Greetings from Amsterdam

The opening keynote has just concluded at Nokia World and it's already clear that this is a company that enjoys global presence and that faces challenges on a similar scale. In yesterday's Wall St. Journal Europe edition, a page two story documented the challenges Nokia is facing from a design perspective in competing with the latest thin, small handsets popularized by Motorola (RAZR) and Samsung. BusinessWeek reports from yesterday's forecast announcement by the company that growth opportunities in the mobile market appear to be slowing and that increasingly, penetration into the Asia market, especially China and India, will be critical to Nokia (and newly announced partner Siemens) growth.

The keynote by Luca Luciani COO of Telecom Italia's TIM (a converged service provider in Italy with 40% share of that market and a significant Nokia partner) was quite upbeat, predicting significant opportunities to ride the wave of increasing broadband to better meet the needs of a number of critical market segments including the ever-lucrative youth market as well as the needs of increasingly mobile business users. Luciani pointed to an expected 4X growth in 3G and 2X growth in ADSL adoption by 2010 as an opportunity for converged service providers to bring messaging (voice, VoIP, SMS, MMS), data, and entertainment (music, IPTV) together into always on, always available offerings.

Nokia is running a live blog called From the Floor with coverage from both Nokia and guest bloggers. A photo stream is available on plasma screens around the RIA Congress venue and is available online at Flickr. Video from the event can be found on YouTube.