The Wristwatch May Be Making a Comeback, But With Some Smarts

Want to try a little experiment? Walk up to someone under the age of 25, don’t say a word, but instead point to your wrist. They will likely walk away, very quickly.

As I noted in an article in 2010, when incoming freshmen first arrived at college that year, wristwatches weren’t just a thing of the past, few students even understood that people could ask for the time silently.

“They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day,” wrote the administrators of Wisconsin’s Beloit College who put together a yearly list for the school’s professors to explain the cultural “norms” of incoming freshmen. “They don’t own watches and instead use their cellphones to tell the time.”

But the wristwatch or the wrist computer or the smartwatch or whatever you may want to call it may be making a comeback.

On Wednesday, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Gear, a smartwatch with a 1.63-inch touchscreen, a 320 x 320 resolution display, a built-in camera and a speaker. The watch can run over 70 applications, including RunKeeper, to track your running, Pocket, to read articles saved from the Web, and Evernote to keep and view notes.

While there is a lot of excitement around the Samsung watch, it is not the first of its kind.

Sony announced the SmartWatch 2 in June that went on sale on Wednesday. The device has a two-square-inch screen that can display e-mails, Twitter posts and other pieces of text, all pulled from an Android smartphone to which the watch is connected.

This year, Stephen Sneeden, Sony’s product marketing manager who worked on the company’s wristwatch, told me that Sony saw a large market in smartwatches. “The wrist becomes a remote screen where you now have the ability to control your phone with a number of different applications,” he said.

Other device makers are also coming to this realization.

Qualcomm this week also announced the Toq Smart Watch, a limited-edition touchscreen device that it said would allow it to experiment in the growing genre of wearable computers.

There are other types of watchlike devices available to customers. The Nike FuelBand, a black band with an array of colored lights, measures the energy you exert on a daily basis and sends it to a smartphone. Jawbone sells the Up, a unisex bracelet that tracks a user’s daily activity and sends the information to an iPhone application. And there’s the Pebble, a black -and-white watch that can play music and display text messages and connect to iOS and Android smartphones.

While the technology blog The Verge seemed excited by the Samsung Galaxy Gear, it also noted, realistically: ”One thing the Gear has in common with other smartwatches; it’s not terribly smart.”

Matt Buchanan of The New Yorker also shared that sentiment. He questioned whether the lack of an invention for watches over the 500 years “is the result of a failure of imagination or simply a fact of nature â€" that a watch will always just be a watch, no matter how smart it might think it is.”

That said, all these gadgets could prove to be the equivalent of the first generation Kindle, which was slow, clunky and not very easy on the eyes, compared with the first Apple iPad.

As I reported this year, Apple has been busy working on an iWatch and hopes to announce the device sometime next year. The Apple iWatch will run a variation of iOS, the company’s mobile operating system, and will connect to an Apple iPhone.

Will all this be enough to persuade college graduates who have never owned a watch and have no desire to ever purchase one to buy an additional device that tells the time?

Not everyone seems convinced that these smartwatches are going to be a big hit.

“No one needs a low-resolution camera on a watch,” Kevin Rose, a partner at Google Ventures, wrote on Twitter. “Or a watch for that matter.”

The Wristwatch May Be Making a Comeback, But With Some Smarts

Want to try a little experiment? Walk up to someone under the age of 25, don’t say a word, but instead point to your wrist. They will likely walk away, very quickly.

As I noted in an article in 2010, when incoming freshmen first arrived at college that year, wristwatches weren’t just a thing of the past, few students even understood that people could ask for the time silently.

“They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day,” wrote the administrators of Wisconsin’s Beloit College who put together a yearly list for the school’s professors to explain the cultural “norms” of incoming freshmen. “They don’t own watches and instead use their cellphones to tell the time.”

But the wristwatch or the wrist computer or the smartwatch or whatever you may want to call it may be making a comeback.

On Wednesday, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Gear, a smartwatch with a 1.63-inch touchscreen, a 320 x 320 resolution display, a built-in camera and a speaker. The watch can run over 70 applications, including RunKeeper, to track your running, Pocket, to read articles saved from the Web, and Evernote to keep and view notes.

While there is a lot of excitement around the Samsung watch, it is not the first of its kind.

Sony announced the SmartWatch 2 in June that went on sale on Wednesday. The device has a two-square-inch screen that can display e-mails, Twitter posts and other pieces of text, all pulled from an Android smartphone to which the watch is connected.

This year, Stephen Sneeden, Sony’s product marketing manager who worked on the company’s wristwatch, told me that Sony saw a large market in smartwatches. “The wrist becomes a remote screen where you now have the ability to control your phone with a number of different applications,” he said.

Other device makers are also coming to this realization.

Qualcomm this week also announced the Toq Smart Watch, a limited-edition touchscreen device that it said would allow it to experiment in the growing genre of wearable computers.

There are other types of watchlike devices available to customers. The Nike FuelBand, a black band with an array of colored lights, measures the energy you exert on a daily basis and sends it to a smartphone. Jawbone sells the Up, a unisex bracelet that tracks a user’s daily activity and sends the information to an iPhone application. And there’s the Pebble, a black -and-white watch that can play music and display text messages and connect to iOS and Android smartphones.

While the technology blog The Verge seemed excited by the Samsung Galaxy Gear, it also noted, realistically: ”One thing the Gear has in common with other smartwatches; it’s not terribly smart.”

Matt Buchanan of The New Yorker also shared that sentiment. He questioned whether the lack of an invention for watches over the 500 years “is the result of a failure of imagination or simply a fact of nature â€" that a watch will always just be a watch, no matter how smart it might think it is.”

That said, all these gadgets could prove to be the equivalent of the first generation Kindle, which was slow, clunky and not very easy on the eyes, compared with the first Apple iPad.

As I reported this year, Apple has been busy working on an iWatch and hopes to announce the device sometime next year. The Apple iWatch will run a variation of iOS, the company’s mobile operating system, and will connect to an Apple iPhone.

Will all this be enough to persuade college graduates who have never owned a watch and have no desire to ever purchase one to buy an additional device that tells the time?

Not everyone seems convinced that these smartwatches are going to be a big hit.

“No one needs a low-resolution camera on a watch,” Kevin Rose, a partner at Google Ventures, wrote on Twitter. “Or a watch for that matter.”

Samsung Unveils Galaxy Gear Smartwatch

BERLIN â€" Samsung Electronics unveiled on Wednesday its highly anticipated digital wristwatch that can snap photos, track workouts and use an array of apps â€" gadgetry that the company hopes will catapult it into a market of smart portable devices that leave cellphones in users’ pockets.

Named the Samsung Galaxy Gear, the so-called smartwatch will join Google Glass as the latest example of wearable technology. The watch is synced to a cellphone, allowing users to answer calls and receive text messages from their wrists. The timing of the release could also give Samsung a leg up over Apple, which has yet to unveil a similar device but has long been rumored to be working on one.

At a much-hyped unveiling ceremony ahead of Berlin’s Internationale Funkausstellung, one of the world’s largest trade shows for consumer electronics, Samsung’s head of mobile communications, J.K. Shin, introduced the new device by pretending to receive a text message on stage.

“Don’t forget to mention Android,” Mr. Shin’s message read.

