Entries from March 2007

30 March 2007

reboot 9.0 - Invitation to participate

I'm going. Are you?

Reboot9

Link: reboot 9.0 - Invitation to participate:

Calling all practical visionaries of the world!

It's time to reboot our minds once again; reboot9 will take place in Copenhagen Thursday, May 31 and Friday, June 1 2007.
Two days away from implementing, away from the status quo. Two days together with old and new friends in an informal and open festival spirit...

THE CHALLENGE
The theme for reboot9 is "human?". A big word, but a word that saturates what's happening and all ready on a deeper level has been transcending reboot the last couple of years.

Mar 30, 2007 1:43:00 PM | Announcements, The Narrative

Pause for Station Identification

Every so often, I find it useful to 'pause for station identification' so that it's clear who I am and what I do.

Whois
My name is Charlie Schick, I am a product manager at Nokia (see details for more). I use this site mostly to talk and think about the fusion of the mobile and the Internet. Lately, my writing (and Web reading) has suffered on all fronts and backs, mostly due to my project here at Nokia, which I thoroughly enjoy and is exactly what I want to be doing,

Lately, my forward-thoughts have been moving to other interesting areas, such as the long now, how our second life on the 'net can improve our first life in the real world, and forcing myself to be more creative and do the story telling I want to do. I'm not sure how that will affect the nature of my writing here, though I don't expect changes any time soon.

For the hundreds of you on feed readers, my site also has a side bar with a link to my WINKsite (I'm a winkster), my del.icio.us links of note (sporadically showing up here as links of the day), and a link to some of my creative writing that I've put on the Web. I also have a running list of Tired Words, you might find amusing or not (feel free to suggest others).

Thanks
I also want to take the opportunity for all of you who read my site. I try to not repeat what is out there, since so many of you are great writers and in many ways have your thumb on the pulse of the Internet and mobile world much better than I. And, that so many keep coming back to this site, suggest that I do have something of value to you all.

I hope to keep it that way, regardless of what I write about.


Standard Disclaimer (riffing off of Cringley)
Everything I write here on this site is an expression of my own opinions, NOT of my employer, Nokia. If these were the opinions of Nokia, the site would be called 'Nokia something' and, for sure, the writing and design would be much more professional. Likewise, I am an intensely trained professional writer (heh), so don't expect to find any confidential secret corporate mumbo-jumbo being revealed here. Everything I write here is public info or readily found via any decent search engine or easily deduced by someone who has an understanding of the industry.

On the flip side, this is my personal site. Please don’t flood me with ideas that you think Nokia might be interested in. Better to leave a comment or trackback relevant to one of my posts (emphasis: relevant). Or go visit one of the Nokia blogs.

Mar 30, 2007 2:59:00 AM | Announcements, General

29 March 2007

links for 2007-03-29

Mar 29, 2007 7:22:56 AM

A new way of charging for 3G data

I recently got a letter from my operator Sonera stating that they had changed their general data plan from 6 euros a megabyte to something like 0,9 euros a while hour (domestic, only, though). The hour would be calculated from the first event of the session. The data is unlimited during that hour.

They even have some bulk packages to buy data hours in advance.

This sort of is similar to the way WiFi is billed, so that's refreshing. Too bad they didn't give me this last month when we ran up a 240 euro data charge.

It's not so bad if you cluster your access, such that over time, you have few moments. But if you spread out your activity throughout the day, you could run up a few euros a day, leading to tens of euros a month. Also, it's a bit more understandable and easier to manage your bill.

In reality, mobile Internet use is usually bursty throughout the day (short times, but many times spread out), so this tariff is really not amenable to the true mobile use of the Internet.

Sigh.

Ok, not so bad as 240 euros for a few hours of downloading.

What do you think of this model?

What happens when you have your browser in the background refreshing a page every hour for a few day without you noticing?

Mar 29, 2007 1:55:00 AM | The Narrative

28 March 2007

A page from Alex's scrapbook - urban miami


urban miami
Originally uploaded by alex*c.
I don't know exactly what he's up to, but it is intriguing. It's clearly a scrapbook-style page he created from some photos he has on flickr. And it looks so real.

It seems related to stuff I used to talk about back in the Nokia Lifeblog days - The Future of Memories.

