’t be enough of a step; it is after all an opt-out measure for people who have the technological know how and literacy to — forcing people in proximity to do something for dubious gain.
• Remote Control: allow identifiable people in proximity to control Glass’s recording functionality and have access to the output of what was recorded. Allowing others to demonstrably benefit from the utility of Glass will make it part of the social landscape.

Pedestal or a Pauper’s Grave?

One could argue that the form taken by Glass offers up a lazy futurist’s vision of what might be — take the trajectory of one product (displays becoming smaller/cheaper/more efficient over time) and integrate it with another (eyeglasses), sprinkle in connectivity and real-time access to content and big-data-analytics. Our expectations of what it could be are raised in part because this join-the-dots vision of the future fits neatly into Western un/popular young-male culture, from “The Terminator” through to Halo. Glass has a certain inevitability about it, like the weight of expectation on of child born to a great composer or, if you will, to a middle-aged suicide. As any visitor to Yodobashi camera over the past decade will tell you, the hardware technologies that make Glass hardly feel novel (and for recent competitors, see Sony, Golden-i, or this Telepathy device prototype) but neither do they need to be, because this is all about how they are brought together into a holistic experience.

There are of course alternative visions of this connected future that are far more discrete, taking connected, sensing things and embedding them in the world around us to inform, guide, direct, cajole, tax, enrich us and the things around us. It’s an area worthy of an essay in its own right, but for now, here are a few pointers to people, places and things that have helped inform my sense of this space: Dan Hill at City of Sound; the MIT Senseable City Lab; Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art; Tisch ITP; BERG, Nicholas Nova and Julian Bleecker at the Near Future Laboratory help stretch our understanding of what could be; Curious Rituals in conjuction with students at the Arts Center College of Design in particular is a lovely piece of work; living for more than a decade in Tokyo, Shanghai and frequent trips to the cities that define this century’s urban experience — the Seoul/Nairobi/Mumbai/Rio/Chongqings of this world; products like Nike+, FitBit, Moves (to take one narrow category) through to less well known but arguably more impactful services that for me are at the very center of the internet of things — services like Kilimo Salama and Sarvajal;⁹ through to business units/activities in large corporations such as Cisco, IBM, Disney, and Ericsson with more of a how to make money/make a difference at scale.¹⁰

That Moment in Time

I started this essay by paraphrasing a quote — here is the original in full: “There is but one remedy for the amateur photographer. Put a brick through his camera whenever you suspect he has taken you unawares.” It could be written about Glass today, but is in fact taken from an 1885 edition of “Amateur Photographer”¹¹ magazine, seven years after the introduction of dry plates, a technology that supported more surreptitious photography. (The essay by Bill Jay is worth reading in full.)

The same essay contains another quote from “Amateur Photographer,” twenty five years later, when cameras were becoming smaller, less noticeable: “Our moral character dwindles as our instruments get smaller.” In due course, the technologies to deliver Glass’s emerging functionality will truly disappear from view — this is a window of opportunity for discussion, debate and a reflection.

I’m thankful to Google for putting so much effort into Glass at this moment in time.

That passion? Channel it.

That anger? Channel it.

Jan Chipchase is Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog, a design and innovation consultancy. He has not tried Google Glass, and has no idea whether he has been recorded through one. His first book, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” available from HarperCollins on April 16, explores issues around technology adoption, use and abuse.

¹ This sign did the rounds but is closer to advertising for a pleasantly seedy bar than a warning sign. The suspicion can be real, but the true test comes from reactions to a wider deployment.
² Eric Schmidt’s quote, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” is an interesting reflection of company culture. It’s refreshing to have a CEO that is this frank about the business they are in and the way they operate, and it’s an interesting assumption that the best way to institutionalize an understanding of creepy is to measure it and place it on a line.
³ If you want to extrapolate the argument around wholesale recording through Glass, it’s actually highly inefficient, particularly once much of that space and context is known. There are other, emerging technologies with far more processing power and unlimited power supply that are in a better position to continuously record.
⁴ There are many examples of what we say and do being recorded: From the obvious conversations in an interrogation room through to corporations tracking employee emails and IM chats, all the way to state agencies. When conducting research in Iran and making a call to the U.S., I assume it is being recorded by both Iranian and U.S. agencies. The only question is who else is listening and what is their motivation, today and at some point in the future.
⁵ I’ve not done a full write up of the research, but it was shared publicly a few years back.
⁶ After the Tokyo study, my then colleague Raphael Grignani ran a comparable study in New York City, with broadly analogous findings.
⁷ The physical toll of having to maintain a state of hyper-awareness is touched on here and here, and while these are extreme examples it is an interesting topic to further explore.
⁸ As Bruce Sterling pointed out, take each of those design principles and flip them to understand the actual experience.
⁹ We are running a study around water consumption and Sarvajal and will be sharing more on the project in due course.
¹⁰ Full disclosure: This list includes both personal and Frog clients.
¹¹ “The Amateur Photographer,” 18 September 1885, p. 871.