He then raised his left arm, exposing the watch to applause from both the Berlin crowd and people in Times Square in New York, who were patched into the event via video stream. Like other smartphones and tablets Samsung produces, Gear runs on Google’s Android operating system.

From the Gear’s small screen, which measures 1.63 inches diagonally, users can also receive e-mails, share pictures and use myriad apps designed for Gear. It does not, however, function as a stand-alone device and must be paired with a Samsung phone or tablet.

Pranav Mistry, the head of research at Samsung Research America, said the watch was “packed with technologies from the next decade.”

The watch has a rubbery wristband in which a small 1.9-megapixel camera is embedded. Its display surface has stainless steel bezels with four visible screws in each corner.

The watch is activated by pressing a button on the outer right side of the display or aiming the wristband lens at an object. A gentle swipe downward quickly turns on the camera, a feature Samsung calls the “Memographer.”

“This is a feature that changes the way we interact, the way we express and the way we capture,” Mr. Mistry said.

From the home screen, swiping upward brings up a number pad where a user can make a call. Because a gyroscope and accelerometer detect the Gear’s movement, a user can answer incoming calls by lifting his wrist to his ear.

“We have uniquely positioned the speakers and microphones so you can talk as you would on a regular phone,” Mr. Mistry said.

The Gear is set to be released worldwide next month, although neither Mr. Shin nor Mr. Mistry gave a date. Also under wraps was the cost, something many believe could be a determining factor in whether the next-generation technology hits home with consumers who have historically been reluctant to adopt such “wearables of tomorrow,” as Mr. Mistry called the Gear.

Samsung, which overtook Apple last year as the world’s largest producer of smartphones, got into the watch business in 1999 with a model that consumers shunned.

Galaxy Gear has 512 megabytes of RAM and an internal memory of four gigabytes. It has an 800-megahertz, single-core central processing unit and weighs 73.8 grams. Available colors include lime green, oatmeal beige, wild orange, mocha gray, jet black and rose gold.

Verizon Never ‘Seriously Considered’ Move Into Canada, Chief Says

Speculation that Verizon Communications would enter Canada by buying two struggling start-up carriers, allowing the company to bid for radio spectrum at a  coming government auction, dominated in recent weeks.

But on Tuesday, Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, told analysts during a conference call that the company’s interest in expanding into Canada had been blown out of proportion.

“We never seriously considered the move and it’s off the table,” Mr. McAdam said.

Mr. McAdam’s remarks came a day after the company, which is based in New York, agreed to spend $130 billion to take full control of its enormous wireless unit, buying out its longtime partner, Vodafone.

In Canada, where the cellphone market has been dominated by Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Telus, there is widespread sentiment, not always  supported by statistics, that wireless service is excessively expensive. A move by Verizon to buy the start-ups, Wind Mobile and Mobilicity, was expected to have been encouraged by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

Aside from posting a petition demanding better cellphone service terms on his Facebook page, Mr. Harper has introduced measures to help turn start-up carriers into market leaders from also-rans.

First, the government barred Telus from closing a deal for Mobilicity, which is nearly insolvent, while making it clear that Telus and Mobilicity, which is Russian owned and struggling, were off limits to the big three.

The larger carriers must also sell service on their networks at wholesale rates to start-ups to enable them to offer nationwide roaming. Had Verizon bought Telus, Mobilicity or both, it would have been considered a start-up in Canada, despite its $75.9 billion in revenue last year. And start-ups can acquire more radio spectrum at a government auction scheduled for January than the established players can buy.

The response over the last few weeks from Canada’s three larger carriers was a flood of ads condemning what they viewed as unfair special treatment for Verizon, even though it had made no formal move into the market. Joining them in the condemnation were several labor unions.

Despite the heated debate, it now appears that Verizon’s northern expansion was more exploratory than a real possibility.

“You know, it is something that we look at. We look at a lot of different countries around the world. We’ll continue to do that, but it was always on the fringe for us,” Mr. McAdam said on Tuesday’s conference call.

While Mr. Harper laid out a welcome mat, he did not take a crucial step that might have lured Verizon or another foreign carrier into the Canadian market. Bell, Telus and Rogers all remain off limits to foreign investors.

Verizon’s deal with Vodafone could be seen as a signal that it intends to redouble  its efforts in the United States, where subscriber growth in the the wireless business  gradually slowed  in the last few years as the number of people without phones has grown increasingly smaller.

Verizon Never ‘Seriously Considered’ Move Into Canada, Chief Says

Speculation that Verizon Communications would enter Canada by buying two struggling start-up carriers, allowing the company to bid for radio spectrum at a  coming government auction, dominated in recent weeks.

But on Tuesday, Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, told analysts during a conference call that the company’s interest in expanding into Canada had been blown out of proportion.

“We never seriously considered the move and it’s off the table,” Mr. McAdam said.

Mr. McAdam’s remarks came a day after the company, which is based in New York, agreed to spend $130 billion to take full control of its enormous wireless unit, buying out its longtime partner, Vodafone.

In Canada, where the cellphone market has been dominated by Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Telus, there is widespread sentiment, not always  supported by statistics, that wireless service is excessively expensive. A move by Verizon to buy the start-ups, Wind Mobile and Mobilicity, was expected to have been encouraged by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

Aside from posting a petition demanding better cellphone service terms on his Facebook page, Mr. Harper has introduced measures to help turn start-up carriers into market leaders from also-rans.

First, the government barred Telus from closing a deal for Mobilicity, which is nearly insolvent, while making it clear that Telus and Mobilicity, which is Russian owned and struggling, were off limits to the big three.

The larger carriers must also sell service on their networks at wholesale rates to start-ups to enable them to offer nationwide roaming. Had Verizon bought Telus, Mobilicity or both, it would have been considered a start-up in Canada, despite its $75.9 billion in revenue last year. And start-ups can acquire more radio spectrum at a government auction scheduled for January than the established players can buy.

The response over the last few weeks from Canada’s three larger carriers was a flood of ads condemning what they viewed as unfair special treatment for Verizon, even though it had made no formal move into the market. Joining them in the condemnation were several labor unions.

Despite the heated debate, it now appears that Verizon’s northern expansion was more exploratory than a real possibility.

“You know, it is something that we look at. We look at a lot of different countries around the world. We’ll continue to do that, but it was always on the fringe for us,” Mr. McAdam said on Tuesday’s conference call.

While Mr. Harper laid out a welcome mat, he did not take a crucial step that might have lured Verizon or another foreign carrier into the Canadian market. Bell, Telus and Rogers all remain off limits to foreign investors.

Verizon’s deal with Vodafone could be seen as a signal that it intends to redouble  its efforts in the United States, where subscriber growth in the the wireless business  gradually slowed  in the last few years as the number of people without phones has grown increasingly smaller.

Thinking About the Next Revolution

The man in the picture is turning on a light with his thoughts. Depending on how you look at it, this is an interesting technology trick, a possible aid to paraplegics or another way that the virtual and physical worlds are becoming indistinguishable.

The device is a combination of Google Glass and a commercially available electroencephalograph, or EEG, which reads brain activity by monitoring electrical impulses on the scalp. Its wearer is Andrew Krage, a co-founder and senior architect at Daqri, a company in Los Angeles that works mostly in computer vision.