Alex, xará, looking forward to your unveiling.
Mar 28, 2007 10:11:51 AM

links for 2007-03-28

Mar 28, 2007 7:21:59 AM

Thinking about the Web 2.0 Expo 2007

Eh, I'm not so interested in this conference, but I'll be on that side of the world just the week before.

In any case, this workshop might be reason enough to go.

Link: Web 2.0 Expo 2007, April 15-18, 2007, San Francisco, California:

The Iterative App: From Discord to Design

Kelly Goto, Principal and Founder, gotomedia

Track: Design and User Experience
Date: Sunday, April 15
Time: 9:30am - 12:30pm
Location: 2003

Due to the diverse demands of clients, bosses, engineers, and designers, web application design has reached a new level of frenzy and discord. Kelly Goto can help you refine your application development process and project management to an art form. Learn the behind-the-scenes techniques for rapid prototyping and learn to include iterative usability testing cycles in your project development.

But, $1500 for a Web 2.0 conference? Am I cheap or is that a lot?

Mar 28, 2007 5:41:36 AM | Extras, The Narrative

Come see what's happening on WINKsites all over the world

David Harper knows how to catch someone's interest.

His WINKsite is growing well and he pointed out some of the cool little views of what's happening on WINKsites.

Here is a map to view all the conversations happening across the globe.

Here is a map that shows people joining mobile chats in real time.

And here is a tag cloud to connect to people in different Metros.

And you need to open one of them and lurk in a chat (see image below). OK, so it's just the usual chat room type of conversation. But note the little icons ('visitor' is me from the desktop) - everyone is on their phone!

Picture_2_2

 

And here's me playing with my WINKsite profile page.

Mar 28, 2007 3:22:00 AM | Innovation, The Narrative

27 March 2007

More on Jaiku and Twitter

As many others, I've been playing with Jaiku and Twitter, getting a feel for what they mean to personal connections.

I think Jaiku fits the always-on world much better that Twitter. It's a rich interface to many aspects of presence, without being overly intrusive or detailed. But, it really only works if you have an unlimited cellular data plan. I haven't used it with WiFi, but my experience with WiFi so far on mobile devices suggests that Jaiku would not be too interesting if it had to depend on WiFi for a connection.

Twitter, on the other hand, is more amenable to current telco tariffs (certainly in Europe). Also, the cost is much more visible when you use it. And its simplicity means it can be used on all phones.*

So, I predict, Twitter will rule in adoption, until Jaiku can figure out how not to cost a half a meg of data a day, for a few SMSes worth of Twitters.

But, if better data plans ever materialize, then I think Jaiku will fly.

*There is SMS access to Jaiku. I think I need to check it out.

Mar 27, 2007 9:12:00 AM | Innovation, Strategy

Today's two cents on Twitter (and Jaiku)

Ok, so everyone and their analyst is talking about Twitter (or Jaiku). And some are concerned with how these apps are making it quicker to get interrupted.

Eh, it's probably been said before, but what I see is actually these apps taking over what other apps, such as blogs or feed readers were doing.

These apps are making it easy to more closely 'ring-fence' (not my term) one's relevant social network. People are willing to invest personally relevant communication (twittering) with fewer folks. I've been seeing people's public blogs make way for Vox and Twitter and Jaiku as folks try to get a handle on the real reason they are out flying the Cloud: connection with people who want to connect back.

That's the next wave of the Internet.

Internet, wave 1 - mass broadcasting and publications
Internet, wave 2 - it's about the youniverse, many to many
Internet, wave 3 - it's about me and mine, few to few, in relevant and closely tied connections, making my First Life vibrant via my Second Life tools.

Hmm, perfect stage for the mobile phone.

:-)

*Heh, heh. As I was writing this, I did a search for Jaiku and Twitter and the first link is none other that redsoda, Henriette.

Mar 27, 2007 3:51:00 AM | Strategy, The Narrative

26 March 2007

Designed to obfuscate - the Byzantine tariff structures of operators

Last year Finland took a step back by bringing back year (or two) long lock-in contracts.* I capitulated, to avoid a 4,5 cent per call surcharge.

Well, my contract is coming to an end and they were kind enough to SMS the phones on the contact the it was time to decide if I wanted to continue the contract.

