LONDON, United Kingdom – Nokia CEO Stephen Elop made a surprise visit to Speakers’ Corner at Nokia World today to pay tribute to the developers who have helped make the new game-changing Nokia Lumia phones.

Appearing at the end of an app shootout competition for the prize presentation, Stephen praised developers for helping Nokia to shift from “ecosystem to ecosystem” so successfully since February.

The appearance today followed his well-received keynote speech on Wednesday which launched Nokia’s Lumia and Asha phones.

He said the pace of change in the mobile world would continue to create opportunities for developers to innovate new applications. It was this environment that had inspired Nokia to move so quickly to adopt the new Windows Phone, he said.

Acknowledging that developers are at the heart of Nokia’s strategy he said that Asha and Lumia were great platforms for building new applications and offered a great business opportunity for programers.  

What does Nokia bring to the table for developers? In one word, “scale”.

What Nokia brings to developers is a deep appreciation of what it takes to make you successful. You have to have scale. The promise of scale we can give you as developers is unparalelled in the industry.  There’s a huge opportunity for developers to reach people all over the world. We want to give each of you access to the whole world.