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Maggie Shiels

Twitter and The Oprah Effect

  • Maggie Shiels
  • 16 Apr 09, 22:11 GMT

Everyone wants Oprah to endorse their product because her backing usually translates into healthy sales and dollars and cents added to the profit column.

We have seen it with books where she has turned unknown authors into literary stars because of her choice. When Amazon launched the Kindle, Oprah was the one that boosted it from a nice tech toy to a must have item.

Figures just out show that the Kindle 2 has already sold 300,000 since its release in late February. It is selling at roughly double the rate of the first generation device which sold around 400,000 units. Analysts reckon the Kindle 2 will hit the one million sales mark this year.

Well now Oprah is turning her attention to another piece of technology that has long been the darling of Silicon Valley and that is the microblogging service Twitter.

On her Facebook page and her programme website, Orpah has said she will be talking to the "King of Twitter - Ashton Kutcher...and sending her very first tweet!"

The actor is presently locked in a Twitter battle with CNN Breaking News to pull in one million followers. He has offered all kinds prizes to the person who actually becomes the one millionth follower and also said he will "ding-dong-ditch Ted Turner's house while I am in Atlanta."

Mr Turner who founded CNN no longer runs the network. The challenge has 'fired up' CNN Anchor Larry King who has responded with a video on YouTube basically saying bring it on pretty boy.

"Are you putting me on? Are you kidding? Do you know how big a network we are? Do you know what CNN is? Kutcher, you're playing out of your field. CNN will bury you," said Mr King, with a wry smile on his face.

Okay so a fun sidebar to the latest chapter in the Twitter story. But there is no doubt that for Ashton Kutcher, who presently ranks at number 3 behind CNN on Twitter, being crowned the "King of Twitter" by Oprah will boost his following.

For Twitter, it will take the service to a whole new level. Figures show the popularity of being able to tell people what you are doing in 140 carachters is catching on, big style.

According to Compete, a Web analytics firm, Twitter had 14 million unique visitors in March, up from 8 million in February.

When founder Ev Williams' tweeted yesterday that "Tomorrow just became a very big day," journalists and bloggers in the Valley went into overdrive speculating that a deal was about to be announced with Google.

Some might say having Oprah in your corner is an even bigger deal. No doubt the Twitter management will be working like crazy for the moment when Oprah sends her first tweet live on national tv. Could you imagine if she got the famous Fail Whale that shows the service is overloaded?

One person, writing on Oprah's Facebook page, has a $100 bet on Twitter going down in its hour of glory.

Rory Cellan-Jones

How smart is Nokia?

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 16 Apr 09, 16:45 GMT

Apple's iPhone may be the world's best-known phone, Google Android is making a growing impact, and Samsung, LG and Sony seem to bring out smarter phones every month - but make no mistake it's still Nokia which dominates the mobile phone industry. So when the Finnish phone-maker released results showing a 90% drop in profits the industry could have been excused for running in panic.

So has Nokia, which still has 37% of the global mobile market, lost the plot? Well its share price leaped ahead after the results came out, despite a fall of 19% in the number of phones sold this year compared to last. The market was happy because the news wasn't worse.

Nokia reaffirmed an earlier forecast that the overall market would shrink by 10% this year, pretty shocking for an industry which was used to 20% growth every year, but investors latched on to the idea that the gloom wasn't getting any deeper.

But there are still questions over how well Nokia is competing in the one area of the market that is still growing - "converged mobile devices", as Nokia calls them, or smartphones to the rest of us.

Nokia N97

The company only managed to sell 13.7 million smartphones in the first three months of 2009, compared to 14.6 million in the same period last year. But the company's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo still managed to extract some good news here, claiming that its share of the market had actually ticked up a little since Christmas.

He trumpeted the success of the 5800 Xpress Music phone which was Nokia's number one seller in the first quarter of the year. But this device, touted an iPhone rival, was the company's first mass-market touchscreen phone - and arrived many months after just about everyone else had brought out similar devices.

Nokia seems to have been caught napping by the way smartphones have moved from early-adopter business devices into the mainstream. I remember visiting their Helsinki headquarters in 1999 and finding everyone there tapping away on the first version of the Communicator - and telling me that it made business meetings a bit tricky because colleagues were messaging each other across the table.

That device seemed extraordinarily advanced at the time - and Nokia has continued to develop the kind of phones that appeal to well-heeled early adopter executives. Now, though, everyone wants a device that is both smart and simple, and Nokia has struggled to deliver that combination.

A lot is now being staked on the N97 which arrives in June, and looks an attractive combination of touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told the investment analysts that he hoped it would sell a million a month, if the price charged by the operators was right.

But one analyst reminded me that June might be a difficult month to launch a smartphone because that's when a new version of the iPhone may be unveiled. Nokia probably sells forty times as many phones as Apple but the N97 could still find itself overshadowed by the glare of publicity surrounding a new iPhone. Perhaps the Finnish company needs smarter marketing, along with its smarter phones.

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