Daqri has built other EEG-based software, including an iPad app that measures concentration. Turn the device’s camera onto a special diagram laid on a flat surface and see how far a subject can “levitate” off of the paper a series of images that are superimposed on the iPad screen. It is used by makers of sensitive instruments, like satellites, to ensure that workers are sharp before they undertake delicate tasks.

The company’s aspiration is to create “the Photoshop of 4-D design,” offering designers a way to insert into three-dimensional space digital objects, said Brian Mullins, Daqri’s co-founder and chief executive. The company still does work of its own, creating things like moving animations of Lego constructions on top of the toymaker’s catalog and educational tools like a virtual human body for anatomy students.

A more advanced application scans a room to figure out its dimensions and furniture. A virtual helicopter can then be flown inside the space, avoiding the solid objects and “learning” new dimensions of the room as the camera moves. Most of the time, anyway - this software is not perfect. The result is either a training tool or a toy that combines the animation and physical reality, with both changing at the same time.

This ability to manipulate objects over space, coupled with the EEG work, is what Mr. Krage is doing with the Google Glass application. To Mr. Mullins, it is the beginning of a longer-term trend toward blending our external thoughts and the world seamlessly. Not only will the underlying software and processing power improve, but there are even projects on Kickstarter to make cheaper EEGs.

“Plato was wrong: A table and the idea of a table are equally real,” he said. “I can make it out of titanium, or I can manifest it as a virtual object, and then create it with a 3-D printer. Right now we are creating applications based on concentration, but the capabilities will increase.”

That may sound grandiose, but it may also be a reality of the Information Age. It makes a little more sense when you consider that software, possibly the greatest generator of wealth and innovation, is completely insubstantial; it may reside on tape or a disc, but it is really just a series of statements about how something should be organized.

Maybe other insubstantial realities lie ahead.

Thinking About the Next Revolution

The man in the picture is turning on a light with his thoughts. Depending on how you look at it, this is an interesting technology trick, a possible aid to paraplegics or another way that the virtual and physical worlds are becoming indistinguishable.

The device is a combination of Google Glass and a commercially available electroencephalograph, or EEG, which reads brain activity by monitoring electrical impulses on the scalp. Its wearer is Andrew Krage, a co-founder and senior architect at Daqri, a company in Los Angeles that works mostly in computer vision.

Daqri has built other EEG-based software, including an iPad app that measures concentration. Turn the device’s camera onto a special diagram laid on a flat surface and see how far a subject can “levitate” off of the paper a series of images that are superimposed on the iPad screen. It is used by makers of sensitive instruments, like satellites, to ensure that workers are sharp before they undertake delicate tasks.

The company’s aspiration is to create “the Photoshop of 4-D design,” offering designers a way to insert into three-dimensional space digital objects, said Brian Mullins, Daqri’s co-founder and chief executive. The company still does work of its own, creating things like moving animations of Lego constructions on top of the toymaker’s catalog and educational tools like a virtual human body for anatomy students.

A more advanced application scans a room to figure out its dimensions and furniture. A virtual helicopter can then be flown inside the space, avoiding the solid objects and “learning” new dimensions of the room as the camera moves. Most of the time, anyway - this software is not perfect. The result is either a training tool or a toy that combines the animation and physical reality, with both changing at the same time.

This ability to manipulate objects over space, coupled with the EEG work, is what Mr. Krage is doing with the Google Glass application. To Mr. Mullins, it is the beginning of a longer-term trend toward blending our external thoughts and the world seamlessly. Not only will the underlying software and processing power improve, but there are even projects on Kickstarter to make cheaper EEGs.

“Plato was wrong: A table and the idea of a table are equally real,” he said. “I can make it out of titanium, or I can manifest it as a virtual object, and then create it with a 3-D printer. Right now we are creating applications based on concentration, but the capabilities will increase.”

That may sound grandiose, but it may also be a reality of the Information Age. It makes a little more sense when you consider that software, possibly the greatest generator of wealth and innovation, is completely insubstantial; it may reside on tape or a disc, but it is really just a series of statements about how something should be organized.

Maybe other insubstantial realities lie ahead.

How Tech Remakes Space, Food and Urgency

We usually think about technology changing our world in terms of things it touches directly. Shelves of records and CDs disappear into Apple’s iTunes. Goods are advertised on the Internet and in a few years hundreds of newspapers close.

The revolution of cloud computing and mobility, however, appears to be doing something even more profound: in an astonishingly short period of time this technology is changing the way we interact with the physical world.

In an article published Tuesday night, I wrote about a San Francisco real estate company called RocketSpace, which gets a premium to existing real estate prices by offering an environment of energetic and rapid change. Architectural niceties like views, oak paneling and thick rugs are old values. The new ones include lots of bandwidth, long tables where people work in the open, and proximity to other people working long hours.

That is, they want to work in places that look like Facebook. And Facebook wants to embody the perpetual change of a software-intensive data center, or a mobile app that can be updated for a new look and added functionality.

Facebook took the old headquarters of Sun Microsystems and spent money on hanging wires and putting people in close proximity and giving the space an unfinished look. While Google earlier put three or more people in an office, Facebook did away with far more walls. In both cases, this was not primarily about saving money. The bigger issue is creating physical spaces that encourage collaboration and flexibility.

New engineers at Facebook are encouraged to change something small on the site as early as the first day, so they can feel as if no product is ever really done. Early in Google’s development, engineers realized that the search engine’s global reach enabled them to experiment continuously with different versions of a product.

Working in a RocketSpace office, where even a cubicle might signify too much rigidity, “is the ethos of cloud software,” said Steve Swasey, the head of communications at Kabam, a cloud-based games company. It’s a look the company kept after moving to its own digs. “Long tables, people talking in a hush because others are working, and if you put in a request you can get your own file drawer,” he said, adding, “on wheels.”

This new way of thinking about how we use space and relate to one another does not end at offices. A company called Quip recently unveiled a kind of cloud-based word processing software built for a mobile world. Its files and documents are meant to be collaborative products, which anyone in a group can jump into and change around. Trappings like instant messaging along one side of the screen and Facebook-like photos of others currently working in one’s files drive home values of change, and getting products out fast.

Those tech workers accustomed to flexibility are also taking that ethos outside the office. As noted elsewhere, the operations of cloud computing, in particular the virtualization of one computer server to do the work of many, have also affected things like transportation, with the Uber car service, and lodging, with Airbnb. A room in a house is now potentially a hotel room, and a limousine is, for a short time, a cab. A recent report looks at this shared â€" or partial ownership â€" style as a threat to our consumer-driven economy.

Certainly, few big changes happen in a vacuum. Both the crammed office and the “sharing economy” can easily be seen as strategies for dealing with a particularly harsh and lasting economic downturn. We are, as a nation, taking in boarders for extra cash.

It may also be true that the current computing revolution prolongs the recession, by increasing the efficiency of a system that was tuned to a higher level of consumption.

Social and economic changes caused by the likes of Airbnb are possible only because cloud computing makes it cheap and easy to manage a huge database of distributed assets that are in near constant flux.

Food trucks that fans follow on Twitter, creating temporary restaurants on streets and sidewalks, or pop-up stores in temporarily unused stores are other markers of this embrace of perpetual change.

