Gossip

Symbian decides to avoid the headlines ...

It can only be a plot to go underground.How else can you explain the decision to announce the appointment of Marit Døving to the post of Executive Vice President, Marketing?

There will be some, of course, who spell her name with the full Norwegian flourish, but for most Web sites, this is simply going to be impossible, as anybody who has done battle with UTF-8 character encoding will vouch.

Either, Marit will be known as Doving, or people will just avoid quoting her. As she's director of marketing, quotes from her office are bound to be frequent; so it must be a plan to shun the limelight, and move Symbian strategy into the shadows.

Marit Døving joins Symbian from Consorte Group ASA, the Oslo-listed telecommunications networking solutions company where Døving has been Group Chief Executive since May 2000.

We can tell you little beyond the fact that "Døving will take responsibility for defining Symbian's product marketing, roadmap and strategy to ensure that Symbian OS continues to meet the current and future needs of both Symbian OS licensees and Symbian's industry partners."

David Levin, CEO of Symbian Ltd said: "I am delighted to welcome Marit as Symbian's EVP of Marketing. Marit's proven industry and professional expertise and experience make her a great recruit for Symbian. I look forward to working with Marit as Symbian continues to progress towards establishing Symbian OS as the global open industry standard operating system for advanced mobile phones."

David Levin had better plan on putting his name to future press releases, or nobody will ever know what is going on.