Interview with Tom Ojala of JoikuSoft
Oviapplications caught up this morning with Tom Ojala, Founder and Chairman of JoikuSoft, developers of popular JoikuSpot Symbian application.
Can you talk about JoikuSoft, your target market and how do mobile users benefit from your various products?
Joikusoft is a small Mobile Software company, founded in Finland 2007 and financed by its Founders. We focus 100% on developing innovative mobile software products and solutions for the S60 Smartphone platform.
Users benefit of our products as they do add rich new value-adding capabilities for the phone use. Our main product is called JOIKUSPOT which transforms a mobile phone into a 3G WiFi Router. People can connect their laptops or other WiFi devices to internet using their mobile phone’s 3G internet over WiFi. This practically replaces the need for carry-on USB dongles or Bluetooth/cable connectivity or costly WiFi access points of e.g. hotels/airports, and users also save money as they do not need additional subscriptions with their carriers. Their mobile phones SIM and data plan with their carrier is enough, and the only device they need is their Nokia phone for a “1 click internet access anywhere”.
The nice thing with our solution is also that people can share their 3G internet connection over WiFi with multiple users in parallel, and also take or make phone calls while having internet connection active. The connection is not limited to laptops, but most any WiFi device (like Apple iPod/iTouch, Nokia Internet Tablet, or a WiFi Camera) can connect to web via JoikuSpot.
JoikuSpot won 4 different innovation awards during 2008. The biggest recognition in my view was the winning of the Navteq LBS Challenge, as the jury comprised of OPERATORS and DEVICE MANUFACTURER experts assessing the business case of the solution.
What is your first impression about the Ovi platform? Was it easy to set up and get up to speed with SDK?
OVI is a very important sales channel to us. It was easy to get up to speed with this new channel, and our app is already nicely listed in the Store! We see that OVI will likely offer the volumes the other channels cant meet.
Tell us about the experience of submitting your first app to the Ovi Store and how long it took to gain approval.
It was very straightforward and worked smoothly!
Are there any other apps besides Joikuspot that your are currently working on for the Symbian devices?
Yes. We will soon be launching new innovations for the S60 platform. Stay tuned 
In addition to JoikuSpot we today also have a product called Joiku-Server. Joiku-Server measures the usage and user profile of JoikuSpot in any operator network. This is a product that we sell to operators. Operators can gain precise data of how much mobile data their JoikuSpot users bring to their network and calculate the data ARPUs based on this data, and also get a split of usage between different phone models, countries, networks etc..
What has been the biggest challenge about desiging apps for Ovi?
Our products are designed for Symbian OS, and they all go through a very thorough Symbian Signing process for QA assurance. Symbian Signed is also a requirement in OVI channel, which makes a whole lot sense to ensure that only verified apps get in. So OVI simply accepts well behaving, quality assured and value adding apps on their storefront, and this is a pretty standard process overall. I don’t see OVI has posed any special challenges to us. As we meet Symbian criterion, we also meet OVI criterion.
What are your monetization and market strategy plans?
We take a small unit fee of our JoikuSpot Premium Edition from users, and try to maximize the channel exposure to our product to hit the volumes. We sell through own channel, external channels like OVI, and whitelabeled via Operators, and the broad reach is a key to us for gaining downloads and ultimately, revenues. We pursue to add value to our customers, e.g. operators gain more mobile data revenues when offering JoikuSpot to their subscribers.
We also have a free Light edition of JoikuSpot product, that offers an upgrade path to Premium (voluntary for Free ed users). You can download the free Light edition at www.joiku.com. Light edition supports only HTTP, whereas Premium supports the FULL internet protocol and VPN for secured corporate intraweb access. Light version is a very good alternative to “trials” as users don’t need to pay for anything and it spreads very fast in the web community, and those who consider the product good have an easy upgrade path to Premium Edition.
Any tips for other Ovi developers that are just starting out on the platform?
Make sure your application is well tested and meets the criterion prior to submitting at the portal. This speeds up publishing!
You can download this app directly from the OVI store for $ 14.99.
