Investments in Finnish high-tech companies dropped 60 percent from 2008, reflecting a 30.6 percent decline in the overall investment activity. Fifty-eight companies tracked by Technopolis Online received funding worth 101 million euros. Investment activity last year remained higher than expected, but investors stayed away from larger investments like the WinWind and Blyk deals that contributed 160 million euros to the market in 2008.

“Finland fared well in the international comparison. And 2010 has seen a good start in the investment activity. But the lack of exit opportunities or international investors continues to be a problem. We need to keep working hard to solve these,” said Will Cardwell, director of Technopolis Development Services.

MobileMonday has announced the opening of chapters in Kampala, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya. The Kampala chapter opens its doors on March 8, and the Nairobi chapter launches on March 11. A new South African chapter will also open in Capetown. After over a year of background work, the global organization formed a partnership with the World Bank to take the commmunity’s concepts to several African countries.

“We visited selected African markets a few weeks ago with absolutely no idea how the open community values would be received, and were pleasantly greeted with much enthusiam by the business, governmental, and academic communities, and by the media as well,” said Jari Tammisto, MobileMonday’s CEO.

In addition to their usual prowling activities on the tradeshow floor, MobileMonday members will have the rare chance to meet many of MoMo’s founders at their meeting point in Hall 2, Stand C28. The number of MoMo members, who visit the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, have continued to grow in the past two years.

“The initial interests created by the Global Peer Awards and the informal style of networking also brought lots of demand for face-to-face meetings at the tradeshow venue. The MoMo network will fill-up this need,” said Jari Tammisto, CEO of MobileMonday Global.

FinnMob (Finnish Mobile Association) and IMA (Israel Mobile and Communications Association) have agreed to jointly promote their portfolio companies. The associations reprepresent over 200 companies operating in the mobile industry, and aim to offer faster access by global operators, handset and network vendors, and investors to mobile products developed in Finland and Israel.

“We are very excited about the synergies offered by this alliance,” said Ismo Rantala, FinnMob’s managing director. “We have been using mobile services for over 25 years in Finland, and we have gained valuable insights to what consumers want. The research and development teams of our portfolio companies have these insights ingrained in them.”

The alliance will present their portfolio companies at the major mobile industry events, starting at the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

French digital security firm Gemalto has bought the Finnish mobile authentication firm Valimo Wireless. The companies did not disclose the terms of the transaction. The acquisition provides Gemalto a position in the growing mobile financial services market.

Mobile operators use Valimo’s software to authenticate financial transactions made through mobile phones. The software is installed in mobile phone SIM cards. Valimo turned profitable last year, and had annual net sales of about 3 million euros.

Remote radioheads will a billion dollar market in five years, predicts a new study from ABI Research.

According to the merket research company the demands of cost reduction and greater efficiency in cellular base station design are leading to a rapidly growing market for remote radio heads.

Cellular base stations are now undergoing a design revolution; the trend is towards “distributed base stations” in which the RF portion (along with suitable processing and an optical interface) is placed into a weatherproof box mounted on the tower near the antennas. This is the remote radio head.

Remote radio heads are also very ‘smart’: almost all are software-controlled and can be configured remotely to handle a variety of technologies within a given air interface family. The result: greater efficiency, lower power consumption, and the possibility of placement in locations with coverage issues. A single distributed base station can even have multiple remote radio heads for MIMO operation.

Finland-based Tieto today announced that it has provided consulting services for China Mobile’s online application store called Mobile Market. The delivery includes the technical solution regarding how to encapsulate China Mobile’s network-end capabilities into the Symbian/S60 client-end and a demo that verifies its feasibility. The solution forms a base for China Mobile to further explore the development of its proprietary Software Development Kit.

The deal is a significant opening for Tieto into the Chinese marketplace, and it further strengthens the company’s position as a major services and software partner in the Symbian Foundation.

This project has required a deep understanding of Symbian/S60 UI frameworks and application development, as well as knowledge on a wide range of development techniques, such as Symbian client/server, SDK authentication and network management and data interaction techniques. Tieto is a member of Symbian Foundation .

”Our aim is to introduce new services that will help Chinese enterprises to increase their productivity with advanced usage of IT and R&D innovations. To make this happen, we are increasing substantially our investments in the People’s Republic of China,” says Pekka Viljakainen, head of Tieto International.

There were more than 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, a number that is expected to more than double by the end of 2013.

Driven by the popularity and affordability of mobile phones, smartphones, and other wireless devices, IDC’s Worldwide Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast expects the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet to surpass the one billion mark over the next four years.

“The number of mobile devices with Internet access has simply exploded over the last several years,” said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC.

“With a wealth of information and services available from almost anywhere, Internet-connected mobile devices are reshaping the way we go about our personal and professional lives. With an explosion in applications for mobile devices underway, the next several years will witness another sea change in the way users interact with the Internet and further blur the lines between personal and professional.”

The most popular online activities of mobile Internet users are similar to those of other Internet users: using search engines, reading news and sports information, downloading music and videos, and sending/receiving email and instant messages. Over the next four years, IDC expects some of the fastest growing applications for mobile Internet users will be making online purchases, participating in online communities, and creating blogs. Accessing online business applications and corporate email systems will also grow rapidly as businesses move to empower their mobile workforce.

The IDC’s forecast also said that more than 1.6 billion people – a little over a quarter of the world’s population – used the Internet in 2009. By 2013, over 2.2 billion people – more than one third of the world’s population – is expected to be using the Internet.