I poured over the offers from my current operator, Sonera. Seems like now in addition to everyone getting the 4,5 cent surcharge per call (contract or not), we are now stuck with a 1 minute minimum per call or about 7,9 cents, which with the per call surcharge comes to about 12,5 cents for the opening minute of each call. That's a pain, because my kids make many sub-minute calls.

Last year, I took the contract to avoid the surcharge. So I went to the store to clarify what I would get for continuing on contract. All I get is a max charge of 1euro for all calls on Sunday. Looking at my bill, we don't make many calls on Sunday.

Ticked off with the surcharge and first minute charge, I decided to check out Elisa, a competing operator. I was thinking of moving to them, since I've been having some connection issues with Sonera and was a bit miffed with them.

Turns out Elisa also charges the 4,5 cent surcharge, but not for folks on contract. Oh, a two-year contract. And for a bit more, the sales guy enticed, I could get a new phone (he didn't mention the fine print that these would be SIM-locked phones, which absolutely shocked me). And they had some talk-time packages. You know, the kind the operator gets your money whether you use up the time or not, so they don't have to have good service.

I don't know what I'm going to do, since both operators have irritated me. I've got a few days still to decide, but I must cancel or I will be placed on a contract automatically. I think I'll just cancel and monitor the effect on my bills. I predict my bill will go up at most 10 euros, which is about 10-20% of my regular bill.

Sure, I understand that they want to maximize their money per customer. In the past year, my bill has actually gone down. But, I think their tariff structures are so convoluted that even folks who take the time to figure things out are still confused and unable to really make a decision.

My take: they don't give a flying hoot about the customer.

*There was a positive knock-on effect, since only 3G phones could have contracts - more 3G phones can now be seen around town.

Mar 26, 2007 9:57:51 AM | The Narrative

links for 2007-03-26

Mar 26, 2007 7:21:42 AM

Overloaded on touch

Ooh, touch me baby!

Touch-sensitive surfaces have been bubbling in the background, for those in the know. But the Apple iPhone catapulted them into the forefront. And, now that it is respectable to talk about them, it's been great to see all the amazing ideas and concepts popping up all over the place.

Well, I use the full touch capabilities of my MacBook - single-click, double-click, click and drag, two-finger scroll, two-finger contextual menu.* I also have a Mighty Mouse, with its own touch sensitive surface and multiple positionings of the finger.

Needless to say, I am now overloaded on touch, occasionally trying to use the Mighty Mouse like the Trackpad with two fingers.

What will happen when I have even more surfaces on personal devices for me finger and touch and slide over?

Oy.

*Heck, I also used the limited touch pad on my, ugh, IBM T41p, and also eons ago on my Apple Powerbook 3400c.

Mar 26, 2007 1:46:00 AM | Innovation, The Narrative

24 March 2007

links for 2007-03-24

Mar 24, 2007 7:22:40 AM

23 March 2007

links for 2007-03-23

Mar 23, 2007 7:24:55 AM

Crowd clout in product development?

A while back, my pahdner in crime, Udo Szabo, dropped on my desk a few chapters of Charles Leadbeaters book-in-progress, 'We Think: why mass creativity is the next big thing.'

It was a great summary of the strength of bottom-up community-based organizations. From schools in India to Open Source Software to Wikipedia, he analyzes a great many examples of movements that have arisen from hierarchy-less groups with a common purpose. As with many such books, not very revealing, but very inspiring when all the examples are placed side by side and compared.

The matrix organization
For much of my life I have worked in very flat and small organizations. Indeed, even though I have been in corporate life for only six years, until recently I was pretty much insulated from the real Mega-Corporate Matrix (hmm, now that I put it that way, leads to other imagery).

Now, as I try to navigate the Matrix and try to bring change (for example, my project team pretty much tries to ignore organization walls), I realize that the Matrix organization is a recent invention. Could there be an alternative?

Indeed, Leadbeater's stuff got me thinking that somewhere in his thought process there was an answer.

Think: the Medici's and the Hanseatic league, not to mention the Roman Empire or the Hun Khanate, were able to exert considerable influence and power across huge geographies, cultures, and economies - all asynchronously, too.

