KEY POINTS:
I was pretty excited by the move by Nokia and Kordia to offer people with Wi-fi enabled Nokia phones free access to Kordia's metropolitan Wi-fi network until I looked at the coverage maps.
Coverage is patchy - restricted to a few pockets in Parnell, Ponsonby, Remuera and along Karangahape Road in Auckland. There's only one lonely hotspot in Wellington - down near Thorndon Quay. You really need coverage as pervasive as that offered by Telecom's hotspot network or that of Citylink in Wellington to make something like this particularly useful.
But I like the business model. The N-Series range by Nokia, including the flagship N95 with 8GB of onboard memory, is an impressive line-up. But the Wi-fi enabled phones are definitely high-end.
Giving free Wi-fi access is a great value-add allowing you to check your email or browse the web as you make your way around time and thus avoid casual mobile data rates which are still way too high here.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona I watched a demo on the showroom floor of Nokia's Comes With Music service which will debut later in the year and allow buyers of certain Nokia handsets to download as much music as they want in one year.
Obviously, a premium is added to the handset and the music is encoded with Microsoft's DRM. But it's an interesting business model. It will depend on the pricing and what handsets are available but if you're splashing out on the new N96 or something similar, chances are you'll be prepared to pay an extra $100 or thereabouts to get a year of music downloads thrown in.
Eurekster founder quits
As a follow on to my downbeat column this morning about the state of R&D funding in New Zealand and the impact of the IT skills shortage, comes news that Dr Grant Ryan, the co-founder of Eurekster, one of our more ambitious Web 2.0 companies, is quitting the company where he served as "chief scientist".
Ryan isn't talking about the reasons behind his departure (a bad sign), but as an IT venture capitalist pointed out to me yesterday, "Grant is Eurekster". Christchurch-based Ryan has a secret project in the works so he'll likely remain an important figure in the local IT industry.
He's involved in the Government's VIF fund and founded Global Brain in the late nineties with his brother Shaun, who now runs the successful Christchurch-based search engine company SLI Systems.
"New project is even cooler [than Eurekster]," Ryan told me in an email.
Ryan was onto a good thing with Eurekster, which makes swickis - customised search engines that produce search results on specialist topics and learn from the behaviour of their users to improve the results.
Eurekster is a leader in this area, serving up hundreds of thousands of swickis to website and blog owners and is moving into video swickis. It's a shame that Ryan's departure largely severs the New Zealand connection with the company, which is now headquartered in San Francisco but it will be interesting to see what comes out of the Ryan camp next.