Daily Report: Microsoft Seeks to Emulate Apple’s Revival With Nokia Purchase

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Japanese Smartphone Maker Sees an Export Market in Older Users

Japanese Smartphone Manufacturer Sees an Export Market in Older Users

Cristóbal Schmal

TOKYO â€" The Japanese electronics industry largely missed out on the smartphone revolution. Yet this summer, even as one Japanese company, NEC, exited the business, another one, Fujitsu, announced plans for a new export push.

Masami Yamamoto is president of Fujitsu. 

The Japanese actress Shinobu Otake, with a smartphone Fujitsu introduced last year that used its Raku-Raku technology, with features meant to appeal to older people.

Rather than competing with dominant brands like Samsung and Apple in the mainstream smartphone market, Fujitsu is aiming at a niche â€" older consumers, who, the company says, are not always served adequately by products like Apple’s iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy series.

In partnership with Orange, formerly France Télécom, Fujitsu has started selling a smartphone in France that uses a technology called Raku-Raku, or “easy easy.”

The Raku-Raku handset has a touch screen and provides on-the-go Internet access, but it has larger buttons and other features aimed at older people who sometimes struggle with the complexity of conventional smartphones.

“We believe the smartphone provides benefits to these customers,” said Toru Mizumoto, the director of the mobile product division at Fujitsu.

In partnership with NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile network operator in Japan, Fujitsu has sold 20 million Raku-Raku phones in Japan since it introduced them in 2001. Ten million of them remain in active use more than a decade later. While most of these phones are old-fashioned feature phones, Fujitsu and DoCoMo introduced the first Raku-Raku smartphone in Japan last year.

Japanese manufacturers tend to focus on the domestic market, introducing features that are considered innovative here but considered quirky and less appealing elsewhere.

While aging consumers may be a niche market, they present a growing opportunity in most industrialized countries. In Japan, 39 percent of the population will be 65 or older in 2050, up from 23 percent in 2010, according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan. In France, the 65-and-older cohort will grow to 25 percent in 2050 from 17 percent in 2010, data from the United Nations show.

“If you’re a smaller vendor and maybe haven’t had much of a presence in Europe, it makes sense to look at these kinds of niches,” said André Malm, an analyst at Berg Insight, a research firm in Gothenberg, Sweden. “It’s an underserved market.”

The 65-and-up population may be growing, but 65-year-olds are becoming younger, too â€" at least in terms of their affinity for technology. Those who will retire in 2020 or 2030 are active on Facebook or Twitter now.

“We see that there is a big, big part of the senior population that is willing to go for a smartphone,” said Augustin Becquet, the head of Orange’s device portfolio.

While the elders of tomorrow may be increasingly comfortable with technology, their physical dexterity may deteriorate with age, as it has with past generations. That is where the Raku-Raku smartphone, called the Fujitsu Stylistic S01, comes in.

At first glance, the S01 looks like a fairly ordinary smartphone. The features aimed at pleasing old people could just as easily be annoying. The touch-screen “buttons” on the phone’s calling function, for example, require a firmer push than those on ordinary smartphones. Only after a slight vibration do they register the chosen digit. That way, the phone avoids misdialing.

Another Fujitsu technology appears to slow down the speech of the person on the receiving end of a Raku-Raku call by removing the gaps between words and allotting more time to the actual sounds. The screen is brighter than those on ordinary smartphones, making it easier to read under direct sunlight.

There are also safety features, like a button on the phone that sends a text message to a friend or family member with the GPS coordinates of the phone’s owner in case of emergency. In its shops, Orange is providing special training on how to use the phones.

“The younger generation likes the stuff with the latest technology, but every smartphone vendor is going to have to adapt to an aging population,” Mr. Becquet said.

While Fujitsu and DoCoMo were pioneers in the development of phones for older people, they are not the only players in the field. Two European companies, Emporia Telecom in Austria and Doro in Sweden, have also been actively pursuing older users.

Doro introduced its first phone aimed at that market in 2008 and has sold four million of them since then. In the Nordic countries, 15 percent of the 65-and-older population uses Doro phones, said Jérôme Arnaud, the chief executive of the company.

While most of the Doro phones in use are old-fashioned handsets, the company introduced a basic smartphone last December and plans to roll out a more sophisticated model this autumn, Mr. Arnaud said.

The phone will use a simplified version of the Android mobile operating system, and several dozen applications have been customized for it, he added. These include a video e-mail function that lets older people skip the typing.

As for Orange and Fujitsu, the companies say they view the partnership in France as a pilot project; if the Stylistic phone catches on, they say, it will also be offered in other European markets in which Orange operates, like Britain.

“For Japanese vendors, it has been challenging to go abroad,” said Michito Kimura, an analyst at the research firm IDC, “but this technology does meet a demand.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2013, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Japanese Smartphone Manufacturer Sees an Export Market in Older Users.

Japanese Smartphone Maker Sees an Export Market in Older Users

Japanese Smartphone Manufacturer Sees an Export Market in Older Users

Cristóbal Schmal

TOKYO â€" The Japanese electronics industry largely missed out on the smartphone revolution. Yet this summer, even as one Japanese company, NEC, exited the business, another one, Fujitsu, announced plans for a new export push.

Masami Yamamoto is president of Fujitsu. 

The Japanese actress Shinobu Otake, with a smartphone Fujitsu introduced last year that used its Raku-Raku technology, with features meant to appeal to older people.

Rather than competing with dominant brands like Samsung and Apple in the mainstream smartphone market, Fujitsu is aiming at a niche â€" older consumers, who, the company says, are not always served adequately by products like Apple’s iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy series.

In partnership with Orange, formerly France Télécom, Fujitsu has started selling a smartphone in France that uses a technology called Raku-Raku, or “easy easy.”

The Raku-Raku handset has a touch screen and provides on-the-go Internet access, but it has larger buttons and other features aimed at older people who sometimes struggle with the complexity of conventional smartphones.

“We believe the smartphone provides benefits to these customers,” said Toru Mizumoto, the director of the mobile product division at Fujitsu.

In partnership with NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile network operator in Japan, Fujitsu has sold 20 million Raku-Raku phones in Japan since it introduced them in 2001. Ten million of them remain in active use more than a decade later. While most of these phones are old-fashioned feature phones, Fujitsu and DoCoMo introduced the first Raku-Raku smartphone in Japan last year.

Japanese manufacturers tend to focus on the domestic market, introducing features that are considered innovative here but considered quirky and less appealing elsewhere.

While aging consumers may be a niche market, they present a growing opportunity in most industrialized countries. In Japan, 39 percent of the population will be 65 or older in 2050, up from 23 percent in 2010, according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan. In France, the 65-and-older cohort will grow to 25 percent in 2050 from 17 percent in 2010, data from the United Nations show.

“If you’re a smaller vendor and maybe haven’t had much of a presence in Europe, it makes sense to look at these kinds of niches,” said André Malm, an analyst at Berg Insight, a research firm in Gothenberg, Sweden. “It’s an underserved market.”

The 65-and-up population may be growing, but 65-year-olds are becoming younger, too â€" at least in terms of their affinity for technology. Those who will retire in 2020 or 2030 are active on Facebook or Twitter now.

“We see that there is a big, big part of the senior population that is willing to go for a smartphone,” said Augustin Becquet, the head of Orange’s device portfolio.

While the elders of tomorrow may be increasingly comfortable with technology, their physical dexterity may deteriorate with age, as it has with past generations. That is where the Raku-Raku smartphone, called the Fujitsu Stylistic S01, comes in.