What I'm leading to is that  Leadbeater shows that organizations do not have to be hierarchical or authoritarian. I just wasn't sure if such Open Source mentality could be applied to a product development organization such as ours.

<breathe>

Crowdsourcing product developement
Lo! The great guys from Trendwatchers.com pointed out this company that is doing just that, crowd-creating manufactured products (link below). Sure, there are places like Threadless and La Fraise, but this is much more complicated - consumer electronics.

What do you think? can it succeed? Can it compete?

Link: CROWD CLOUT | Groups of consumers exercising their collective (purchasing) power:

Another initiative to watch: French CrowdSpirit. Currently in beta-mode, the company hopes to go full circle on crowd-innovation: participants not only submit ideas for consumer electronics, but also take part in every stage of the product life cycle, up to purchasing the end result. In the first stage of the project, the focus will be on products with a market price below EUR 150 (USD 190).

How it will work:

Step 1: The community sends ideas, fine tunes them & votes for the best one.
Step 2: The best ideas and their product specifications are jointly defined with CrowdSpirit's research and manufacturing partners. Community Investors start financing the product development.
Step 3: The first prototype is tested and fine-tuned by the community.
Step 4: Customers purchase products thanks to the CrowdSpirit supply chain. The community takes care of product support and recommends products to retailers.

A tentative launch is planned for this summer. May we humbly suggest that every B2C industry, from travel to food & beverage experiment with this model? If only to get a feel for the innovation prowess of 'ordinary consumers'. But we're digressing, we've hit you over the head with this many times in our CUSTOMER-MADE briefings ;-)

Mar 23, 2007 2:15:00 AM | Innovation, Strategy

22 March 2007

links for 2007-03-22

Mar 22, 2007 7:22:17 AM

Mike Rowehl on: Wifi vs Cellular, Again

Mike was spurred on (link below) to make a comment or two on the cost of data access. He's a good example of what I am talking aobut.

But, and this is a big but, is anyone paying attention to the cost of WiFi - that is, when you need ot pay for it? While not necessarily data sensitive (per packet cost), you still can end up paying tens of euros a day for WiFi access.

Go FON, I say.

Link: Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility » Blog Archive » Wifi vs Cellular, Again:

Sure, you have the business users who have their bill footed by their company, and they’ll pay the outrageous charges. But those costs are hindering the growth of the environment as a whole.

Mar 22, 2007 6:54:00 AM | The Narrative

21 March 2007

links for 2007-03-21

Mar 21, 2007 7:22:48 AM

Hah, Netvibes is so 2006 - enter Twitter, Poster Child 2007

Do you feel barraged with Twitter articles or have you already submitted to the Twitter disease?

What really makes me laugh is that everyone is a-twitter about something that runs on SMS (which I have been saying for a long time still has legs).

Go, Twitter!

Link: We Won!:

We totally won the SXSW Web Awards last Sunday!

BTW, Twitterific is - uh - terriffic.

Mar 21, 2007 3:30:23 AM | Innovation, Strategy, The Narrative

20 March 2007

links for 2007-03-20

Mar 20, 2007 7:22:09 AM

18 March 2007

What the heck? Ford Schick? In a game?

Following a string of cognections, set off by twitters from Matt Jones on game god Warren Spector, led me to Spector's Wikipedia page and this photo below.

I rarely see my name not connected to someone I know or a box of razors.

Fordschick

Ford Schick (from Wikipedia)

* D&D Trivia: One of the game developers was called Lawrence Schick.

Mar 18, 2007 8:01:00 AM | Extras

links for 2007-03-18

Mar 18, 2007 7:22:46 AM

17 March 2007

links for 2007-03-17

Mar 17, 2007 7:21:27 AM

16 March 2007

How to find a trainee, by: Eurovision Song Contest 2007

Interesting way of finding a trainee - mixing mobile marketing, mobile contest, and other interesting things.

Too bad the event makes my head hurt.

Link: Sonera - Trainee: Eurovision Song Contest 2007:

Application opens Tuesday 13 March at 8.00 am

The first selection phase is an sms competition during two weeks, where you respond to questions sent to your phone. The best candidates after this phase will proceed to phase two. The first sms question will be sent to you on March 19th.
Mar 16, 2007 4:56:17 AM | Innovation, The Narrative

Separated at birth?

