Jolla is back in business!

Dear Jolla fans, community, customers and Jolla Tablet backers,

Last time when I wrote here, we had just heard that our financing round had not succeeded as expected and realized that we were in a full on financial crisis situation. In other words, the whole continuation of the Jolla story was in a real jeopardy and unfortunately we had to make some drastic moves to handle the situation.

I was personally very happy to see so many community members and followers react to the dire situation we were in. My personal “we are fighting tweet” got 548 retweets and the wonderful initiative ISupportJolla gathered a lot of heartwarming comments and helped us fight the battle. I can’t thank you enough for the continuing support you have shown to us!

Now, it is my pleasure to share you really good news: we’re back from the death valley! We have just finished our latest financing round and secured solid new financing to the company. This investment enables the continuation of Sailfish OS development, the community activities and other company operations. It’s clear that this recent struggle hit us hard and left some battle wounds but most importantly this means that the development and life of Sailfish OS will continue strong. This alone is worth a celebration!

Our focus areas in the future

As already said many times before, we are very excited about Sailfish OS 2.0 and we’ve also seen that is has been taken on very positively by our current Jolla customers and also our business partners. We aim to continue the development of the OS, and scale up our resources as soon as possible to match the needs of all our customers.

On the partnering side our focus remains on the BRICS countries, concentrating strongly on India and Russia. India is a very exciting opportunity to us, since it is one of the booming smartphone markets with over 100 million new smartphone users every year (and growing).  In Russia we’ve also seen a lot of interest towards Sailfish OS, and this is gradually moving into concrete projects – we can’t wait to tell you more about these projects.

Additionally we have a few other very interesting projects cooking up for Sailfish OS but more about these a bit later.

About the Jolla Tablet project

We receive daily more and more questions about the status of the Jolla Tablet and many people are seemingly frustrated – rightfully so. After I showed the cost breakdown for the Jolla Tablet project in my previous blog post, many have asked that why did we spend a big part of the tablet crowdfunding money on software development and not the tablet itself. To me this question as such does not make sense, since Sailfish OS is our product, our crown jewel, which we aim to make perfect for all of you – the tablet hardware is only a platform for the software.

As you all know, we were already late with this project when the financing struggle hit us, and unfortunately this unexpected delay in financing will clearly have an effect on the project. Now that the immediate financing challenge is resolved we will put our attention to the tablet project and develop a plan for dealing with it.

All of your cases will be dealt with as soon as we have the plan ready to be implemented. So hang in there, the answers are coming.

All in all, good news this time – and thanks again for your countless support and nice encouraging words along our journey. We’re in this together!

Happy Holiday Season for all!

Your Jolla captain,
Antti

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