One year to the day of the troubled Facebook IPO, the climate for tech IPOs in the public markets is significantly less stormy, especially for companies in the enterprise space. Today, not one but two are debuting on New York stock exchanges. Business intelligence provider Tableau Software, trading as “DATA”, is one of the more highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and so far it has not disappointed. It priced its IPO at $31 per share, and it has popped 58% and is at nearly $49/share in early trading on the NYSE.

Meanwhile, Marketo, a cloud-based marketing services company, priced its IPO at $13 per share. It will be trading as MKTO on the NASDAQ exchange, but has yet to trade at the time of writing.

Taken together, the two are strong endorsements for the market for enterprise services and some of the still-emerging trends within it.

Tableau Software, as its stock ticker unsubtly hints, is aimed more at a big-data play, offering visualization and analytics that it says are easy enough for non-technical people to use. Up to now, it still offers the majority of its services as downloadable, on-premises software rather than as cloud-based apps.

Marketo is positioned as a software-as-a-service, and like a Salesforce for the marketing department, offers its various services — inbound marketing, lead management, social marketing, event management, instant CRM integration, sales dashboards, and marketing ROI reporting and analytics — all in a one-stop-in-the-cloud-shop.

Tableau Software is raising some $254.2 million at the $31/share price, after raising that IPO from an initial range of $23-26, with a valuation of $2 billion. Marketo, meanwhile, is raising just under $85 million for a $550 million valuation. (Incidentally, Facebook’s shares have lost some 30% of their value in the last year, and are at around $26.45/share at the moment.)

How does Tableau’s IPO compare to other high-profile enterprise listings? The money raised is just shy of the $260 million that enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks raised in July 2012. It is still a ways behind HR specialist Workday’s IPO in October 2012, which raised $637 million.

Tableau Software’s multi-billion IPO sets the stage for other multi-billion tech IPOs from the likes of Box and Twitter. Tableau had raised less than $40 million prior to this from NEA and Meritech (Crunchbase puts the total at only $15 million, but Geekwire says that NEA’s total investment in the company has been $29 million).

In contrast, Marketo has raised $108 million in six rounds, from investors that include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and Battery Ventures.

Data visualization software company Tableau Software, going by the symbol “DATA,” will start trading tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange at $31 per share, up from earlier today when the company said it would trade in the $28 to $30 range.

Tableau will offer 8.2 million shares of its Class A common stock, up from the 7.2 million it previously said it would offer. That puts the offering at $254 million with a market capitalization of more than $2 billion. Previously the company’s market cap was estimated at $1.7 billion.

The company, which filed its IPO in April, develops business intelligence software, including Tableau Desktop, Tableau Public, and Tableau Server and has about 10,000 customers.

It has established itself as one of the most feature-rich data visualization providers. It integrates with data warehouse platforms and with an extensive list of partners, including Google Cloud Platform, IBM and HP Vertica.

The IPO shows the value that enterprise software companies command. Palo Alto Networks and Splunk have had successful IPOs and a host of new deals are expected in the coming months. For example, Marketo, a marketing automation company, will also begin trading tomorrow on the Nasdaq scheduled in a $73 million IPO and a market capitalization of $429 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Auvik Networks, a Canadian enterprise networking startup co-founded by repeat entrepreneur Marc Morin (co-founder of now-public Sandvine and of PixStream, sold to Cisco); David Yach, a former CTO of BlackBerry’s software division; and ex-Sandvine product manager Alex Hoff, is today announcing that it’s raised it first round of outside funding: $6 million from Celtic House Venture Partners, Rho Canada Ventures, and BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, along with more contributions from Auvik’s founders, who have been backing it internally it to date. Auvik is part of a wider trend of companies working in software-defined networking, in its case developing a cloud-based platform for enterprises to manage IP networks built out of hardware from multiple vendors. Auvik has yet to release a commercial product: that will only come at the beginning of 2014, according to Morin, who is the company’s CEO.

“We’ve been focusing on the core technology and bringing the product out and bring it to market,” he told TechCrunch, noting that this round is being led by investors that were also strong backers of his previous startups. “This should be enough until launch.” The plan, he says, is for Auvik to support “all major hardware.”

To match how Auvik plans to disrupt traditional networking, Morin says that Auvik will also be priced in a disruptive way: there will be three tiers — See, Tell and Do — ranging from free of charge to a fee of about $12 per month, covering such things as community membership, and data collection, through to configuration services, 24-hour support and deeper analysis.

