Repeat after me. Three hundred million users. The population of the US in 2006 was 300 million. It is also Nokia's target for it's services - which are planned to reside under the Ovi umbrella brand.

Nokia targets its Services & Software business to have 300 million unique services users by 2012.

Forget nagging Nokia to announce it's target for 2009 for Ovi. As Nokia is insisting of finishing (???) Ovi first, before pushing it, we will not see a huge jump before summer. My own estimation is about 0,5 - 1 million Ovi (mostly Share) users by the end of 2008, around 30 million by the end of 2009 (mostly the Mail on Ovi and Maps on Ovi users, future N97 owners and converted My Nokia IDs), 100 million registered (!) users by the end of 2010 and 100 million users in each year after.

How big is 300 million?

To understand how far behind Nokia is currently and how ambitous is the goal, let's look at some other services and social sites:

• Apple's Mobile Me has an estimated 2-5 million users (didn't find any data)
• Gmail has 50 - 100 million users (the 2 most common estimates)
• Facebook has 140 million active users
• Yahoo has 250-280 million users (mostly Mail)
• Microsoft Live has about 300 million users (mostly free Hotmail)

To summarize, 300 million is as big as the top web players today. While Nokia has been criticised many times recently for its slow turning of the mothership, the arsenal pointed at the Goliaths of today is shaping up to be breathtaking - and not at all resembling yesterday's sling.