Author: BWild

The tech company is seeking partnerships and is hiring talent as it prepares to make its way back into the market.

Nokia has announced that it is now testing products, hiring experts in software, and is looking to make new sales partnerships as it builds its strategy to return to the consumer and mobile technology industry.

After having previously stepped out of the handset and smartphone business, it is now headed back in.

Nokia was once a leader in mobile technology and was the largest cell phone maker on the planet. That said, when smartphones took over basic cellular phones and feature phones, the Finnish firm made decisions that allowed Apple and Samsung to leap into the top spots. Eventually, Microsoft purchased Nokia’s handset business. Since that time in 2013, Nokia has placed all of its energies on creating equipment for telecom networks.

While Nokia can’t fully return to the mobile technology industry until the end of 2016, it plans to be ready.

The company has a non-competition deal with Microsoft that is blocking Nokia from being able to make it back into the handset business at the moment, but when that expires in 2016, Rajeev Suri, the CEO of the company, plans to be ready. The preparations are now heavily underway with the business in order to ensure that once it is free to jump back into the smartphone and consumer handset business, it will be ready to leap with both feet.

Nokia has already taken a tiny step back into the consumer marketplace after having launched a tablet based on the Android operating system. This device hit the market shelves in China in January, and is called the N1. Much more recently, it unveiled a type of “virtual-reality camera” which it has referred to as the “rebirth of Nokia”.

Other tech that the company has set out to the market includes an Android app entitled the Z Launcher, which is designed to provide smartphones with more effective content organization.

That said, a major focus of the business is now to prepare for reentry into mobile technology in a big way. It is hoping to create handsets in the future that will provide stiff competition in that market.

The company is now working location based news opportunities into its offerings for mobile users.

The last decade has been just as defining as the one before it in terms of changing the way that people consume news and media as a whole, and Blockfeed is now jumping onto the latest trend that uses geolocation to ensure that people are receiving the stories that are relevant to them.

A large number of major news publications are already offering online alternative options, but this is another step up.

The new Blockfeed app has now launched for Android devices and is marketing itself as a new way for people to be able to consume news media. This is because it works with geolocation data from within a smartphone or tablet. It uses that data to be able to “hyper localize” its experience in order to generate a relatively precise one. In some cases, the experience can be brought right down to a city block from the user’s actual location. The mobile app then curates stories that have been aggregated from a broad spectrum of different sources and presents them to the user in a list.

This geolocation based list of stories can then be viewed by the user who can select the story that interests them.

When the story is selected, the user is directed to the actual source page where it was initially published, so that they can continue to read as much of it as they’d like. The Blockfeed app also uses a type of algorithm that allows the popularity of a specific story to be recognized. That algorithm takes into account a number of different factors, such as the number of times the story has been shared over social media. Those factors also help to decide which stories will be at the top of the list when the app is opened up.

Equally, it also ensures that there is a full spectrum of news media available to the reader, as smaller blogs are placed right along with the major publications.

The initial launch of Blockfeed has made its geolocation capabilities available only to users who are in New York City, which is where the headquarters of the company are located. That said, the company did report that it intends to bring the news app to other “dense urban areas” and “high-quality local journalism scenes”. For the time being, New York City suits that need perfectly and is the home of the initial launch, but it will be expanded and rolled out in other areas over time.