Enterprise startups continue to remain a focus for VCs, even as their attention gets distracted by the buzz around the next big thing, be it bitcoin or 3D printing.

One of the reasons is because there are still so many areas left to tackle in the space, cluttered as it is with legacy IT services and hardware.  It is here that Auvik sits. Up to now, businesses (especially those that are big enough to have multiple locations, but perhaps not big enough to have huge IT support groups) have had to deploy people to reconfigure networks physically, partly because it’s difficult to get hardware from different vendors to “speak” to each other. Using an API-style approach by way of the open-standard OpenFlow, the idea is that Auvik will become easy for anyone, not just IT engineers, to reconfigure and control how a network operates.

“Networking has been about hardware and boxes, but the focus now is on how people use software to control things,” noted Morin. “No one should have to configure routers and switches anymore.”

While a lot of the early emphasis will be on operating devices and users on a company’s network of desktop devices, the plan is for this to also include the many mobile devices that are also becoming more powerful and more used by workers. This is one area where Yach’s expertise, which spans not just BlackBerry but also years at Sybase, should come in handy.

Morin says that at the moment Auvik counts companies like SolarWinds and Meraki (recently acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion) as among its competitors. But he contends that Auvik will be taking a different approach from them. Tackling the idea of multi-vendor architectures — a common occurence at many medium-sized companies — Auvik is trying to make it as easy as possible for non-engineering IT people to use its platform, also a crucial priority for the size of companies that it’s proposing to target. “The real promise is a dramatically simpler way to configure how an application can be run.”

The other important point is that Auvik says it will, for the first time, provide a cloud-based way for enterprises to go deep into how their networks are controlled.

He uses the instance of a finance group’s network access as one example, with the idea that these people may log in on more than one device. “Say you want to put a policy on the finance group so that they can go straight to the finance server, and you want to enforce that, but the network doesn’t identify users, just IP addresses,” he says. “Using our platform, you can now join these up and change network configurations based on that, and modify it during the day as users log in and log out. Network management has been around for a long time, but it hasn’t had a very deep level of abstraction for how it works.” Morin says that most of the capabilities of hardware are never exploited by medium-sized companies, and so its service will aim to take advantage of that well, extending the life and functionality of that equipment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here is something you probably didn’t see coming: Outlook.com just enabled chat interoperability with Google Talk. This new feature, which is rolling out worldwide over the next few days, allows Outlook.com users to chat with their friends on Google, just like they can already do with their Facebook friends. Given the somewhat strained relationship between Microsoft and Google, this move comes as a bit of a surprise, but it looks like Microsoft doesn’t expect any issues with this rollout.

The new chat feature will be available across a number of Outlook.com-related products, including your inbox, calendar, address book and SkyDrive, so you can chat with your friends on Google while working on a document, for example.

As Microsoft’s senior product manager for Outlook.com Dharmesh Mehta told me yesterday, Microsoft heard from its users that chat interoperability was “one of the things that was holding people back from switching from Gmail to Outlook.com.” Many of those users who did switch, he added, said that this was a feature “they missed after the switch.”

To enable Google chat in Outlook.com, users simply have to connect their accounts using Google’s standard OAuth system to give Microsoft access to their accounts. After that, they can start new chats by hovering over a Gmail user’s contact cord or right from the standard chat pane.

One thing that doesn’t currently work, though, is to start group chats that include Gmail and Facebook users. Mehta left open the possibility that Microsoft would enable this in the future, but for now, the team hasn’t built the pieces that would allow Microsoft to pass messages between the networks.

Google is widely expected to launch updates to its own text, audio and video chat features at I/O later this week. It’s unlikely, however, that these will have any influence on the new features Microsoft announced today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

AOL (owner of TechCrunch) has just reported its Q1 results for the quarter, and it’s a mixed bag, with sales of $539 million, up 2%, beating Wall Street estimates, but with diluted earnings per share coming in at $0.32. Analysts were expecting EPS of $0.35 on revenues of $537.15 million. Still, Q1′s EPS number is up 45% on the same period a year ago.