At first glance, the S01 looks like a fairly ordinary smartphone. The features aimed at pleasing old people could just as easily be annoying. The touch-screen “buttons” on the phone’s calling function, for example, require a firmer push than those on ordinary smartphones. Only after a slight vibration do they register the chosen digit. That way, the phone avoids misdialing.

Another Fujitsu technology appears to slow down the speech of the person on the receiving end of a Raku-Raku call by removing the gaps between words and allotting more time to the actual sounds. The screen is brighter than those on ordinary smartphones, making it easier to read under direct sunlight.

There are also safety features, like a button on the phone that sends a text message to a friend or family member with the GPS coordinates of the phone’s owner in case of emergency. In its shops, Orange is providing special training on how to use the phones.

“The younger generation likes the stuff with the latest technology, but every smartphone vendor is going to have to adapt to an aging population,” Mr. Becquet said.

While Fujitsu and DoCoMo were pioneers in the development of phones for older people, they are not the only players in the field. Two European companies, Emporia Telecom in Austria and Doro in Sweden, have also been actively pursuing older users.

Doro introduced its first phone aimed at that market in 2008 and has sold four million of them since then. In the Nordic countries, 15 percent of the 65-and-older population uses Doro phones, said Jérôme Arnaud, the chief executive of the company.

While most of the Doro phones in use are old-fashioned handsets, the company introduced a basic smartphone last December and plans to roll out a more sophisticated model this autumn, Mr. Arnaud said.

The phone will use a simplified version of the Android mobile operating system, and several dozen applications have been customized for it, he added. These include a video e-mail function that lets older people skip the typing.

As for Orange and Fujitsu, the companies say they view the partnership in France as a pilot project; if the Stylistic phone catches on, they say, it will also be offered in other European markets in which Orange operates, like Britain.

“For Japanese vendors, it has been challenging to go abroad,” said Michito Kimura, an analyst at the research firm IDC, “but this technology does meet a demand.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2013, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Japanese Smartphone Manufacturer Sees an Export Market in Older Users.

Shedding Handsets, Nokia Looks to the Future

Nokia, which began making rubber boots for Finnish workmen 150 years ago and was an innovative leader of the cellphone industry in the 1990s, is once again evolving.

A Lumia 920 Windows phone released last year by Nokia, whose handset unit is being acquired by Microsoft.

It will still exist after Microsoft buys the company’s handset business. While Microsoft is acquiring what Nokia is best known for, the Finnish company is holding on to two if its major businesses: networking and mapping.

“There’s a lot of emotion involved in this move,” Timo Ihamuotila, Nokia’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “Nokia has been synonymous with cellphones for the last two decades. It’s hard, but Finland will have two strong technology companies that result from this deal.”

Nokia focused on cellphones in the 1990s after facing financial difficulties. By the height of the dot-com boom at the end of the 1900s, Nokia was the world’s largest cellphone maker. It attained a market value of around $250 billion. Yet a failure to develop a smartphone good enough to rival Apple’s iPhone and popular Android-based devices from Samsung Electronics collapsed the company’s market share from around 30 percent in 2009 to less than 4 percent last year, according to the research firm Gartner. In 2013, Samsung dethroned Nokia to become the largest phone maker.

While Nokia’s mobile phone business has been dwindling, the remaining segments are not laggards. Flush with Microsoft money from selling off its core businesses, the new Nokia could be well positioned to compete. It might be invisible to consumers, but Nokia’s networking business, which includes equipment it sells to telecom operators to run their wireless networks, brings in the majority of the company’s annual revenue.

Nokia’s maps technology, another part of the company Microsoft does not want, has a valuable global database of geographical information. Called Here, it can be licensed to other companies that want to build products and services around maps.

Without having to worry about making popular software and sleek phones to compete in the brutal handset industry, the new Nokia would be freed to build a profitable company from the remaining businesses. But it is unclear how well those businesses will stand on their own. And even without a mobile unit, Nokia still has to compete in a rapidly changing mobile industry that left it behind long ago.

“It’s a very odd mix at this point,” said Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst for Ovum. “There’s no other company that combines heavy network infrastructure with what’s basically a pure data and software asset, and there’s very little synergy between the two.”

Nokia’s mobile infrastructure business, which began as a joint venture with Siemens, currently generates around 85 percent of the company’s annual $18.4 billion in revenues. Nokia acquired the 50 percent stake in Nokia Siemens Networks earlier this year for $2.2 billion.

It is expected to compete against telecom suppliers like Ericsson of Sweden and Huawei and ZTE of China to win contracts from the world’s largest cellphone operators. China Mobile and Vodafone of Britain are planning to spend billions of dollars to upgrade their mobile data networks to so-called fourth-generation technology.

By the time the next generation of wireless technology arrives and vendors are upgrading their equipment, Nokia, now a smaller company, will be in a tough spot.

It may have some success in the United States and Europe, where the governments are wary of Huawei and ZTE because of security concerns about Chinese government-sponsored spying. But it will have to invest heavily to challenge Ericsson, said Tero Kuittinen, an independent analyst for Alekstra, a company that does mobile diagnostics.

“Being a small network infrastructure company, that’s a very hard business,” Mr. Kuittinen said. “Ericsson is such a giant in this industry.”

Nokia’s mapping component, Here, provides GPS services to dashboard navigation systems in many car models. The unit, which generates around $1.3 billion in annual revenue, plans to sell GPS and entertainment services to companies that do not want to build them from scratch, according to Mr. Ihamuotila, Nokia’s chief financial officer.

Nokia maps might hold some appeal to device makers because Nokia will not be competing with them. (Microsoft said it would continue to use the Nokia brand on smartphones for about 10 years.)

But the value of Nokia’s maps may decrease now that the company no longer has a device business attached to it. As smartphones became popular, digital maps became more complex and sophisticated because people were pulling up directions from the devices they carried instead of looking up directions on a computer. As they did, the mapmakers gathered information from people’s smartphones and made the maps more accurate and more useful.

Google, a rival to Nokia’s mapping services, treats the millions of smartphones using its map software as data probes to improve the thoroughness of its database.

Nokia has also retained its research and development facilities and patent portfolio, with plans to develop new products to license, or sell technologies to other companies.

However, with so many mobile devices relying on Google’s Android software, and so many smartphones relying on parts and technologies made by Samsung, the Finnish giant will have to come up with something truly compelling to stand out in stores.

Even with the remnants of Nokia, the loss of its phone business creates a void for Finland as a whole, said Mr. Kuittinen, the Alekstra analyst. Many Finnish universities offered courses in mathematics and software engineering with Nokia in mind as a future employer.

Now, they may look to other countries, like the United States, if they want to get into the business of making mobile software, one of the most popular technology sectors for engineers.

“The industry just vanished,” Mr. Kuittinen said, “and this is not something that happens very often.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Selling Off Handsets, Nokia Keeps 2 Core Businesses.

Shedding Handsets, Nokia Looks to the Future

Nokia, which began making rubber boots for Finnish workmen 150 years ago and was an innovative leader of the cellphone industry in the 1990s, is once again evolving.

A Lumia 920 Windows phone released last year by Nokia, whose handset unit is being acquired by Microsoft.