More than 1.6 billion devices worldwide were used to access the Internet in 2009, including PCs, mobile phones, and online videogame consoles. By 2013, the total number of devices accessing the Internet will increase to more than 2.7 billion.

China continues to have more Internet users than any other country, with 359 million in 2009. This number is expected to grow to 566 million by 2013. The United States had 261 million Internet users in 2009, a figure that will reach 280 million in 2013. India will have one of the fastest growing Internet populations, growing almost two-fold between 2009 and 2013.

Presently, the United States has far more total devices connected to the Internet than any other country. China, however, is the leader in in the number of mobile online devices with almost 85 million mobile devices connected to the Internet in 2009.

Worldwide, more than 624 million Internet users will make online purchases in 2009, totaling nearly USD 8 trillion (both business to business and business to consumer). By 2013, worldwide eCommerce transactions will be worth more than $16 trillion.

Worldwide spending on Internet advertising will total nearly USD 61 billion in 2009, which is slightly more than 10% of all ad spending across all media. This share is expected to reach almost 15% by 2013 as Internet ad spending grows surpasses USD 100 billion worldwide.

Some Finns have for years lamented the lost leadership of Finnish mobile development. Now MobileMonday is rubbing salt into the wounds by bringing Estonians to Helsinki strut their mobile stuff.

MobileMonday December event on December 14th extends active discussion as of why Finland has lost the leadership in mobile development (not everyone agrees) by asking: Why and how Estonia became the true mobile development lab in Europe?

The program includes overviews, stories, and cases from Finnish-Estonian Fromdistance Ltd, Ericsson, MobileMonday Estonia, Nutiteq, Fortumo and Positium LBS.

Doors at Molly Malone’s Irish Pub open at 17:30 with Glögi, light buffet, and drinks provided by Enterprise Estonia, the largest state foundation providing financing, counseling, co-operation opportunities and training for the corporate sector, research institutions, the public and the NGOs. Enterprise Estonia also is the implementing agency for the EU Structural Funds business and regional support programs in Estonia.

Agenda:

18:00 Welcome by MoMo MC

18:10 Mobile market overview - Priit Salumaa, MobileMonday Estonia

18:30 Ericsson experiences in Estonia – Indrek Petersoo

18:45 Fromdistance experiences from Estonia-Finland – Jouko Vierumäki

19:00 Case presentations from: Nutiteq, Fortumo, Positium LBS.

The Western European mobile phone market rose for the first time in the last 15 months.

During the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09) the Western European market grew 5% year-on-year, according to IDC’s European Mobile Phone Tracker. Handset shipments totaled 46.8 million units, representing sequential growth of 11%, which shows that consumer demand is picking up and operators are not so reluctant to stock up for the Christmas season.

“The mobile phone market is showing strong signs of improvement since the onset of the economic crisis,” says Francisco Jeronimo, European mobile devices research manager with IDC.

“The quarter’s growth was supported by the traditional mobile phones (TMP), the biggest segment of the market, but affected by the trend towards smartphones. Samsung and LG have been particularly strong in the TMP segment, with their portfolios boosting sales of feature phones. On the other hand, converged mobile devices (commonly known as smartphones) saw negative growth due to the lack of materials and supply chain problems experienced by some of the major vendors, which were not able to supply the high demand from operators.”

Traditional mobile phones increased 6% year-on-year and 14% sequentially, driven particularly by touchscreen and messaging devices from LG and Samsung. Converged mobile devices (CMDs) experienced a slight decline of 2% year-on-year, but grew 2% from the second quarter of 2009, supported by RIM’s 87% YoY growth and Apple’s shipments, while all the other vendors declined over the quarter in the smartphones segment.

Overall, Nokia continues to be the market leader, with 35.3% market share in 3Q09, followed by Samsung with 30.5%. The gap between these two has been narrowing, and Nokia is facing a significant threat of being overtaken by Samsung in Western Europe in 2010. The Korean manufacturer is already the leader in the traditional mobile phone segment, and is developing a wider portfolio of smartphones, with several devices running Windows Mobile, Android, and LiMo, which will allow Samsung to significantly increase its smartphone shipments in 2010. During the quarter, LG overtook Sony Ericsson’s position, becoming the third biggest player in Western Europe for the first time.

Android OS continued to grow its market share from 4.2% in 2Q09 to 5.4% in 3Q09. Several operators listed Android devices in 3Q09 for the first time, which helped Android shipments to grow, though consumers steer clear of Google’s OS and sell-out is below everyone’s expectations.

Consumers recognize the Google brand, but still do not understand what Android is. The lack of devices available didn’t help to raise awareness, though this is expected to change, with more handsets from LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and other vendors hitting the market soon.

BlackBerry OS continued to perform well, growing 87% YoY and increasing market share among smartphones from 13% to 16% during the quarter, with BlackBerry Curve 8520 shipping well on the consumer channel.

Windows Mobile continued to lose market share, mainly due to Microsoft’s strategy of launching all new devices running the new WM6.5 in October and not throughout the summer sales season, which negatively impacted market performance. The new OS is getting good track from operators, and WM market share is expected to improve in 4Q09.

Symbian was hit hard by growth in Mac OS, BlackBerry OS, and Android, and its market share declined from 59% in 2Q09 to 48% in 3Q09. It remains the biggest OS among smartphones, however.

Apple’s strategy of opening to other operators in Europe helped increase market share from 16% in 2Q09 to 24% in 3Q09.