Here’s how revenues and profit break down over the last several quarters:

This quarter, it looks like AOL’s global display revenues are finally in an upswing, rising 8% over a year ago to $140 million. Subscription revenues, the legacy part of AOL’s business that still includes (yes) revenues from dial-up customers, is still coming in as a bigger part of AOL’s revenues, at $165.8 million. They are slowly on the decline, though, down 9% on a year ago.

Last quarter was a notable one for AOL in that it was the first one in eight years where the company had posted revenue growth, with revenues of $600 million for the three-month period. As with many other online, advertising-based companies, AOL’s revenues for this most recent, post-holiday quarter will be seasonally lower.

More interestingly, the company has been working to reposition itself around a couple of key strengths where it can still gain ground, even as Google continues to dominate the online advertising market overall.

The first of these involves innovations around ad tech. That has included grouping together all of the company’s online advertising sales and technology assets into a single group, AOL Networks. And last week the strategy got another boost when AOL signed a deal with FreeWheel and Mediaocean so that AOL’s online inventory, and specifically its video inventory, can be bundled together with TV ad buys in a multiscreen strategy.

The second is a stronger emphasis on rich-media advertising, specifically against premium content that AOL owns itself or has deals to provide advertising for. AOL’s portfolio got a boost early in the quarter with the acquisition of gdgt, started by two former Engadgeteers (founder Peter Rojas and ex-editor-in-chief Ryan Block).

And last week, AOL expanded the amount of content against which it can sell online ads even further with the news that it would be releasing 15 new original video programs, created in a factual, unscripted format that fits with the rest of AOL’s newsy portfolio. However, as it grows in these areas, it’s also continuing to whittle down assets in others, such as its nearly-concurrent decision to shut down AOL Music.

AOL’s own branded content is still lagging behind the company’s subscription revenues (again, these relate mainly to the company’s legacy services) but they are also showing the strongest growth in terms of revenues over a year ago. But if you look at operating income before depreciation and amortization, collectively the Brand Group, along with AOL Networks, are still loss-making, if coming very close to break-even:

The third-party advertising business continues to grow for AOL. This quarter revenues for ads distributed on sites not owned by AOL were up 10% to $120.7 million.

More to come.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A little disconnection goes a long way.

In the tangled web of digital social networks that we weave one thing is increasingly absent: a sense of mystery.

We are so wrapped up in our digital social graphs there’s rarely room for gaps. Our networks offer the promise of being entangled with ever more connections — reaching out to grasp the hands of friends’ friends (and so on to the edge of the digital universe) – reminding us how few degrees of separation there are between citizens of the wired world.

Networks turn strangers into quasi-acquaintances before we’ve ever met them IRL. Based on the digital recreations our networks generate, we may decide we never need to meet such and such a person. A social snub online doesn’t have to involve any socialising at all.

Add in the various knowledge graphs we constantly tap into — Internet search skewed to be social, networked mobile apps & services, the low and high level chatter of our connections as we track and trace their activity online – from what they watch and listen to, to who they talk to, where they go, what they see — and the sum of our networked knowledge starts to feel all seeing, all knowing.

Context is being pushed at us faster than we can escape it. Ignoring the minority of intentionally gated personal data, our digital networks are ripping off the masks of the many, leaving only the Anonymous few fighting for the right to remain unknown. We triage email, triangulate individuals.

Sidestepping the issue of privacy – which is a whole other (highly polarised) debate — where’s the fun in knowing everything before truly knowing anything? More importantly, what happens when we’re not engaging our creative faculties half so much because the mind isn’t being asked to fill in all those blanks? The ellipses are being overwritten.

It’s no longer about making mental leaps to join dots. The challenge now is about piecing together the endless jumble of data that’s being pushed at us. Instead of dreamers, we’re policemen sifting through a bottomless box of evidence.

Of course it’s churlish to complain about the interconnectedness afforded by networks and digital devices. Go back a handful of generations and the entire plot of a novel could hinge on whether someone received a paper letter slipped under a door at the right moment in time. That plot is no longer possible for those of us who have chosen to be wired in.

We don’t have to wait to get news. We’re unlikely to miss a message once it’s fired at us from the myriad channels now open for communication unless we’re deliberately trying to. Our problem is filtering the signals we’re receiving. Tuning out the noise so we can hear the stuff that’s relevant, important, valuable.

That’s the quotidian challenge. The philosophical and emotional challenge is that we’ve replaced life’s little mysteries with a barrage of sound and fury. That may not sound very important – and perhaps it’s not. But in my view it does leave a gap that developers could think about tapping into.