It will still exist after Microsoft buys the company’s handset business. While Microsoft is acquiring what Nokia is best known for, the Finnish company is holding on to two if its major businesses: networking and mapping.

“There’s a lot of emotion involved in this move,” Timo Ihamuotila, Nokia’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “Nokia has been synonymous with cellphones for the last two decades. It’s hard, but Finland will have two strong technology companies that result from this deal.”

Nokia focused on cellphones in the 1990s after facing financial difficulties. By the height of the dot-com boom at the end of the 1900s, Nokia was the world’s largest cellphone maker. It attained a market value of around $250 billion. Yet a failure to develop a smartphone good enough to rival Apple’s iPhone and popular Android-based devices from Samsung Electronics collapsed the company’s market share from around 30 percent in 2009 to less than 4 percent last year, according to the research firm Gartner. In 2013, Samsung dethroned Nokia to become the largest phone maker.

While Nokia’s mobile phone business has been dwindling, the remaining segments are not laggards. Flush with Microsoft money from selling off its core businesses, the new Nokia could be well positioned to compete. It might be invisible to consumers, but Nokia’s networking business, which includes equipment it sells to telecom operators to run their wireless networks, brings in the majority of the company’s annual revenue.

Nokia’s maps technology, another part of the company Microsoft does not want, has a valuable global database of geographical information. Called Here, it can be licensed to other companies that want to build products and services around maps.

Without having to worry about making popular software and sleek phones to compete in the brutal handset industry, the new Nokia would be freed to build a profitable company from the remaining businesses. But it is unclear how well those businesses will stand on their own. And even without a mobile unit, Nokia still has to compete in a rapidly changing mobile industry that left it behind long ago.

“It’s a very odd mix at this point,” said Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst for Ovum. “There’s no other company that combines heavy network infrastructure with what’s basically a pure data and software asset, and there’s very little synergy between the two.”

Nokia’s mobile infrastructure business, which began as a joint venture with Siemens, currently generates around 85 percent of the company’s annual $18.4 billion in revenues. Nokia acquired the 50 percent stake in Nokia Siemens Networks earlier this year for $2.2 billion.

It is expected to compete against telecom suppliers like Ericsson of Sweden and Huawei and ZTE of China to win contracts from the world’s largest cellphone operators. China Mobile and Vodafone of Britain are planning to spend billions of dollars to upgrade their mobile data networks to so-called fourth-generation technology.

By the time the next generation of wireless technology arrives and vendors are upgrading their equipment, Nokia, now a smaller company, will be in a tough spot.

It may have some success in the United States and Europe, where the governments are wary of Huawei and ZTE because of security concerns about Chinese government-sponsored spying. But it will have to invest heavily to challenge Ericsson, said Tero Kuittinen, an independent analyst for Alekstra, a company that does mobile diagnostics.

“Being a small network infrastructure company, that’s a very hard business,” Mr. Kuittinen said. “Ericsson is such a giant in this industry.”

Nokia’s mapping component, Here, provides GPS services to dashboard navigation systems in many car models. The unit, which generates around $1.3 billion in annual revenue, plans to sell GPS and entertainment services to companies that do not want to build them from scratch, according to Mr. Ihamuotila, Nokia’s chief financial officer.

Nokia maps might hold some appeal to device makers because Nokia will not be competing with them. (Microsoft said it would continue to use the Nokia brand on smartphones for about 10 years.)

But the value of Nokia’s maps may decrease now that the company no longer has a device business attached to it. As smartphones became popular, digital maps became more complex and sophisticated because people were pulling up directions from the devices they carried instead of looking up directions on a computer. As they did, the mapmakers gathered information from people’s smartphones and made the maps more accurate and more useful.

Google, a rival to Nokia’s mapping services, treats the millions of smartphones using its map software as data probes to improve the thoroughness of its database.

Nokia has also retained its research and development facilities and patent portfolio, with plans to develop new products to license, or sell technologies to other companies.

However, with so many mobile devices relying on Google’s Android software, and so many smartphones relying on parts and technologies made by Samsung, the Finnish giant will have to come up with something truly compelling to stand out in stores.

Even with the remnants of Nokia, the loss of its phone business creates a void for Finland as a whole, said Mr. Kuittinen, the Alekstra analyst. Many Finnish universities offered courses in mathematics and software engineering with Nokia in mind as a future employer.

Now, they may look to other countries, like the United States, if they want to get into the business of making mobile software, one of the most popular technology sectors for engineers.

“The industry just vanished,” Mr. Kuittinen said, “and this is not something that happens very often.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Selling Off Handsets, Nokia Keeps 2 Core Businesses.

From Nokia, an Executive Who Knows the Difficulties at Hand

Richard Drew/Associated Press

Stephen Elop will step down as Nokia’s chief and head an expanded devices team at Microsoft.

When Stephen Elop takes on Microsoft’s challenges as the new head of its mobile computing business, he will find plenty of parallels from his three years running Nokia: both are established companies blindsided by new innovators and troubled almost as much by pride and internal fiefs as by technology shifts, according to former executives and company watchers.

What Mr. Elop’s Nokia experience doesn’t show is a history of engineering turnarounds that could be translated to Microsoft. Before Microsoft’s $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia’s devices and services business was announced late Monday, Nokia’s stock was off about 60 percent since Mr. Elop joined the company in September 2010.

Mr. Elop made many tough choices, including major layoffs, selling office space and shedding pet technologies like an aging operating system for mobile devices. Those calls prevented an even worse outcome, and gave the Finnish company a badly needed sense of urgency, analysts said. But he failed to stop the company’s declining market share and he leaves â€" at best â€" a work in progress at Nokia.

As part of the Microsoft deal, Mr. Elop agreed to step down as Nokia’s chief executive and rejoin Microsoft when the deal closes, which is expected to happen in early 2014. He will lead an expanded devices team inside Microsoft, responsible for both hardware and Microsoft’s business in things like games and music.

He also puts himself in the running to succeed Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, who last month announced he would be leaving within 12 months. “His hat is firmly in the ring, running a very important division for Microsoft’s future,” said Crawford Del Prete, an analyst at IDC who has known Mr. Elop for many years. “He could have just exited Nokia, but the fact that he’s there shows he is a very ambitious guy.”

Mr. Elop, a 49 year-old Canadian, came to Nokia from Microsoft, where he ran the business division, a senior leadership job that includes Microsoft’s lucrative Office software. Before Microsoft, he ran the information systems of Juniper Networks, a computer networking company, and ran field operations for Adobe, which makes tools for digital content. He came into Adobe from another acquisition, when Adobe purchased a company he ran called Macromedia.

He is a father of five, including triplet girls and a daughter he adopted from China. He is close to his family, uprooting them for his first Microsoft job only at his son’s urging. But then Mr. Elop left his family in Washington while he relocated to Espoo, Finland, where Nokia is based.

“It’s a beautiful place, but it’s very hard to be that far away from your family,” said Leslie Nakajima, a former Nokia executive who now runs communications for the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the Firefox browser. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Elop declined to be interviewed.

When Mr. Elop arrived at Nokia, it was still the world’s leading maker of mobile phones. But it had been struggling for years to match smartphone competitors. First, BlackBerry wooed business customers with phones that had an easy-to-use keyboard for typing out e-mails. Apple’s iPhone, which came out in June 2007, and Google’s Android operating system in October 2008, represented an even bigger challenge with smartphones that closely tied hardware, software and a wide variety of customer-pleasing applications.

