Nokia Picks Visual Radio Partner

Remember we reported on Visual Radio? Nokia have just chosen Hewlett-Packard as a technology partner to help get the service into the market. They intend to develop Visual Radio further, with the aim of making it available to other handset manufacturers through HP.

Felice Swapp, director of strategic initiatives for HP said “As you drive to this ‘digital lifestyle’ where it’s fundamentally mobile and digital and virtual, and content becomes much more meaningful, how do you have business models in that world?”

Their answer is to employ HP to sell Visual Radio to phone makers and radio stations, providing installation and support.

Research from Nokia indicates that phone owners with FM receivers in their handsets only listen to radio once a week – but the company is hoping that their new service will encourage users to take more interest in radio and use Visual Radio to buy ringtones and other music-related content.

Forbes on the announcement

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?