Remember back in July when a handful of Nokia’s trademark applications were uncovered, launching unending speculation about tidbits such as “C Series”, “X Series” and “Booklet”? Well Booklet ended up being a netbook, as suspected, and we’re still waiting to see how the C and X series end up materializing. One of the trademarks that didn’t receive much attention however, was “Nokia Money”. We all assumed it had to do with a mobile payment platform of some kind and as it turns out, it does. Nokia announced its new Nokia Money platform built on top of Obopay this morning, that will provide a Paypal-like service using mobile phone numbers as identifiers rather than email addresses. From the release:

Nokia Money has been designed to be as simple and convenient as making a voice call or sending an SMS. It will enable consumers to send money to another person just by using the person’s mobile phone number, as well as to pay merchants for goods and services, pay their utility bills, or recharge their prepaid SIM cards (SIM top-up). The services can be accessed 24 hours a day from anywhere, meaning savings in travel costs and time. Nokia is building a wide network of Nokia Money agents, where consumers can deposit money in or withdraw cash from their accounts.

We don’t anticipate seeing the service become available in the US any time soon, if ever. It would be nice to see a company step up to make mobile banking more of a reality in America but considering Nokia’s lack of presence here, we doubt it will be the company to lead the pack. Abroad however, where Paypal isn’t quite the force it is here — the Paypal service isn’t even available in many regions — Nokia is poised to supplement its dwindling mobile revenues with a service that could see big returns initially and bigger returns in the long run. More details will be revealed next week at Nokia World and we’re definitely looking forward to it.

Read

Well apparently that Finnish blog Puhelinvertailu opened up the flood gates as a bunch of people spent their Saturdays nights/Sunday mornings combing through Finland’s trademark database for anything Nokia-related. Much of what was found, such as a laundry list of trademarked handset names, falls into the “who cares?” category. Yes, Nokia trademarks names like Exx and Nxx so it can use them down the road. There were a few trademarks of interest uncovered however, namely a trademark for “Xseries” — meaning we now have two possible names for new lines of Nokia handsets. If we had to wager a guess: Cseries will encompass handsets that would have previously fallen into various numbered ranges (ie boring) and Xseries will cover Nokia’s upcoming line of Maemo 5-powered handsets (ie not boring). Again, that’s just speculation of course. Trademark miners managed to dig up mention of some other possibly-interesting tidbits as well, such as “Nokia Money”, a potential new platform for mobile financial transactions, and Booklet, a possible name for Nokia’s upcoming line of netbooks/smartbooks. Hopefully at least some of the products behind these trademarks will be covered by whatever Nokia plans to unveil at Nokia World.

Thanks, CanisMajor!

Read (Xseries)
Read (Nokia Money, Booklet, etc)