Nokia had turned down an early chance to be Google’s partner in Android, partly because its purchase of a mapping company could have presented a conflict with Google Maps. That relationship went to Samsung, now the world’s biggest smartphone maker. Instead, Nokia’s strategy involved managing five different operating systems, and making scores of different phones for markets across the world.

“A kind of arrogance had crept into the company, a feeling that they really understood exactly what consumers wanted,” said Mr. Del Prete. “That was a real problem when they were assaulted by BlackBerry and Apple.”

Early in his tenure, Mr. Elop wrote an internal memo that compared Nokia to a man on a burning oil platform who is forced to jump into icy waters. Mr. Elop’s point: If the company didn’t make some drastic, risky decisions, it was doomed to fail. Mr. Elop’s “burning platform” memo recalls a similar missive written a few months earlier by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, as he left Microsoft. Mr. Ozzie wrote about a company in thrall to its past success, troubled by internal complexity and unable to react to fast-moving competitors, particularly in a world dominated by new mobile devices and services.

Mr. Elop could see that Nokia faced similar issues, but he may not have been prepared for the firestorm when he announced in February 2011 that the company would drop development on multiple operating systems, switch to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system and lay off thousands of employees. Older-model Nokia phones were orphaned, and newer phones with Microsoft software did not arrive on the market for months.

“People were already sore, because they felt like there would be a deal with Microsoft as soon as he came on,” said a former Nokia executive, who requested anonymity to maintain professional ties. “There was uncertainty, there was infighting, and the market share plummeted.”

Mr. Elop was making a risky decision that still hasn’t paid off.

“He had to do something,” said Mr. Del Prete. “Smartphones change so fast, and this was a company where workers expected to stay their whole lives.”

While the first models of Nokia phones running Microsoft software were expensive and failed to excite consumers, Mr. Del Prete added, “they are making progress. They are adding developers. It will take longer than people envision, and it will take the coffers of Microsoft.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: From Nokia, an Executive Who Knows All Too Well The Difficulties at Hand.

From Nokia, an Executive Who Knows the Difficulties at Hand

Richard Drew/Associated Press

Stephen Elop will step down as Nokia’s chief and head an expanded devices team at Microsoft.

When Stephen Elop takes on Microsoft’s challenges as the new head of its mobile computing business, he will find plenty of parallels from his three years running Nokia: both are established companies blindsided by new innovators and troubled almost as much by pride and internal fiefs as by technology shifts, according to former executives and company watchers.

What Mr. Elop’s Nokia experience doesn’t show is a history of engineering turnarounds that could be translated to Microsoft. Before Microsoft’s $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia’s devices and services business was announced late Monday, Nokia’s stock was off about 60 percent since Mr. Elop joined the company in September 2010.

Mr. Elop made many tough choices, including major layoffs, selling office space and shedding pet technologies like an aging operating system for mobile devices. Those calls prevented an even worse outcome, and gave the Finnish company a badly needed sense of urgency, analysts said. But he failed to stop the company’s declining market share and he leaves â€" at best â€" a work in progress at Nokia.

As part of the Microsoft deal, Mr. Elop agreed to step down as Nokia’s chief executive and rejoin Microsoft when the deal closes, which is expected to happen in early 2014. He will lead an expanded devices team inside Microsoft, responsible for both hardware and Microsoft’s business in things like games and music.

He also puts himself in the running to succeed Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, who last month announced he would be leaving within 12 months. “His hat is firmly in the ring, running a very important division for Microsoft’s future,” said Crawford Del Prete, an analyst at IDC who has known Mr. Elop for many years. “He could have just exited Nokia, but the fact that he’s there shows he is a very ambitious guy.”

Mr. Elop, a 49 year-old Canadian, came to Nokia from Microsoft, where he ran the business division, a senior leadership job that includes Microsoft’s lucrative Office software. Before Microsoft, he ran the information systems of Juniper Networks, a computer networking company, and ran field operations for Adobe, which makes tools for digital content. He came into Adobe from another acquisition, when Adobe purchased a company he ran called Macromedia.

He is a father of five, including triplet girls and a daughter he adopted from China. He is close to his family, uprooting them for his first Microsoft job only at his son’s urging. But then Mr. Elop left his family in Washington while he relocated to Espoo, Finland, where Nokia is based.

“It’s a beautiful place, but it’s very hard to be that far away from your family,” said Leslie Nakajima, a former Nokia executive who now runs communications for the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the Firefox browser. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Elop declined to be interviewed.

When Mr. Elop arrived at Nokia, it was still the world’s leading maker of mobile phones. But it had been struggling for years to match smartphone competitors. First, BlackBerry wooed business customers with phones that had an easy-to-use keyboard for typing out e-mails. Apple’s iPhone, which came out in June 2007, and Google’s Android operating system in October 2008, represented an even bigger challenge with smartphones that closely tied hardware, software and a wide variety of customer-pleasing applications.

Nokia had turned down an early chance to be Google’s partner in Android, partly because its purchase of a mapping company could have presented a conflict with Google Maps. That relationship went to Samsung, now the world’s biggest smartphone maker. Instead, Nokia’s strategy involved managing five different operating systems, and making scores of different phones for markets across the world.

“A kind of arrogance had crept into the company, a feeling that they really understood exactly what consumers wanted,” said Mr. Del Prete. “That was a real problem when they were assaulted by BlackBerry and Apple.”

Early in his tenure, Mr. Elop wrote an internal memo that compared Nokia to a man on a burning oil platform who is forced to jump into icy waters. Mr. Elop’s point: If the company didn’t make some drastic, risky decisions, it was doomed to fail. Mr. Elop’s “burning platform” memo recalls a similar missive written a few months earlier by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, as he left Microsoft. Mr. Ozzie wrote about a company in thrall to its past success, troubled by internal complexity and unable to react to fast-moving competitors, particularly in a world dominated by new mobile devices and services.

Mr. Elop could see that Nokia faced similar issues, but he may not have been prepared for the firestorm when he announced in February 2011 that the company would drop development on multiple operating systems, switch to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system and lay off thousands of employees. Older-model Nokia phones were orphaned, and newer phones with Microsoft software did not arrive on the market for months.

“People were already sore, because they felt like there would be a deal with Microsoft as soon as he came on,” said a former Nokia executive, who requested anonymity to maintain professional ties. “There was uncertainty, there was infighting, and the market share plummeted.”

Mr. Elop was making a risky decision that still hasn’t paid off.

“He had to do something,” said Mr. Del Prete. “Smartphones change so fast, and this was a company where workers expected to stay their whole lives.”

While the first models of Nokia phones running Microsoft software were expensive and failed to excite consumers, Mr. Del Prete added, “they are making progress. They are adding developers. It will take longer than people envision, and it will take the coffers of Microsoft.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: From Nokia, an Executive Who Knows All Too Well The Difficulties at Hand.

Getting a Glimpse of Your Own Online Data

Last weekend, I wrote a story about Acxiom, a marketing technology firm that introduced a Web site on Wednesday morning called Aboutthedata.com. The site allows consumers to view all sorts of personal details the company has collected about them in its marketing databases.