What’s mystery for? It fires the imagination, as well as working our logical, critical, analytical faculties (which are still getting a good workout online). If boredom is good for creativity – and there’s been lots written on the need to give the mind downtime to come up with great ideas — it follows that mystery oils the wheels of imagination.

An app I wrote about in March does just this: Rando is an anti-social photo sharing app. You take a photo and share it to a random stranger. It doesn’t tell you who gets it. In return you get a photo back – shared by another random stranger, with nothing to tell you who sent it beyond a general location which is revealed when you tap on the photo to turn it over.  There are no social networking tie-ins. You can’t post the photo straight to Facebook or Twitter. It’s deliberately disconnected.

Rando offers little glimpses into other worlds. Stripped of almost all their context, they are fascinatingly rich, replete with mystery – in a way that the photos your friends post to Facebook can never be. That’s not to say those photos don’t have any value or aren’t important — they do, and they are. But they just engage a different part of our minds.

In the same way that falling without distraction into a good book entices the mind’s creative faculties – really invites us to fall down our own mental rabbit hole like Alice tumbling into Wonderland — Rando’s randomness is a pocket-lighter for the imagination.

I find myself continually firing it up, just to see what it sparks.  And looking back through the photos I’ve received, trying to imagine a context for them, trying to figure out who sent that image, and why, and what they were trying to say.

The creativity flows both ways too. Creating a photo to send in this app means gifting a small piece of your world to a stranger. And when you start to see your world through the eyes of an unknown person, you see details afresh. Find mystery in dusty, overlooked corners. Kindle things and thoughts laid dormant.

A little disconnection goes a long way. Think on it.

[Original Alice in Wonderland illustration by John Tenniel, now in the public domain]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Hackathon has come and gone, and it’s time for the main event. TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 begins now.

If you’ve been a fan of Disrupt in the past, you’re in for a huge treat this beautiful April morning. We’ll be live streaming the entire event from start to finish, with today’s live stream starting at 8:45am ET and ending around 6pm each night.

In the morning, we’ll be enjoying fireside chats with the likes of Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon and Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, along with panels like “Content Makes A Comeback”. Better yet, Jonah Perreti from BuzzFeed will be giving the keynote for the day.

In the afternoon, Battlefield begins. For those of you who are Disrupt virgins, the Startup Battlefield is the shining star of TechCrunch Disrupt.

Thirty-five companies from all over the world are handpicked by TechCrunch staff to launch their products and companies on our stage, direct to the world. They’ll have six minutes to present, followed by six minutes of Q&A with tech star judges like Tracy Chou (Pinterest), John Frankel (ff Venture) and Sam Yagan (okCupid).

We invite you to follow along on the live stream and tweet with us at #TCdisrupt.

Here’s the full agenda for the day:

9:00am -9:05am
Opening Remarks by TechCrunch

9:05am – 9:25am
Fireside Chat with Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz)

9:25am – 9:50am
Fireside Chat with Bill Gurley (Benchmark)

9:50am – 10:10am
In Conversation with Chamath Palihapitya (Social+Capital Partnership)

10:10am – 10:35am
Keynote: Everyone Is Literally Crazy, by Jonah Peretti (BuzzFeed)

10:35am – 10:55am
TBA

10:55am – 11:05am
Special Product Announcement

11:05am – 11:20am
BREAK

11:20am – 11:45am
In Conversation with Kevin Ryan (Gilt Groupe) and Dwight Merriman (10gen)

11:45am – 12:10pm
Panel: Content Makes a Comeback

12:10pm – 12:30pm
Fireside Chat with John Borthwick

12:30pm – 2:00pm
LUNCH

2:00pm – 2:25pm
Founders Stories with Mike McCue (Flipboard)

Startup Battlefield with Jason Kincaid
2:25pm – 2:30pm
How the Startup Battlefield Works

2:30pm – 3:30pm
Session One – New Networks

Judges: Ime Archibong (Facebook), David Pakman (Venrock), Yossi Vardi (angel investor)
3:30pm – 3:45pm
BREAK

3:45pm – 4:45pm
Session Two – Online for Offline

Judges: Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Tracy Chou (Pinterest), Matt Mazzeo (Lowercase Capital), Ron Palmeri (Mark II Ventures)

4:45pm – 5:00pm
BREAK

5:00pm – 6:00pm
Session Three – Get Things Done
Judges: John Frankel (ff Venture Capital), Hilary Mason (bit.ly), Megan Quinn (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Sam Yagan (Ok Cupid)

6:00pm – 7:30pm
BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

9:00pm – Midnight
After Party hosted by New Relic at Santos Party House

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Following up on their strong quarterly earnings report earlier this week, Netflix has just released a big ol’ mission statement document to their investor relations site, and it’s jam packed with all sorts of great lil’ details.

