Lee Epting, Vice President of Developer Relations for Nokia, Head of Forum Nokia

Helsinki is a long way from Silicon Valley. When Lee Epting stepped into the afternoon darkness of Finland for the first time in the winter of 2002, she had a few moments of pause. It was -25Þ outside, and there was 2½ feet of snow on the ground in this strange land where people had too many consonants in their names.

Epting and her family, however, quickly adjusted. Nokia doesn't just transplant random Northern Californian families to Helsinki without good reason. Epting had a developers' program to run.

Epting, 40, is head of Forum Nokia, where she manages the 1.6 million relationships Nokia has cemented with game developers, application builders, content providers and even e-book publishers worldwide. With only a few hundred employees, Forum Nokia is by far one of Nokia's smallest divisions, but its impact is great, Epting said.

“We're one of the few organizations within the company that serves all of Nokia as well as external groups,” she said. “We're responsible for ensuring that developers are important to Nokia.”

Born in New York, Epting made her way to Santa Clara, Calif., initially for school and then for employment. Though her original field was real estate, she soon found herself working on some of the first data applications to emerge in the telecom market, working at Octel on voice-enhanced call-processing services before the Internet made its debut.

In the mid-1990s, she joined Palm for the launch of the first — and now revolutionary — Palm Pilot and later followed Palm's founders to Handspring. At those two companies she ran the developers' programs, helping reverse the inward-facing trajectory of palmtop computing and transforming the PDA from electronic device to full-fledged platform. The success of the Palm operating system (OS) speaks for itself. It's the most prevalent of hand-held computing OSs in the world, and the developers under Epting's watch were churning out thousands of applications each year. That kind of success was bound to attract the attention of Nokia, which had similar designs on the smartphone market. But when Nokia called, Epting was surprised.

“My world had been primarily in the North American market,” Epting said. “My competitors were Microsoft and Qualcomm. We weren't even on the same playing field.”

She started work in February 2003 and found a completely different challenge than she faced at Handspring and Palm. Nokia had a platform and a large developer community, and it was pushing it aggressively. The problem was getting its handsets to conform to the specifications laid out by the platform. Unlike at Palm and Handspring, where one, maybe two, new hand-helds were launched each year, Nokia was releasing dozens of new handsets built on its own Series 40, Series 60 and Series 80 platforms, and those phone launches were getting way ahead of the platform itself. Epting got Nokia's other divisions to design to the platform's specs, which in turn gave her developers the consistency they needed to build apps. With Nokia's divisions working in unison, she then did the same with Nokia's Series 60 license partners, which began launching their own Nokia-powered devices this year.

Epting is now supervising the single-largest smartphone developers program in the world. According to Epting's estimates, more content traverses the servers of forum.nokia.com than Nokia's own corporate Web site. While that accomplishment might be good enough for most, Epting is leading her little unit of Nokia one step further. This fall, Forum Nokia launched Preminet, a content aggregation and distribution service designed to put the Forum's mammoth catalog of content directly into carriers' hands. This ambitious move — for both Nokia and Epting — was launched despite skepticism from the telecom community. But Epting said as long as Nokia is in a leadership position in the mobile data market, it will assume a leadership role.
— Kevin Fitchard