Reporting first-quarter earnings, Hon Hai said revenue fell 19.2 percent from the year prior, to NT$809 billion. That’s well below the NT$895 billion analysts were expecting, and the largest drop in revenue the company has suffered since 2000.

The reason for the precipitous decline? Hon Hai won’t say. But it’s likely to have something to do with Apple. Between 60 percent and 70 percent of Hon Hai’s revenue is believed to stem from the company’s partnership with Apple. So when it posts ugly earnings like these, the quick and easy explanation for them is a slowing in demand for the iPhones and iPads it manufactures. As KGI Securities analyst Ming-chi Kuo told Reuters today, “This shows that Hon Hai’s revenue depends too much on Apple, and iPhone orders corrected more than expected.”

That may be true. But it’s important to remember that Hon Hai’s customer list stretches well beyond Apple, and boasts a number of big names, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Nokia and Nintendo among them. Given the decline in the PC market, and continuing struggles at Dell, Nintendo and Nokia, it’s entirely possible that there are some other factors at work here, as well.

But that’s just speculation until Apple next reports earnings on April 23.

Hon Hai and Apple both declined comment.

The 17-member Fairsearch.org coalition, which includes Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, TripAdvisor and Expedia, said that Google “uses deceptive conduct to lockout competition in mobile.”

The organization complains that Google gives away Android for free, but then forces those who want its maps or YouTube or the Google Play store to then preload other Google services.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” coalition lawyer Thomas Vinje said in a statement. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market.”

Google representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to a Finnish newspaper report, a Lumia 920 phone was recently run over by a 24-ton earth mover.

Although its screen was battered — and the phone’s frame bent a little out of shape — the device was still able to make and receive calls.

“Before any Nokia device is released to the world, they undergo a series of quality tests to ensure they stand up to the wear and tear of everyday usage. Tests for extreme weather, humidity, and repeated drops onto a hard surface are the norm,” a Nokia representative told AllThingsD. “I guess you can add being run over by a 24-ton tractor to that list.”

“For a while now, Nokia has been focusing on growing its presence in operator and third-party retail outlets, rather than through our own physical stores,” a Nokia spokesman told AllThingsD. “We are, of course, also continuously beefing up our online presence. With this in mind, our store in Shanghai was closed on March 31.”

The shuttering of the Shanghai store — Nokia’s largest — follows a massive retail withdrawal that has seen a number of closures around the world, including the felling of the company’s Finnish-forest-themed flagship store on London’s Regent Street. Where once it had a dozen stores around the globe, Nokia now has just one — its recently remodeled outlet in Helsinki, Finland.

The closure of Nokia’s Shanghai store — which, when it was opened, was the seventh of 18 planned flagship outlets — is one more indicator of the global malaise from which the company suffers. China is a market crucial to Nokia’s successful turnaround; closing up shop in Shanghai is a tacit admission that the store never attracted the sort of foot traffic for which Nokia had hoped. Certainly, it didn’t do much to sustain Nokia’s business in China. The company saw revenue from Greater China plummet a gruesome 79 percent in the fourth quarter.

New market share data from Kantar Worldpanel show Windows Phone seeing significant increases in adoption in a number of major markets for the three month period ending February 2013. Year over year, Windows Phone’s share of the U.S. smartphone market rose to 4.1 percent from 2.7 percent; in Great Britain, it rose to 6.7 percent from 3 percent; in Australia, it rose to 3.4 percent from 1.7 percent; and, in Italy, it posted a gain of 7.7 percentage points, rising to 13.1 percent from 5.4 percent.

Not tremendous growth by any means, but given the market and the chokehold that incumbents like Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS have on it, it’s certainly worth noting.

Also worth noting: Windows Phone’s growth seems to be coming at the expense of BlackBerry and Nokia’s Symbian OS, which both lost significant market share during the period. In Great Britain, for example, BlackBerry’s share fell to 5.1 percent from 16.8 percent, an 11.7 percentage point decline (and that’s in one of BlackBerry’s strongest markets). In the United States, it fell to 0.7 percent from 3.6 percent. Meanwhile, Symbian’s share fell to 0.6 percent from 2.4 percent in Great Britain; to 0.1 percent from 0.5 in the United States; and to 3.7 percent from 17.6 percent in Italy — a staggering 13.9 percentage point drop.

A new report shows that a quarter of U.S. patents issued this year are likely to be related to mobile technology. That’s up from just 5 percent of all patents in 2001, according to analyst Chetan Sharma.

In Europe, mobile is somewhat less of a focus, accounting for roughly 10 percent of all patents.

Samsung led all companies in terms of U.S. mobile patents granted last year, while IBM filed the most applications last year, followed by Microsoft and then Samsung. Apple broke into the Top 10 on the strength of a slew of computer-graphics patent filings.

