Jolla gets new CEO and board
Does that mean that for more traditional companies where such phases co-exist, a schizophrenic CEO would be a good (and a possibly stabilizing continuity) opportunity?
I'm waiting when Elop would get there
But has the Chinese government already chosen its favourite operating system? A couple of weeks ago Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu OS, said that Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has selected Canonical’s Ubuntu as the basis of China’s official smart phone platform. “That was a media stunt organized by Canonical”, says Saarnio. “Based on our information there has been no official selection of this sort and there would be no sense in [this kind of choice]. It was only a joint research project, China is happy to co-operate with everyone.” One thing is certain. Chinese officials may not have chosen their favourite OS, but at this point they dislike the ones that come from US. The Chinese will be happy if the non-US smartphone operating systems gain market share. Finnish Jolla with its Chinese investors and partners is in good position.
The presales campaign of the first Jolla smart phone will begin soon. ”This is not about money”, says chairman Antti Saarnio. ”We couldn’t collect enough capital this way, but we want to start building the Jolla community. Jolla has over 20 000 active fans in services like Twitter and Facebook and this way we can let them participate. At the same time we can estimate the actual number of potential customers.” To get more capital, Jolla will be issuing a convertible bond for institutional investors during June. Saarnio says that the size of this loan will be about 30 million euros. The investors will be able to change the loan into Jolla stocks if the company realizes its IPO as planned. Jolla has gathered 11 million euros from private investors and Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Antti Saarnio says that the company is not looking for traditional venture capital funding at this point. He says that Finnish venture capital funds are so small that they could not scale up with Jolla and the global venture capitalists tend to control too much. “Jolla needs peace”, he says.
Jolla has named a new board of directors. From the Jolla team, Antti Saarnio will continue as chairman and company co-founder Stefano Mosconi as a board member. New board members are: Ari Jaaksi, senior vice president of McAfee. He was once the head of Nokia’s Meego platform development and after that led the WebOS-development at HP. Steve Lau, an investor and the chairman and the CEO of the Chine Fortune Holding Limited. This company was the early mobile phone distributor for Nokia in China. Boukerche Mohamed, entrepreneur and an investor that has a knowledge of Arabic and CIS-countries.