Top cellphone maker Nokia has opened up its media sharing site and games offering on Facebook and is looking to broaden ties with the fast-growing social networking site.
Niklas Savander, the head of Nokia's Internet services business, said the world's largest handset maker was talking to many large social networking firms, including Facebook, to ease access to their sites from Nokia phones.
Nokia's "Share on Ovi" media sharing service was opened as a Facebook application last month, and members of the network can also play Nokia's "Reset Generation", the world's most expensive mobile game to develop, which links cellphone and PC gamers allowing them to play against each other.
"We obviously talk with a mass of companies and Facebook is one of them. Facebook is big in the US, it's gaining traction in Europe, but it's small in Asia," Savander told Reuters in an interview.
Nokia, which made about 40 per cent of all cellphones sold in the second quarter, is the first handset maker to move strongly into content provision, trying to bolster its margins by selling customers mobile music or applications like games.
Nokia is set to invest billions of euros in building up a strong presence on the Internet services market over the next few years as growth in the cellphones market cools.
{{/usCountry}}Nokia is set to invest billions of euros in building up a strong presence on the Internet services market over the next few years as growth in the cellphones market cools.
{{/usCountry}}It aims to establish its new Ovi portal as one access point for a variety of Web services, some offered by Nokia, some by other firms.
"The world is a mashup -- we have to make sure we have the key things in the offering. Facebook is one of them," Savander said.