On December 4th 2007, Avvenu was acquired by Nokia. This means that the Avvenu services will now be provided by the world’s leading mobile communications company. With Nokia’s global stature, the Avvenu service is available to more people than we could ever have reached as a startup.

I’m impressed with the direction Nokia is taking to transform itself into the next generation Internet company. With my role on the Avvenu transition complete, I accepted the position of Head of New Businesses, reporting to Ilkka Raiskinen.

The New Businesses team analyzes and explores service business opportunities outside of current Services and Software scope using Nokia’s existing assets in new service solutions. The New Businesses team resides in the Context, Advertising and Emerging markets service line, but the scope expands to explore new possibilities in all service lines.

I’m extremely excited with my new role at Nokia and am looking forward to the challenges ahead.

At Avvenu we recently announce the Avvenu Music Player (Beta), a new service that lets you listen and share your iTunes music collection, from anywhere via a web browser or Windows mobile 5 smartphone. This new service has got a lot of press lately. You can read about it here, here, here and here. If your a “digger”, you can even digg it here.

By the way, you can get a sense of the Avvenu Music Player (Beta) with one click — stream part or all of a 3-hour playlist from Bill Tai via a link at the Avvenu blog. His share expires shortly. It starts with Tubthumping by Chumbawamba, a classic song to kick off your week whether or not you kite surf.

Well before the beta version of the Avvenu Music Player, the Avvenu team came up with the Alpha version — the sporty Avvenu Kazoo. We quickly formed a choir to experiment with our invention, the results of which can now be seen publicly for the first time ever. Here is the video that convinced us to rapidly proceed with our current beta version.

One night last week I walked into my office at home only to find it had been converted into a movie set. Apparently my son decided he wanted to be a rock star and created a lip synced video worthy of such aspirations. But he ran into one very big issue - how to distribute a 120MB file.

He attempted to email it and got the dreaded attachment too large error message. It seems most email systems only allow a maximum 5MB file to be attached. He didn’t want to copy the files on CD and mail (USPS) them to his friends and grandparents and he didn’t want them posted on the internet where everyone might see them. In fact, he doesn’t even have an account on YouTube or MySpace - thank goodness. That’s when he came to me and asked what he could do to share his video.

I explained how simple it was using Avvenu, which he’d already downloaded and installed on his PC a few weeks ago. All he had to do was navigate to the file he wanted to send to his friends and grandparents, click on the “Share” link and enter the email addresses of each person he was sharing the video with. I explained that the video files were not being attached to the email, but instead a link was being sent that would allow his grandparents and friends to download the videos directly from his PC, completely securely without them seeing or accessing any other part of his PC. Half an hour later he told me he had shared his video with a variety of different friends and his grandparents.

A few hours later we got an enthusiastic telephone call from his grandparents letting us know how much they enjoyed having a budding rock star in the family - next stop Madison Square Gardens.