Happened to be browsing the T3 gadget magazine and noticed the colophon:

Futurepublishing

Which reminded me of the Sonera logo:

Sonera-1

Mar 16, 2007 4:27:18 AM | Extras

14 March 2007

links for 2007-03-14

Mar 14, 2007 7:22:22 AM

Why can't we make things easier?

OK. So sometimes we shouldn't make things too easy. But other times, we make things too goddamned hard when the process should be simple.

I was telling you about the 20-year old with the Nokia N93i I lent her. She loved making videos and was keen on posting them onto YouTube.

Making the videos was easy. Uploading them was not.

First, it was a challenge to get them onto our Mac - cable, browsing folders, dragging things over, managing it all.

Ugh.

Next, she was having the darnedest time getting them onto YouTube. There were constant failures. The FAQ told her mpeg4 wasn't supported (it is).

Nokia recently cut a deal with YouTube, but it's only for browsing, as far as I can tell. We couldn't figure out how to upload via the Nokia.YouTube mobile pages.

She tried uploading from her phone. We searched a bit and saw ShoZu could do it. Well, not really, since it wouldn't upload anything over 4MB, which is a really really short video on the N93i. We tried making the video smaller, but no luck.

Not to be dissuaded, she tried and tried until the videos started to properly upload onto YouTube.

To me, the story illustrates a few key things.

1) Unless the person is determined to do something, it can be really easy to lose a potential user if any part of the process is not smooth.
2) With all these moving parts, someone can make a killing by making this work smoothly and intelligently. YouTube tried, but 60MB files can't be uploaded via email. Also, the apparently have poor error feedback during their upload process. ShoZu tried, but failed for me (though I bet 4MB is sufficient for most folk).

Has Nokia tried. I\m not sure. I need to walk over to the video guys and see what we can do to make this easier.

It's the least I could do.

What do you think?

Mar 14, 2007 5:35:00 AM | Strategy, The Narrative

13 March 2007

links for 2007-03-13

Mar 13, 2007 7:23:00 AM

When not to make something too easy

I sometimes hand folks I know one of our high-end phones to see what they do with them. All too often, I see folks with amazing devices and they are quite content to just call and SMS. Still, I try to see what real folk do with our devices (most of you don't count!)

I have this 20-year old staying with us for a bit, so I handed her an Nokia N93i. I told her it had WiFi (which she understood, since all our computers at home have it), an amazing video camera (which she got excited about, in a YouTube way), and I told her that it could play her music in as good as any music player (and which 20-year old is not a music freak).

Well, first thing she goes off and do is download a bunch of songs from bands on MySpace, using the phone's browser. It's how she understands accessing stuff on the Web. Then she started taking some great videos of the bands she went into town to see (that's another story).

I told her I was impressed that she was able to get online so easily. I didn't think our devices made it that easy to use the WiFi (I later found out that the N93i has a neat WiFi sniffer).

A few days later, she was showing me something and I noticed that she was using the access point called 'Internet', which happens to be Sonera's (her operator) 3G access point.

Ugh.

A quick check of her bill, via SMS, confirmed that she'd run up an incredibly high data bill.

It was too easy to get online. And the whole access point thing was new to her, so she didn't think she wasn't using WiFi.

Dammit, it said 'Internet'.

Oy.

I quickly disabled the access point and she's quite happy with that. She totally is comfortable with using WiFi when it's available (and I think most folks would be).

But, we all try so hard to make things easy, that we forget the real folk, folks who don't understand the way we build our software (all phone manufacturers do this access point thing), and we forget to warn them when we make it so easy for them to run up an amazing bill.

Nokia phones used to warn users about actions that would cause charges beyond the expected, but we then thought, I guess, that our users would have a clue.

Yeah, they have a clue. But, when the clues are hidden, and we make it all easy, how can they know really what they are doing?

OK, so Sonera might be partly at fault for a simple sounding access point. But, I think this is a good lesson of when making something too easy is not always the best solution.

What do you think? Any similar examples? Do you think that sometimes we need to make our devices dumber and a bit more resistant?

Mar 13, 2007 5:35:00 AM | Strategy, The Narrative
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charlie

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