Goodbye Mark Selby (and two other NFC related Nokia Execs jumps ship)

When I read the title from IntoMobile that three top level NFC related Nokia execs were leaving, I feared one might have been Buttery voiced Nokia World MC, Mark Selby which may explain why we has missing this year.

As you saw back in April, Mark Selby has been pretty key to the NFC effort. I’ll miss Mark. He was pretty much the Morgan Freeman of mobile as far as that incredible voice was concerned, but also his efforts in Near Field Communication at Nokia.

NFC World reports the three Nokia NFC chaps are going:

Mark Selby, Nokia’s UK-based VP of industry collaborations, will leave the company at the end of December for “a new adventure”. (I hope that new adventure is not a different manufacturer. How difficult it would be to hear him accounce something for HTC/Samsung or worse, Apple 🙁 )

Damien Balsan, Nokia’s head of NFC business development for the Americas, has joined PayPal as director of ecosystem partnerships at the online payments giant’s newly formed point-of-sale unit.

Mikko Saarisalo, Nokia’s lead delegate to the NFC Forum and vice chairman of the trade association, has also left the handset manufacturer to join NFC trusted service manager C-Sam, a key supplier to the US Isis NFC joint venture.

Might it be because WP doesn’t and won’t have NFC? Well no, as Stefan points out, Windows Phone has their NFC guys already. And there are still people at Nokia working on NFC.

Ah 🙁 I’m really gonna miss Mark. He’s a nice chap – had the opportunity to meet him at last year’s Nokia World. I remember him when he was VP Nokia Multimedia, back in 07 he did some really cool “meeting the bloggers” thing. I don’t think I was even blogging at that stage but that was a very cool effort from Nokia and Mark. You may then remember him being there when the awesome N82 was launched at Nokia World. So already very early fond memories – probably harder to stomach personally than any other Nokia execs leaving. Good luck Mark.

Source: NFC World via IntoMobile

Cheers Zane Farooq for the tip.

Category: Nokia