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Nokia and Yahoo! Announce Partnership on Maps, E-mail and IM

by Terrence O'Brien on May 24, 2010 at 04:00 PM

Yahoo! and Nokia CEOs Announce Partnership
Despite being a powerful force in the global smartphone market, Nokia has really struggled to capture much of a share in the U.S. Similarly, Yahoo!, once a dominating force in search and other Web services, has quickly became an also-ran. Its e-mail and other Web apps have fallen behind those offered by Google, and its search service has all but been retired, now merely offering re-branded results from Microsoft's Bing. And as Yahoo! CEO Carl Bartz admitted today at a press conference, Yahoo! let mapping tools fall by the wayside as it "chose to focus on other areas." At that same press conference, the two companies announced a partnership that should help them to extend their reaches and fill in gaps in their business models.

The partnership will see the Nokia Ovi product family employ Yahoo!'s services for e-mail and instant messaging, and Yahoo! will take on Nokia and NAVTEQ tools to provide mapping and navigation services. The new service will be branded together (e.g., "Ovi Chat powered by Yahoo!"), and customers will be able to use their IDs across platforms for ease of access.

The new services should be launching in the U.S. during the second half of 2010, with a global launch in 2011. The partnership should save both companies some cash, but whether or not that can translate into market share or profits remains to be seen. [From: Nokia and Yahoo!, via: Engadget]

Tags: CarolBartz, chat, email, im, maps, nokia, ovi, ovi maps, OviMaps, top, web, yahoo

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