Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

For long (see my article about the industry ecosystem) OEM have heavily relied on ODM for production and many times design of their phones…except Nokia which has historically preferred to keep everything internally to manage cost, scaling, distribution and above all margins, but kept around 20% of its production in the hand of tightly controlled ODMs,

In 2008, Nokia outsourced about 17 percent of the manufacturing volume of its mobile phone engines, which include the phone and software that enable its basic operations.

Nokia’s key subcontractors have been Foxconn (2038.HK), China’s BYD (1211.HK), Jabil Circuit (JBL.N) and Elcoteq (ELQAV.HE).

via Reuters

certainly to balance its risks and not put its internal factories and staff exposed to a high demand slow down from the market. This is happening today.

And Nokia:

Nokia Pulls More Than $5 Billion in Business From Contract Manufacturers

via iSuppli

We’ve seen some signs already with this Foxconn announcement:

Foxconn Full-Year Profits Drop 83%

Foxconn International Holdings – the mobile phone manufacturing division of Taiwan’s giant Hon Hai Precision Industry has reported a net loss for the second half of last year, which dragged its full year profit down by 83.% to US$121 million – compared with US$721 million a year earlier.

cellular-news

And those industry moves:

TAIWAN ODM handset maker Arima Communications and EMS provider Elcoteq have temporarily set aside merger talks in favor of joining forces to produce low-cost handsets for LG Electronics, company sources told DigiTimes.

DigiTimes

SAN JOSE — Flextronics has reportedly laid off about 70 workers in Taiwan and additional cuts are possible, according to a local newspaper report.

The Apply Daily, citing company sources, said most of laid off workers are from the company’s notebook and server operations.

Flextronics acquired the Arima notebook and server business operations in March this year.

CircuitsAssembly

Arima is the big SEMC ODM, and is really hurt by SEMC woes.

When time are tough, sub contractors are the first to be cut, but when economy is rising again they are the first to get the benefits: if they were able to survive. Let’s watch at this space to look at the first sign of recovery!

Thomas

looks like they are translating to AS3 and running MXMLC! Go Flex.

from Ted On Flash

Again a proof that languages are important (for reuse, etc) and not tied anymore to one runtime.

On a side note it also means that we will be able to code in Java for ELIPS 3.0

I’m a heavy Google Reader user, and we use it a lot internally at Open-Plug to share technical articles. I’ve already made a Yahoo Pipes (my Pipes are here) to aggregate the Google reader shared feeds of some of my coworkers into one feed we read each other to not read the same article too often.

Yahoo pipes is sooo great , and twitter seems to take momentum so I’ve decided to build a pipe that would automatically tweets the item I’ve read and on which I’ve put a note, so the work I do reading article is immediately available via twitter.

As always just before doing the work, I’ve Googled a little, and of course someone has made it already Internet is fantastic.

Here is the link: http://mat.su/tweeting-google-reader-notes/ basically:

• A yahoo pipe is filtering the Google shared page (check the original here http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=PJ3jpty83RG9IVzUBR50VA )
• This feed is sent to the twitterfeed service (beware, it used OpenID: as you have a google account, simply select google as an openIdD provider right in the twitterfeed login page, icon on the right were you need to enter the openID…well openID as a usability point of view simply sucks)
• Twitterfeed then posts on Twitter (shortening URL, etc)

My pipe is working, I’m waiting for the first twitterfeed update.

Update: it works like a charm! This is ubber geek, I tweet from Google reader, well back to work!

Update 2: Reworked the pipe, simplifying it, perhaps I should remove the title to leave only the note?

Thanks to Nicolas to pointing this out through Twitter (first time I find it useful).

Really a great piece of explanation!