The piece provoked an animated conversation across social media:

On the Web site, people who are willing to undergo an identity verification process â€" which includes submitting your name, address and the last four digits of your Social Security number â€" and who pass that test will be able to see, correct and delete information Acxiom has collected about them.

There are six categories of information on the site: personal details like race, gender and occupation; residential data like assessed home data and lot square footage; vehicle data like the make and model of your car; economic data like estimated household income: shopping data like whether your household buys books, cooking utensils or toys; and household interests like board games, golf, hunting or text-messaging.

When I visited Acxiom’s headquarters in Little Rock, Ark., last week to get a preview of Aboutthedata.com, I discovered that I was unable to view my own marketing profile. It turned out that, after I started writing about Acxiom last year, including a piece about the troubles I had getting access to my Acxiom record, the company had opted me out of its marketing databases.

So, after I passed the identification process on the new site, I found there were no details to see about me â€" only a message saying there was no information available.

We would love to hear from readers who are able to view their details on Aboutthedata.com.

What’s your reaction to the site? How did you find the identity verification process â€" was it secure enough for you? How accurate were the data about you and your household? How did the site make you feel about data mining for the purposes of marketing? Did you modify or delete your data, did you opt out or stay in? Why?

If Google Could Search Twitter, It Would Find Topsy

There is no question that real-time social networks like Twitter have become an important forum for public conversation, whether the discussion is about chemical weapons in the Middle East or the dance moves of Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards.

But good luck trying to search and analyze the fire hose of information flowing through the real-time social network.

Sure, Twitter offers a search function, but its algorithms favor recent tweets and what it considers the most important items over the ones that might be most relevant to the searcher. For example, a search on Tuesday night for Bill de Blasio, who is leading the polls in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, pulled up lots of tweets repeating his poll stats but virtually nothing on the night’s debate among the Democratic candidates. And search results for older material are quite limited.

Twitter’s weaknesses in search have left an opening for a start-up called Topsy, which has built a niche offering real-time indexing, search and analysis of the Twitter stream.

On Wednesday, the San Francisco company announced that it has now indexed every Twitter message since the first tweet was posted in 2006 â€" about 425 billion pieces of content when you include photos, pages linked from Twitter, and other related material. (Previously, its complete archive only went back to 2010.)

And the database is free for the public to search at Topsy.com. Want to see what people are saying about President Obama and the Syria vote in Congress? A quick search pulls up what Topsy’s algorithm thinks are the most relevant results, factoring in retweets and the past influence of the tweeter. You can narrow down results by time frame, search for tweets in 10 languages, and see a graph with the volume of tweets over time and an indicator of the general sentiment, positive or negative.

“How do you make sense of 400 billion pieces of content?” said Vipul Ved Prakash, Topsy’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “One, by ranking it. We do that ranking by looking at how much a particular piece of content is being cited by other people.”

The system is similar to what Google does for Web search. (For a brief time, Google had a deal with Twitter that allowed it to index tweets. But after that deal expired in 2011, it became pretty much useless for searching the real-time social conversation.)

Topsy makes its money from more sophisticated tools â€" aimed at marketers, media companies, political operations, and hedge funds â€" that require a subscription fee that starts at $12,000 a year. Those allow searches that compare different terms, narrow down results by geography and surface the specific tweets with the most influence on the social conversation.

“When Sandy hit, I used them for tracking down information,” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, referring to the 2012 storm that devastated much of the East Coast. “I think they’re a great resource.”

But Mr. Sullivan, who has followed the development of search technology since its infancy, questioned whether Topsy’s powerful tools are more than most Twitter users want.

“People aren’t turning to Twitter search the way they are with Google,” he said. “The people who are really into Twitter search are journalists.”

Mr. Prakash acknowledged that most of Topsy’s users work for businesses that need to mine Twitter for valuable information, such as Visa and USA Today. Competitors like DataSift and Gnip also offer access to the Twitter archive, he said, although their ability to deliver real-time information is more limited.

But Topsy knows it’s doing something right when Twitter itself uses the company’s tools, including for its Twitter Political Index that tracked voter sentiment during the 2012 presidential election and for its Twitter Oscars Index, which tried to predict this year’s Academy Award winners based on Twitter chatter.

“What we are doing is creating new products from the data,” Mr. Prakash said. “It becomes very complementary to the products that Twitter is providing.”

If Google Could Search Twitter, It Would Find Topsy

There is no question that real-time social networks like Twitter have become an important forum for public conversation, whether the discussion is about chemical weapons in the Middle East or the dance moves of Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards.

But good luck trying to search and analyze the fire hose of information flowing through the real-time social network.

Sure, Twitter offers a search function, but its algorithms favor recent tweets and what it considers the most important items over the ones that might be most relevant to the searcher. For example, a search on Tuesday night for Bill de Blasio, who is leading the polls in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, pulled up lots of tweets repeating his poll stats but virtually nothing on the night’s debate among the Democratic candidates. And search results for older material are quite limited.

Twitter’s weaknesses in search have left an opening for a start-up called Topsy, which has built a niche offering real-time indexing, search and analysis of the Twitter stream.

On Wednesday, the San Francisco company announced that it has now indexed every Twitter message since the first tweet was posted in 2006 â€" about 425 billion pieces of content when you include photos, pages linked from Twitter, and other related material. (Previously, its complete archive only went back to 2010.)

And the database is free for the public to search at Topsy.com. Want to see what people are saying about President Obama and the Syria vote in Congress? A quick search pulls up what Topsy’s algorithm thinks are the most relevant results, factoring in retweets and the past influence of the tweeter. You can narrow down results by time frame, search for tweets in 10 languages, and see a graph with the volume of tweets over time and an indicator of the general sentiment, positive or negative.

“How do you make sense of 400 billion pieces of content?” said Vipul Ved Prakash, Topsy’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “One, by ranking it. We do that ranking by looking at how much a particular piece of content is being cited by other people.”

The system is similar to what Google does for Web search. (For a brief time, Google had a deal with Twitter that allowed it to index tweets. But after that deal expired in 2011, it became pretty much useless for searching the real-time social conversation.)

Topsy makes its money from more sophisticated tools â€" aimed at marketers, media companies, political operations, and hedge funds â€" that require a subscription fee that starts at $12,000 a year. Those allow searches that compare different terms, narrow down results by geography and surface the specific tweets with the most influence on the social conversation.

“When Sandy hit, I used them for tracking down information,” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, referring to the 2012 storm that devastated much of the East Coast. “I think they’re a great resource.”

But Mr. Sullivan, who has followed the development of search technology since its infancy, questioned whether Topsy’s powerful tools are more than most Twitter users want.

“People aren’t turning to Twitter search the way they are with Google,” he said. “The people who are really into Twitter search are journalists.”

Mr. Prakash acknowledged that most of Topsy’s users work for businesses that need to mine Twitter for valuable information, such as Visa and USA Today. Competitors like DataSift and Gnip also offer access to the Twitter archive, he said, although their ability to deliver real-time information is more limited.

But Topsy knows it’s doing something right when Twitter itself uses the company’s tools, including for its Twitter Political Index that tracked voter sentiment during the 2012 presidential election and for its Twitter Oscars Index, which tried to predict this year’s Academy Award winners based on Twitter chatter.

“What we are doing is creating new products from the data,” Mr. Prakash said. “It becomes very complementary to the products that Twitter is providing.”