Nokia India's Ovi Life Tools will power the rural value added services for Tata Docomo, the GSM brand of Tata Teleservices; what's particularly interesting is that Tata Docomo is embedding Nokia Ovi Tools in the Sim Took Kit (STK), apart from the usual SMSM, USSD, GPRS deployments. This is premium real estate, and the STK deployment ensures that the services will be accessible to all future customers of Tata Docomo. For Nokia, which has services live in 18 states and in 11 languages on its own short code, this deal is more about reach which a telecom operator affords it. One would have thought that a handset manufacturer with 52% marketshare in India wouldn't need telecom operators for distribution, Nokia's marketshare at the lower end of the price range is under significant pressure; with this deal, it appears that instead of banking on services to sell handsets, it is also looking to services as a revenue source. Not a 40% margin business, is it? (Historical context: Nokia To Focus On Solutions, Targets 300M Active Users by 2011 End) While the revenue share information for this deal has not been disclosed, please feel free to share the info in the comments to this post, if you know. Some boilerplate information on Nokia Life Tools: Nokia Life Tools is now offered across 18 states and 11 languages (Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya and English.), with two plans: - र 30 per month for daily weather updates and…