Among cellular operators, AT&T was the patent leader, followed by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Telecom Italia, Swisscom, SK Telecom, TeliaSonera and Orange.

Among device makers, Samsung led the pack, followed by Nokia, Sony, BlackBerry, LG, NEC, Motorola, Siemens, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard.

“Mobile will continue to be the growth engine of the knowledge economy and the companies who understand the value of the intellectual property will continue to protect and benefit from their investments for years to come,” Sharma said in the report.

After spending the bulk of his career pitching developers on the benefits of one particular platform, Kerris says he wants to help developers navigate all the competing choices.

Kerris, who previously worked at Apple and HP/Palm, was at Nokia for a year and a half, helping the company woo developers to Windows Phone.

In an interview, Kerris said he is putting together a small team to start the firm, including a technologist and a well-known marketer.

“Our goal is to make it a small boutique, but a prestigious company,” Kerris told AllThingsD.

The new consulting firm will work to help both established companies and startups create a coherent mobile strategy.

Kerris said many entertainers, artists and brands have developed a mobile app, gotten some downloads, but then seen their mobile efforts fizzle.

Meanwhile, he said, there are lots of startups that have a good idea but not a strong enough business plan or technical strategy to fully implement it. Nor, he said, can they get the attention they need from the major platforms.

“They can’t even get a return call,” he said.

Presumably, Kerris’s firm would be able to help with that, given his contacts at Microsoft, Nokia, Apple and elsewhere.

Kerris said he left Nokia on good terms, and will remain a consultant to them for the forseeable future.

1.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough?

2.) How Apple Gets All the Good Apps

3.) Telling Employees He Hasn’t “Walked the Talk,” Cisco’s John Chambers Leans In on Women in the Workplace Issue

4.) LinkedIn to Buy Pulse Newsreader for More Than $50M (and here’s what they could do with Pulse)

5.) How One Boring Company Pulled Off the Perfect SXSW Troll

6.) Crowdfunding for a Cause: Nonprofits Can Now Hold Fundraisers on Crowdtilt

7.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

8.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

9.) Nokia: A Microsoft Surface Phone Could Screw Us

10.) Outbox: Yahoo Mail Head Sharma Leaves Company (Update: And he has now joined Disney’s online parks division)

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Jonas Daehnert

Nokia bet the farm on Windows Phone back in 2011, committing to a broad partnership under which Microsoft’s mobile OS would be its primary smartphone strategy. Two years later, it continues to struggle toward what has so far been an elusive recovery. So it’s understandable that the Finnish handset maker might worry that Microsoft’s foray into the tablet world with Surface might herald a similar “exploratory” jaunt into the smartphone market. And, according to Nokia’s latest 6-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that is a very real fear.

Among the multitude of Microsoft-related uncertainties listed in the “Risk Factors” portion of Nokia’s 20-F is this one, helpfully flagged by Business Insider:

“Microsoft may make strategic decisions or changes that may be detrimental to us. For example, in addition to the Surface tablet, Microsoft may broaden its strategy to sell other mobile devices under its own brand, including smartphones. This could lead Microsoft to focus more on their own devices and less on mobile devices of other manufacturers that operate on the Windows Phone platform, including Nokia.”

It could indeed. And while Microsoft would surely insist that such a handset is — like Surface — simply a reference design meant to show other manufacturers what’s possible, that device would most certainly be — like Surface — a piece of go-to-market, Microsoft-branded hardware.

Which means it would put Microsoft between Nokia and its smartphone customers. And no good can come of that.

In other words, the real risk factor for Nokia in this situation isn’t losing Microsoft’s attention, it’s being forced to compete against it the way Redmond’s longtime hardware partners now must in the Windows 8 tablet market. Who wants to do that? Certainly not Nokia, which has its hands more than full with the likes of Apple and Samsung, HTC, Motorola and the rest of the Android armada.

Now you can get your own retouch transformation — should you so choose.

A new iOS app called Facetune helps edit pictures of people’s faces. Its tools can whiten teeth, smooth wrinkles, cover blemished skin, remove red-eye, apply makeup, add or remove hair, blur background objects and change the shape of a face.

There are tons of apps to help give mobile photos more contrast or sharper focus or a sepia tone. But many of those effects tend to be oriented toward landscapes and still lifes. Facetune is all about the faces.

Released last week by a small bootstrapped Jerusalem company called Lightricks, the app is currently the No. 1 paid photo and video app in the U.S., after being featured by Apple. It costs $1.99.

I played around with Facetune a bit, and it didn’t take long to notice that a light touch goes a long way — human faces are not a very forgiving canvas. I did appreciate that within the app there are explanations for every tool, as well as an ever-present option to compare what you’re working on to the original photo.

Other apps in this category include Philips Zoom (whitening teeth) and moreBeaute2 (smoothing skin tone). Nokia also developed an app called Glam Me, specifically for enhancing self-portraits taken with its Lumia devices.