For example: you know how every Netflix customer’s first complaint is that there’s just not enough great streaming content on the service? They know — and they’re spending $2B a year to fix it.

The document is a rather painful 11 pages long, but here’s some of the more interesting stuff we’ve gleaned out of it so far:

On Spending:

- Netflix is currently spending $350 million per year to improve their services and apps
- More notably, they’re spending $2 billion per year on content licensing and original shows. The “vast majority” of this spending goes to licensing movies and prior-season TV shows, with a much smaller chunk of it going to their recent original content efforts.

On The Content They’re Choosing To License:

Netflix seems to be realizing that quality is better than quantity. For all of us who’ve killed an evening digging through all of Netflix’s offerings in search of that diamond in the rough, that’s great news.

As we’ve gained experience, we’ve realized that the 20th documentary about the financial crisis will mostly just take away viewing from the other 19 such docs, and instead of trying to have everything, we should strive to have the best in each category. As such, we are actively curating our service rather than carrying as many titles as we can.

On their focus:

Netflix knows they can’t be exhaustive. They can’t offer every genre of video out there, so they’re keeping their focus on movies and tv shows. More specifically, they want long-lived TV shows — topical things like The Daily Show, reality shows, and sports are specifically mentioned as things Netflix isn’t interested in right now.

“We don’t and can’t compete on breadth with Comcast, Sky, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, or Google. For us to be hugely successful we have to be a focused passion brand. Starbucks, not 7-Eleven. Southwest, not United. HBO, not Dish.”

Speaking of HBO…

Netflix sees HBO as their primary competition:

“The network that we think likely to be our biggest long-term competitor-for-content is HBO. They recently won, for example, long-term exclusive domestic movie output deals with Universal and Fox. They bid against us on many Original projects, but are not currently a bidder against us for prior-season television from other networks”

With that said, Netflix estimates that they’ll eventually be “2 to 3 times larger than current linear-HBO”, with 60-90 million subscribers (versus the roughly 30 million or so that both Netflix and HBO each have today).

Beyond that, Netflix sees piracy and pay-per-view services as the only competition that can offer up exhaustive sets of content, but seemingly sees Amazon/Hulu/et al. as secondary worries for the time being.

As mentioned, the new mission statement comes in at a pretty heavy 11 pages — the quotes above are just the choice bits that really stood out. You can read the full document here if you’re so inclined.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the surrounding hills of Silicon Valley stands the impressive Tah.Mah.Lah, the “Greenest house in America.” The home is also the brainchild and abode of Foundation Capital partner and longtime VC Paul Holland and his wife, Linda Yates. We were lucky enough to be invited into their home to hear about why and how they built the most sustainable home in the country.

So what makes the “Greenest” house in America? First, every aspect of the house, whose name draw origins from the Native American Ohlone word for puma or mountain lion, has been built to have minimal environmental impact. Second, the house has the highest LEED certification, which is the defacto third-party verification of green buildings.

Another interesting factoid from Holland and Yates. There are seven green energy and sustainable living start-ups represented in the project: CalStar Products (building materials), Control 4 (home automation and energy management), Serious Materials (building materials), Silver Spring Networks (energy), Sun Run (solar), Tigo (solar), Xicato (lighting). And many of these startups are funded by Foundation Capital.

Happy Earth Day and check out the video above for an in-depth tour of the house with Holland and Yates.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nokia has just reported is results for Q1 2013 with sales of $7.6 billion and a non-IFRS loss per share of $0.03 (and a reported EPS of $0.09) — a mixed result compared to analyst estimates, who had expected a loss per share of $0.05 on revenues of $8.65 billion (€6.6 billion). That estimated loss per share is effectively half of what it was a year ago, when Nokia posted a loss of $0.08 per share.

