Russell Beattie

Cool! I just saw that Nokia is going to buy Avvenu. I interviewed with them a few years ago when they were called Kinetic Tide, and were just a few people in a big empty office in Palo Alto - I liked the idea and the company, but ended up deciding to continue to pursue my own thing for a few months before joining Yahoo! Looks like they've been able to get a neat exit... very cool!

This is a great service for Nokia to buy to continue their move into Mobile Internet services. Avvenu (in case you don't know) is a remote access service for your PC. You sign up, install a client on your PC and you get access to your files via your mobile from anywhere, as well as being able to share them with your family/friends. I guess recently they've launched a music player and a Facebook app, etc. but the core of the product still seems to have that core focus on making it easy to access your stuff wherever you go.

In essence Avvenu turns your home PC into your own personal content server, which in my mind is fantastic, and they'll also cache your content on the server (their "Anytime Files" service) so that you can have your stuff synced and stored in "the cloud" as well. Personally, I can see this part of their service growing over time as more people move to laptops and don't have a "home PC" as such. The next service Nokia should buy is Box.net - which overlaps with Avvenu in some ways, but is also less reliant on a specific downloadable client as well, which is good.

Cool stuff - we'll have to watch to see how well Nokia uses Avvenu in the future.

-Russ