Nokia’s operating loss was $196 million, and while that’s down into the red again compared the previous quarter, when it posted an operating profit of $557 million, it’s a very significant improvement on a year ago, when its operating loss was $1.7 billion. Similarly, operating margin for the quarter was negative 1.5%, a reversal on the 6.8% of last quarter, but much better than the negative 5.1% of a year ago.

Analysts had also estimated that Nokia would report sales of 5.6 million Lumia devices for the quarter, and there Nokia was right on target, noting that the 5.6 million Lumias that it has sold are 27% on last quarter. The company has been building out the range of handsets it’s been selling in the last quarter, extending further into midrange and less expensive models. Nokia is estimating Lumia sales of 7.1 million for Q2, another rise of 27%.

“Nokia Lumia performance is promising considering this is the weakest quarter of the year and the new low end smartphones were not yet out,” noted Francisco Jeronimo, an analyst with IDC.

These are small but encouraging signs. To put these Lumia sales numbers in to context, a Reuters survey estimates that in the same quarter, Samsung has shipped 61.6 million smartphones, while Apple has shipped 36.9 million.

Here’s how Nokia’s results are breaking down for this quarter:

Devices. Not an overall great picture here. Device sales were $3.8 billion, down a full 25% compared to last quarter, and 32% compared to a year ago. Although Lumia sales trends are pointing in the right direction, they are still not big enough to offset Nokia’s other declines. The company’s feature phone business, which it terms simply “mobile phones”, were at 55.8 million units sold — down 30% on last quarter and 21% on a year ago. Within the smartphone segment, the last dregs of Symbian attrition also continue to give the company grief: Nokia sold 6.1 million smartphones in total, down 8% on last quarter, and 49% for the year.

Regions. Although mighty China, the world’s biggest smartphone market, used to be Nokia’s oyster, that time has long passed with the double juggernaut of Android and iOS taking away appetite for Nokia handsets. China saw the biggest drop of any region for Nokia in terms of sales by value and volume. The company reported $334 million in sales in Greater China, down 56% on a year ago, and putting it just above North America in terms of market size for the company. North America has been Nokia’s weakest market for some time already; China coming to join it in the bottom ranks is new. Of Nokia’s 61.9 million devices sold in the last quarter, only 3.4 million of those were in Greater China. Interestingly, North America was the only market in which Nokia saw a small increase in sales compared to last year — up by 9%, as some of its carrier deals to carry its smartphones continued to work their way through the balance sheet.

Here. CEO Stephen Elop announced in February that its mapping division would rebrand as “Here,” dropping the Nokia name, partly so that it could better target cross-platform business. Indeed, not only does it power Amazon’s location services, but Nokia’s maps are also available for Android and iOS, in addition to Windows Phone.

Whatever Nokia wants to call its mapping division, the unit continues to be the smallest division in the company. It reported sales of $281 million, a decline of 22% both on last year and last quarter, with the margin on services currently at nearly negative 45%.

NSN. What a lot of the decline in devices has meant for Nokia is that its infrastruture business is suddenly looking relatively okay. Whereas Nokia Siemens Networks used to only yield sales that were half as valuable as Nokia’s devices segment, these days they are more level with each other: NSN sales were $3.7 billion, while devices were at net sales of $3.8 billion. More importantly, NSN is posting a profit: $4 million. Yes, it’s small but again relative to the rest of Nokia’s balance sheet, this stands out. It’s also the only division with a positive margin, of 0.1%.

Some of these results were forecast by Nokia itself. In its Q4 2012 results Nokia posted better-than-expected results, with 4.4 million sales of its new Windows Phone Lumia smartphones and sales of $10.7 billion, but it also warned of a weaker Q1.

At the time, Nokia said it expected operating margin to be negative 2%, plus or minus four percentage points, citing “competitive industry dynamics” that have negative impact on smart devices and mobile phones. In other words, ever more competition from Apple and Samsung, which continue to keep a stronghold on smartphone sales, even as Windows Phone models, led by Nokia, are seeing gains. Indeed, Nokia noted that although Lumia smartphones continue to “ramp up” this may not offset larger consumer demand or the wider economic environment.

It also noted last quarter that it expected Location & Commerce non-IFRS operating margin in the first quarter 2013 to be negative “due to lower recognized revenue from internal sales, which carry higher gross margin, and to a lesser extent by a negative mix shift within external sales.”

We’ll be listening in on the call in just a while and will either update with more detail here, or post separately if the news merits it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch