ThreeDimensionalPeople

Moving on up

2009-07-17T05:33:00.001-07:00

Greetings. This is to say that I've finally got tech savvy and got my own domain, called surprisingly, threedimensionalpeople.com.
Please go there for the latest.
Thanks for the good times, Mr. Blogger.
Stephen

Mobiles in the classroom

2009-06-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

Nokia has kicked off an initiative to start thinking about how mobiles can be used to improve the classroom learning experience. Together with the Pearson Foundation they are sponsoring the "Mobile Learning Institute, which delivers engaging, personalized, project-based learning right to classrooms and community centers across the United States." It goes on to talk about the need to help teachers and students develop the "21st-century skills they need to design, develop, and complete the collaborative digital arts projects that will shape their future."

Not much more detail yet, but definitely a step in the right direction. There hasn't been nearly enough fresh thinking in this area. A novel idea I heard recently was the Million progamme - a radical idea championed by Harvard's uberkid Roland Fryer and carried out by the funky NYC ad house Droga5, the folk responsible for The Great Schlepp and Unicef's Tap project. The hypothesis is that you can give phones to kids in schools that help them during the school day, as a learning-centric communication platform (quizes, prizes, research etc) which then double as their personal devices at night. All sorts of knee jerk reactions to the idea of giving more techno toys to kids, bribing them with rewards for good grades, and some relevant questions about whether a device given by the school could ever be cool enough to use at home.

However, the reality is that i) kids are watching 4 hours of TV a day, and ii) US pre-university education standards are as Greenspan puts it, awful and slipping further. Kids today are so hard to reach through normal channels, so getting into a conversation with them where they are already today (the phone), rather than where they're not (the classroom) has some merit. Looking forward to seeing these ideas evolve.

The ice cream cart brings us from advertising to subscriptions

2009-06-06T10:13:00.001-07:00

Loic points to what seems to be an increasing trend as Twitter fundamentally improves the efficiency of communications -- companies using broadcast publish and subscribe models as ways to interact with their customers and provide service updates.

This is very much in early alpha stage today - tech savvy, barbeque, ice-cream & crème brûlée cart-wielding chef-geeks send off tweets in a fairly curt shorthand to their followers, who then turn up salivating, with wallets open.

This turns the hoary advertising adage of "I'm wasting half my advertising money, but I don't know which half" on its head. These guys aren't spending any money on advertisting, and they know exactly what is being wasted - none of it. It all goes to existing customers.

I think that next steps in this evolution will be particularly interesting in three areas: First, semantic data, such as machine readable location info for the trucks, or - and probably not done today - a markup to describe food that's on offer. Second, integrating to mobile, so you can more easily publish (e.g. upload content) and subscribe (integration of your favourite twitterers into your core mobile apps). And third, perhaps the toughest - a business model that extracts some of the value accruing from the vendors and amplifies it, to make a professional service, rather than the tasty, but hacked and ugly mashup it is becoming today.

Tommaso's Risotto

2009-04-24T06:15:00.000-07:00

One of the many benefits of marrying an Italian (ok Italian American) is the fantastic food. Now, my mum's a great cook, but inevitably growing up in a country like England anesthetizes one to the finer arts of the palate. This was compounded by a stint in Finland; a number of my colleagues said they learnt from their days of military service that "food is fuel" and no more.

To me Italian food has always been pizza and pasta - from a box at Tescos. Now enter Uncle Joe, Anna, Mum Rodin and my fair wife, and I realize I've been missing a trick. We're learning a lot from the ancien Italians such as how to make fresh pasta with Uncle Joe, but the latest excitement came when our friends Tommaso and Francesca visited last week, and showed us how to cook risotto. We made it ourselves last night for my colleague Ed.

Here's the recipe - in the Italian tradition, amounts are approximate.

Heat about 1.5pints stock (water + stock cube) with half a glass of white wine and a crumbled pinch of saffron. In another saucepan, saute onions, then garlic in olive oil for a few minutes, then add a cup of arborio rice (don't use normal rice). Saute this for about 5mins, then add the stock, half a cupful at a time, stirring well at medium heat. Then let it simmer for about 15mins, and add portobello mushrooms (we use dried ones that you have to soak for a few mins beforehand). When it's done stir in a bunch of fine grated parmesan, and throw some italian parsley on as garnish.

We served it with grilled John Dory and asparagus, and a couple of bottles of Ed's fine vino - and it came out a treat. Now I just have to work on the air of insouciance that Tommaso has perfected to make it look easy.

Slightly surreal email marketing

2009-04-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

Had to do a double take on this email i just received:

"Dear Mr Johnston,

Apologies for the intrusion. According to our records we don't have permission to contact you by email. If you're happy with this arrangement, you need not do anything. To encourage you to reconsider, please take a look at Your Preferences (based on past purchases) - a new service designed to help us look after you better."

And signed off:
"Contact us if you want to contact us!" by the MD of the London based wine store that was sending this note.

While it certainly has chutzpah, its brazen flouting of my earlier stated preferences just looks dumbass. Bin.

Backslashing - the upcoming tests for Google and Facebook

2009-02-05T05:53:00.000-08:00

One of the quaintest garbled Finglishisms from my time in Helsinki, and there were many, was when my colleagues would warn of the dangers of a backlash, and call it a backslash. Don't know why, and maybe it was a localized phenomenon, but it conjured up in my mind some kind of fevered robed, masked assassins scything at a cowering hoard of alphanumeric symbols. Anyway, this is the season of the backslash.

At the macro level of backslashery, Obama is shooting fish in a barrel, with his $500k top rate salary for officers of companies taking public funds. Though an admirably attractive idea for mass market politicos seemingly frustrated that stocks are no longer a valid punishment for errant execs, this is unlikely to be effective, since the most capable executives will presumably head elsewhere, leaving a second division in charge of doing the right things.

More to the point though, are the upcoming backslashes in the worlds I inhabit - social networking and mobile. Within hours of it being launched, colleagues and friends were inviting me to share my location with them courtesy of Latitude, Google's considerably important foray into mobile social networking. Hundreds of other startups have been trying to be The Network for mobile social networking, not realizing that there's very little point in having a separate network for mobile social networking that involves other people than in your other networks.

Unsurprisingly, privacy advocates have been jumping up and down. Google has done some elegant things to make it easier for people to not be too obvious about their location, enabling people to lie about it (something that my friend Janne has always maintained was a crucial essence of humanity that social networks would avoid at their peril). The problem however, is that people are inherently lazy, and the middle ground of people like me are most at risk. The youth have time on their hands and care not a jot about privacy - happy to bare all to any who stumble across their myspace page. The old fogies will be appalled and won't use it. Those in the middle such as me will fancy playing with the technology, then forget they left it on (it asks you if you want to keep it on when you leave the app, but out of sight, out of mind). We'll then be embarrassed by it - not necessarily today, but at some later point. This level of discomfort willbe magnified the first time there's an abduction or murder linked directly to it. Google up to now has been a B2B play, with their only customer interface a plain white box. Let's hope they ramp up their service with a smile.

The other backslash coming our way was something i just glimpsed on CNN. The case shown was a family guy whose Facebook account was compromised and a hacker changed his status updates to say he urgently needed help. This hacker than contacted the victim's friends saying he was held captive in London, and one friend obligingly wired over $1200 to get him out of trouble. The same kind of thing can happen on any network. However, as Facebook becomes the most relied upon identity layer for many people, they'll need to rapidly scale their capabilities to deal with the aftermath of the life-wrecking that happens when something so intimate goes wrong.

The massed ranks of users and their backlslashes will probably prove to be a force more humbling and educational to these pillars of the new Internet economy, than even Obama's majesty is to the pillars of the old.

Event ad, NYC: The Hatchery goes Mobile

2009-02-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

I met David Blumenstein recently at a schmooze-fest in New York. He's one of the founders of The Hatchery - a mashup of Dragons Den and a traditional tech meetup. He circulated this flyer- thought I'd post.

Am planning to attend, so ping me if you are too.

_______________________

Stephen,

Please alert startups in the mobile space to The Hatchery and please pass on the information below:

The Hatchery is calling for submissions to the next mobile technology event on March 25. Submissions are due February 11. If selected, you must be available for event preparation and advisory the 4 weeks prior to the event. Please read and submit here.

Hatchery is a New York based venture collaboration group focused on creating opportunities for the technology community.

The Gauntlet is a forum in which start-ups, investors and corporate America converge, and has been likened to American Idol meets Venture Capital. It is an interactive platform at which emerging start-ups and developing companies present their ideas and themselves to a high-caliber audience and expert panel. A team of Hatchery experts review submissions and applications from the pool of emerging start-ups and early-stage companies, months prior to the events. Three presenters are chosen in line with the respective Gauntlet theme to appear before the panel of experts and general audience. The expert panel participants are chosen for their level of experience and skill in each Gauntlet’s respective theme/category. General audience attendance is strictly invitation-only to ensure that the chosen theme is of relevance to the audience and maximizes deal-making opportunities. Each presenter is given 7 minutes to make their case, and is followed up by 15-20 minutes of interrogation by the expert panel. Finally, the panelists are given 1 minute to sum up and analyze what they have seen and heard. For those who have prepared, it is uplifting, for those presenters who have not, it can be a train wreck. Either way the audience is engaged and entertained and come away with a clear sense of the presenters’ mission, objectives and market viability. It is a mutually beneficial ecosystem for all, and one we refer to as Venture Collaboration.

To learn more about The Hatchery and see previous presenters please visit The Hatchery website - www.hatchery.vc

Thanks in advance.

The towering room service bill at Westin Seattle

2008-12-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

Stayed at the westin in december while there for a short trip. youch. my advice, avoid breakfast in bed.

$18 eggs benedicts + 9.3% tax + 18% service charge + $4.5 delivery charge + $6 convenience charge. Ooops, sorry the last one was wrong -- thought i was talking about Ticketmaster. Either way, these are the kind of games that give big hotel chains a bad name, and leave the innocent delivery guy shuffling embarrassed and tip-free.

please, stop the killing, and make babies

2008-12-03T06:37:00.001-08:00

I saw yesterday that we launched a very nice looking phone the n97, but was dismayed that it was immediately branded an iphone killer. At least we had the good sense not to officially invoke comparisons, but we didn't discourage them.

Being described as a category killer is bad for two reasons. First, it just buckets us into a follower role - our moves are seen as defensive responses. But more important, it misses the point - the value is increasingly in the services and experiences, not the hardware. So, as the technologists froth over hardware porn such as 5MP cameras, buckets of RAM and the ability to play Flash videos, the real competition is in the service innovation. How will our new products reinvent old fashioned applications like the music player, contacts books and calendar and connect these to the web, and your friends and locations in truly unique ways? We shouldn't be making category killers, we should be making category babies and launching entirely new species.

My friend and visionary Wyndham put it like this in an email to me this morning about the iPhone: "It is the first time for years that people have overt behaviours around the applications and it is a focal point of conversation. There is a shift in the conversation since the 90’s when people last talked about their choice of phone." So, the big test for me will be when we roll out our innovations targeted at our lighting a fire under the developers and application makers, in light of the very real stat of 10,000 iphone applications.

how i voted in the us elections

2008-11-04T15:05:00.001-08:00

ok, well i didn't really vote but i went in the booth with my wife who is a bona fide american citizen and witnessed the process - quite sobering and perhaps of interest for those observing from across the seas. first impressions of our polling station in upper west side manhattan was good - was clearly marked (a local school) and there were no lines. cnn is reporting 3 hour queues in florida and apparently the whole of pennsylvania is becoming one enormously long line of frustrated mewling wannabe votees.

the process of voting in us elections involves being registered, finding your local voting station, knowing your precinct number (ours was 74, courtesy of a lady in the building), and then registering at a table inside. there were probably double the number of staff to voters in our station, and so we didn't have a hard time finding where to go.

but it did take a full 5mins before the lady found rita's name on the list and filled out a slip which gave her a voting number - hers was 211. there was a bit of back and forth between the staff about whether she'd filled out the form correctly, and whether it was neat enough and whether registering people on the list was more important than dealing with questions. not exactly slick, but i guess they only do this once every 4 years and these are unpaid volunteers.

the slip of paper was then given to us and we got into a queue to give that to another lady a few feet away, where we stood waiting for the chap to leave the booth. there was a set of lights on the booth with little obvious functionality - the lady told us to go in, but the guy was still inside.

so we go in to the booth area, shrouded in heavy black plastic bag material for secrecy, and are presented with a vast machine. i suspect these were designed by an epileptic monkey let loose in a tool shed at some point towards the end of the nineteenth century. there is a Big Grey Box, a Big Red Lever, and instructions. very mechanical, very retro. no chance of those nefarious electronic machines being tampered with in this outpost.

you have to flip the BRL over to the side to allow your vote to count then flip various mechanical switch from UP to SIDE next to your choice for president. there was one for obama and 3 for mccain -- he was also confusingly on the conservatives and independent columns. then there was another set of levers for supreme court justices. and then, randomly positioned on the bottom right hand side was another choice - it was a proposition 1 amendment or something about veterans rights. i could hardly understand the issue or figure out what i wanted, but thankfully the voting was done by the lawyer in the family who knew what to do.

and we were done - after spending about 5mins within the plastic bin liners. not exactly the white heat of technology, all rather manual, amateur and not really clear, but it did seem to work ok. we were in an affluent well educated neighborhood and the process was neither smooth nor transparent for the workers and voters alike. i can see how more people needing to vote would cause huge delays. we then went over to starbucks and claimed our rightful free cup of coffee that they give to all voters. let's hope that's just the start of the good times rollin.

so, in the end i didn't vote in the us elections. but if i had done, i'd have flipped barack's switch with pride.

Farewell to Bob Iannucci, Nokia CTO

2008-10-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

Got back from honeymoom to discover that our CTO Bob Iannucci has stepped down - great shame. Was lucky enough to work with Bob on a number of projects, most recently the various internal Nokia2.0 innovation activities which helped drive the 'Internet company' thinking and cool projects like Beta Labs as well as a bunch of stuff still under the covers.

I always enjoyed working with Bob - he's super smart and knew what was needed to get stuff done. He could geek speak and get his hands dirty with code as well as being one of our most eloquent and convincing visionaries explaining how we're helping the future unfold. He's a fellow non-Finn who spent time working at the mothership, and recently transferred back to the West Coast. I can sympathize with the regular travel and 10hour Palo Alto-Helsinki time difference that makes being a senior exec particularly tough, and wish him all the best. I've no doubt he'll reappear on our (small) screens before long.

i want a "mylist", not craig's list

2008-09-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

so here's a thought. my best man christian is coming to new york next weekend, and is finding it impossible to find anywhere decent to stay for less than $400/night. i have loads of friends in the city who'd probably be willing to put him up for free, or for less than $400/night, given that i can vouch for him. but i can't really spam them all with an email for this, and then something else in a few weeks. he's surfing on craigslist to try and find places, but neither party then has any independent reputation.

why not merge craigs list with my contacts book, and add in a publish and subscribe element. so that way i can subscribe to topics that i might be interested, and know who the people are - as my friends, or friends of friends. obviously this is the kind of thing that social networks could enable but i) none of them are comprehensive enough to include all the people in my contacts book ii) doesn't have good integration with contacts books and ii) doesn't have a publish-subscribe element apart from the status update, which is rather a blunt instrument.

we need a way of brokering interesting connections between people based on their collective set of interests that delivers a marketplace with enough liquidity (ie most people participate), but also keeps privacy and spam at bay. another thing for the boffins to work on.

a month to get citibank to pay itself

2008-09-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

one of the problems with coming to america is having to remember to pay off my credit cards in time. got stung last month as i just forgot to pay one of them off - citibank mastercard. whenever i went to the site it just showed some balance and some faroff date. when it stopped working i went to the site and it looked completely normal - no message such as - you're late. i then phoned them up and they said i was in arreas. i guess i was, but they didn't make much of an effort to let me know, apart from a monthly statement email - who reads that stuff?

anyway, i asked how i could "switch on" automatic debiting as i had in uk. presumably going from my citibank current account to my citibank mastercard should be a breeze. oh no. they had to send me a form - which took a week to arrive, and then fill in loads of fields and sign it and send it back (which of course i've failed to do so far). they say it'll take about 2-3 weeks once received to process. so well over a month to allow me to pay me.

this fascination with the mail and paper pushing is rather 1970s. c'mon citibank - get with the programme, and send some of your folks to see how europe has weaned itself off the paper monster.

friendfeed acquiring my comments is like republishing ads

2008-08-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

aggregation space is a hot. but am not yet convinced. i got an email notification from friendfeed that someone (hi Timo) has commented on one of my not recent and particularly insightful blog posts (timo was being generous). however, that comment -- generated from the content of my blog -- is now attached to friendfeed, and doesn't show up here. i have to go to friendfeed if i want to see the comments? seems a bit like a dirty trick - akin to republishing someone else's content to get the advertising revenues.

i'd be interested to know more about whether the content sites that the aggregation engines visit are happy for this to happen. do they use an API, or just crawl? why would blogger be happy to have this happen?

Impressive new york taxis

2008-07-23T08:37:00.001-07:00

Impressive new york taxis
Originally uploaded by sdbj

have to say am impressed with the consumer facing technology installed recently in the new york cabs. it's a in car TV + credit card consoles. impressive stuff. ok you have to put up with the anodyne vapidity of the talking heads talking about non stories, but the technology is good in that it i) works everytime ii) is super simple to use and navigate. this means i can see the weather forecast and pay a cab with a credit card relatively painlessly.

i've noticed that the interface in ny transport related machines is as good as i've seen it anywhere. in the cabs, the credit card payment is quick, and cheekily suggests (optional) a minimum fare of $2, even on a $4 ride. no doubt this was to keep the cab drivers from complaining about credit cards losing them tips. also when buying a ticket for the trains or the subway, the interfaces are easy to grok and lightning fast, and have only rarely seen them out of order. they do smart things like suggest common routes, whereas the ticket machines in london profess no knowledge whatsover of where someone in waterloo might be likely to want to go, despite legions of hapless and similar commuters having provided reams of data. it's the kind of simple yet complex challenge google would love. perhaps they're providing some of the secret sauce behind the big apple's splendid transport infrastructure?

Product request: car alarm fryer

2008-06-22T18:23:00.000-07:00

Would be great if someone would invent a high powered directional-microwave-tazar-thingy that could be used to fry car alarms from a distance.

From where i write this - the intensely populated uppper-west-side - there has been a car alarm going off intermittently for about the last 2 hours. It is probably stressing out the several hundred people who are in range, hence inflicting thousands of dollars of pain and suffering.

Taking a sledgehammer to the car is very tempting, and as far as i'm concerned absolutely justified, but it would have the downside of probably putting me in jail. How much more satisfying to fry a car's innards from a 5th floor window.

The American service paradox

2008-06-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

America is a wonderful place that revels in its leading edge technologies and superior service culture. Much of that is, much of the time, perfectly valid. But it seems there are various blackholes into which the latest techno wizardry and service with a smile disappears with a poof. Healthcare, finance and telecomms industry are three not insignificant industries where my recent experience as a fresh off the boat new yorker suggests much could be done to improve the situation with a dose of scandinavian efficiency.

My darling fiancee (more to come in future installments) has been witnessing first hand the need to improve the service experience in healthcare. Not only is the quality of the advice for her badly mashed up foot particularly patchy and inconsistent, but the process reeks of inefficiency. Having had a number of surgeries in the hospital, last week she had to fill out a whole bunch of
additional paper forms about some other procedure, all requiring the same mind numbing and time consuming repitition of standard info such as address, insurance providers etc. This is not only inefficient it can also affect the service experience - one of the times she noticed that the basic dates for the operations had been entered wrongly on a bit of paper, potentially resulting in all sorts of trauma.

My own experience of US finance is poor. Coming from First Direct in the UK, am staggered to find myself swimming in paper and a morass of expensive and impenetrable fees that are applied to you by banks for most of the functions associated with merely being alive. Getting my salary paid direct debit rather than by cheque is harder than it should be (can't remember when i last saw a cheque before arriving to the US).

And perennial favourite telco rounds out the list for my triple waaaaammy. As the nation crowded round their sets trying to watch Big Brown cheat history on Saturday we were frustrated as the local monopoly provider Time Warner had blackouts over the whole of the upper west side. We ventured out to a local bar which mysteriously seemed unaffected. On both the broadband and mobile side (Apple's singlehanded efforts notwithstanding) the US is a lumbering giant - an embarassment to this nation of nation builders.

Whenever I can I interact with these guys via their website, as to dial an 800 number is to consign yourself to a desperate game of eternal loops, bereft of logic, feedback and feeling, where the winning prize is a date with a bored and surly operator with interest in nothing except churning your call. Lots of room for these companies to start decentralizing the service experience back out to the edges and figure out how to let us better help ourselves, and each other.

What business is the Holiday Inn in?

2008-05-09T02:33:00.000-07:00

Greetings from the Holiday Inn Express in Hammersmith - in the twilight zone between living in London and living in New York. Flat is packed, bags are bulging & Heathrow beckons. But I couldn't pass an Internet connection without asking the question - what business is Holiday Inn in?

I think it's the "affordable business travellers" market. The problem is that a customer segment is not an experience. The Internet connection here provides the example. They have a plug in cable, but the browser the opens up a page asking that you enter in your credit card details and address in order to pay £15 for 24hrs access. That experience is terrible - they do not even allow you to bill to your room.

The hotel have outsourced Internet provision to an intermediary as they don't think they're in that game. Nothing else is obviously outsourced - hot water, bed and food are considered core. Sure, go ahead and price discriminate for movies or the mini bar (or the Internet) if you must, but make it as simple as typing in your room number on the screen or just grabbing a bottle. an easy and integrated Internet experience is not a fundamental requirement of today's travelling business exec on a budget, I don't know what is.

Note to Tyler Brûlé and departing EOS employees: Service is relative

2008-05-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

I was happy to see the return of Tyler Brûlé's Fast Track column in today's weekend FT. It provides breezy opinion-rich accounts of the life of business travel of the black credit card variety - no Little Chefs here.

Despite regular suggestions from an unbelieving public that Tyler's column, which charts the antics of a diva-like jetsetter stomping carbon footprints around the globe, must be the handiwork of one of the FT's relentless micky takers, the man does actually exist. Tyler made his name founding Wallpaper* magazine and is now back with Monocle - a cross between the Economist and, well, Wallpaper*. He does indeed live a colourful life, bouncing around the globe with boundless enthusiasm. I've met him several times and enjoy his company - though can't keep up with his travel tales, since Nokia's travel policies make me turn right at the plane door.

And business travel is the subject of his column today. He is shocked by the failure of EOS, an all-business-class airline that jetted execs between "London" (or Stansted, 40 miles north) and New York. He provides some lessons in hindsight, but I think he misses the most important one that applies to just about any "all elite" service such as an all business airline. It's an oxymoron.

Elite is relative.

It's not just about having more leg room. It's about having more legroom than you.

Of course, I'm humble (see above note about turning right) and can't afford to have an ego or let such superficial, competitive thoughts enter my mind, but how many fat cat businessmen are as charitable as me, St. Stephen? These people eat babies for breakfast and oneupmanship makes them tick. They're unhappy with a million dollar bonus if their mate gets more. So I'd suggest that a good part of the value they receive when their secretary pays several thousand pounds for a flight ticket is comprised of exhibitionism and the feel good sense that comes with attaining what others can't get, and want. Gore Vidal put it well, "It's not enough that I succeed. Others must fail." And there's no point in succeeding if you're hidden from view in a separate airplane and a separate airport.

I'd hazard a guess that the Venn diagram of people rich enough for such premium services, and those immune to such posturing has not much by way of overlap.

With that in mind, am interested in how Singapore Airlines will manage the experience for their customers of their new Suites product. It uses the massive space on the A380s to take first class to a new level of exclusivity, providing enclosed cabins for those paying £6k each way to escape from the crowd. But, as a word of advice from me - don't cut them off too much. Give the execs the joy of jealous looks from those traipsing to economy class, or the ability to share a smug smirk with their fellow cabin-travellers. After all, if good service was everywhere, it wouldn't be good any more.

Stephen's Charitable Foundation for Household Appliance Engineers

2008-05-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

Continuing to document my service experiences good, bad and downright ugly, today's gas stove engineer was probably among the most expensive experience on a per minute basis. £70 for approximately 600 seconds (most of which involved opening his magnificent toolbox and displaying his wares). I really felt like a chump - scared off by the fiddly screws and 50,000 volt mini lightning strikes that the ignition switch creates that can floor a rhino (maybe).

However, I blame Google - I tried various terms relating to "sticking ignition on NEFF stoves" hoping to find some forum of technically-adept housewives chatting endless about modding their domestic appliances, but oddly the cupboard was bare.

So, who needs to be a lawyer earning $700/hr - you can double that by just grabbing a toolbox and finding dopes like me wrestling with domestic appliances.

Coming to America. With thanks to the US Embassy.

2008-04-29T15:12:00.001-07:00

(Pic from National Geographic, link embedded)

This blog has been ambling along with no particular theme - an aide memoire of things that make me go aha or err. But I have noticed within me in the last few weeks an urge to reach for the keyboard when confronted with especially good service. And for regular readers, my Heathrow inspired frenzies suggest that I love documenting bad service too (if only to save on medical bills). So, this blog is developing a service-related theme, and that suits me fine. More about that in future.

Well today's experience of submitting my US visa application was a case in point. I have been transferred to the USA with my employer Nokia and need to get a US work visa, with a view to heading over to US in the next few weeks. So goodbye London, hello New York City. Should be a relatively easy transition with Big Co supporting me, but I had mentally prepared myself for turmoil and trauma - from the lawyers processing the case in the bowels of our corporate bureaucracy to the steely faced unflinching staffers behind perspex in the Embassy who would rip your painstakingly created application to shreds for not documenting every single country you'd visited in the past 10 years, or for not including the middle name of your former boss's labrador.

Well, I was wrong. First our lawyers delivered reams of paper work in short order, with no obvious typos. And second, and most surprisingly, the officials at the US Embassy were courteous, efficient and welcoming. I did try dot Is and cross Ts ahead of time, but still I was expecting some resistance. A probing examination of my motives; a frustrating queue to be told I needed to be in another queue. Not a bit of it. I went to Belfast since the London Embassy had a month wait, and apart from the initial 2hr queue, the processing and interview process took approximately 2 minutes. A nice American lady asked me one question about Nokia, cut me off as I was getting long and boring about Nokia's impending strategic shift to Internet services and my role within it, and said Welcome to America, your visa will there in a few days (now my faith rests on the slightly less broad shoulders of Royal Mail. Hmmm).

God Bless Uncle Sam. Here I come, America. Land of the Free. And now, me.

Simon Johnson - Heathrow's finest shoe shine

2008-04-28T15:05:00.001-07:00

simon johnson - heathrow's finest shoe shine
Originally uploaded by sdbj

The shoe-shiner is a dying breed. Despite no pressure from the menace of outsourcing (quite tricky to shine shoes by phone), this anachronistic service has been kicked into touch by our scruffy and frenetic lifestyles - bespoke Oxfords gave way to tatty trainers made of chemicals, not cows. These cheap canvas concoctions are always running to the next thing, with little time to stop and smell the polish. Simon's customers are usually running to a plane, as he plies his wares in Terminal 1 domestic departures, and has recently been seeing depressingly few patters of feet in his direction.

I got chatting to him today as I had my shoes shined. Despite his booming presence and a magnetically sunny personality (his other jobs include childrens' entertainer, actor and musician - I have his card) his quaint and comfy seats only attracted four bums the whole of this afternoon. With that kind of result it won't be long before he packs his brushes for good. So if your leather brogues are a tad scruffy and you're flying via Terminal 1, take a few mins to sit and chat with Simon and let him put a shine back in your stride.

What happens to us, when our cars get increasingly smart?

2008-04-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

I have a 5yr old VW golf, and one of the reasons I like it is that it lets you kill yourself if you want to. Well, more specifically, it lets you drive without your seatbelt on and does not disturb the peace with a wretched warning bing bing, that seems to be the preserve of most cars nowadays. If the car really thinks you'll injure someone else because you don't have a seatbelt on, why not kill the engine. If it thinks you'll injure yourself, same question, but also another one - why not give me an option saying, "I'm happy to take the risk, bud". The problem is with stuff like this, that you can't ever do things outside the proscribed intentions of faceless mandarins thinking up use cases. Maneuvering around a parking garage or jumping in and out of the car to post letters aren't in defined use cases, and fall through the cracks.

Same with GPS. Whole villages are being cut off by lorries that take short cuts and get stuck - oblivious to reality, the drivers outsource reason to a $200 plastic console on the dash.

And according to today's USA Today, 5 US states have introduced legislation requiring people with drink driving convictions to blow through a breathalyser contraption in order to start their car, and you have to do that at random times to keep the motor running. Wonderful idea, I guess, but what if they have a sober passenger? How soon before it's a requirement on all cars?

Seems like quite a dangerous alignment of increasingly capable technology and increasingly pliant populace which is seeing us outsourcing decision making and responsibility to faceless others and none too smart black boxes. I, Robot, here we come.

First taste of Terminal 5. Nice building, shame about the moving parts.

2008-03-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

Just had my first experience of Terminal 5. Thought I’d pen some notes about it on the plane, rather than bite the head off a chicken or similarly handy rodent.

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is a slap in the face of the current UK government’s love of big tangled public private partnerships. It was surprisingly delivered on time and on budget primarily it seems because there was actually somebody responsible for getting it done. While there were subcontractors, there would be no mealy-mouthed blame-shifting and finger pointing when it failed, was shoddy, late and over budget, as big projects in this country inevitably are. There would be no tangled webs of intricate outsorcery, no rapacious subcontractors sucking eagerly on sweetened, risk-free deals, only to sue at the drop of a hat for little breaches of large contracts. With this government’s prediliction to fudge and quango (is that a verb? should be) there is often no real sense of right and wrong and clear ownership. The lawyers and economists trough happily, while Joe Public normally gets trampled underfoot.

So my heart was lifted when I heard that Terminal 5 touched down on time with perfect poise – one in the eye for common sense I thought. And the pictures of the terminal were indeed not bad for London, used to dealing with the infra-tragedy that is Heathrow Terminal’s 1–4 – a creaking, dirty place that makes Zimbabwe look like a bation of good management.

And how many airlines have the luxury to have their very own terminal, all to themselves? BA must have been delighted themselves that they could finally set aside their usual excuse of shoddy experience – not us gov, it’s BAA – and work to make this the best in flight experience money and technology could buy. The website holds little back: “The creation of Terminal 5 was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to redefine air travel. Our aim was to replace the queues, the crowds and the stress with space, light and calm.” Fat chance. Their proud claim in the adverts of 10 minutes from check in to departure gate even had me rather excited. Fuggedaboutit.

The news stories started to flood in – perhaps with a sense of schadenfreude. I checked mine – still on time – and checked-in online at BA’s site - all working fine.

When I arrived to catch my flight I had left half an hour to get through security. In terminal 1 there is a separate section for Exec Club members and biz class, and it’s really pretty good most of the time. When I arrived the massive foyer of Terminal 5 it’s not obvious what you do. I asked where to go through security, and they said – South securty was full, so go to North security. Er, ok. Any Exec Club Gold Card option? Er, they might be one over in South side, but it was “miles away” and not worth the bother.

>> Figuring out where security was: 2 minutes.

So I head to the North security. Nobody had told us that there doing biometric checks before security. Seemed to be taking pictures of everyone. Why? Apparently because international and domestic passengers were mixing up. And the point of that is what? This system was completely borked. Long lines just to get through to the next lines waiting for security. As the queues mount, flustered staff run around on walkie-talkies. There are absolutely loads of them with blue Tshirts on offering to help. But it seems they spent on all money on greeters and none on the security desks. So, they decide that anyone on international flights can just go through without getting their brained scanned, iris extracted or first born branded, or whatever they were doing. We trundle through to cattle station 2 security.

>> Waiting in a fruitless line to get a biometric whatsit taken, but then just being ushered through: 20mins.

Inside a big airy hall there are about 50 security machines. Unfortunately there are only about 5 open. I hear someone say there’s a fast track line over there, so I trundle through (even though wasn’t biz class, i reckon my gold card sort of counts, no?). Getting to the second line it doesn’t seem to be moving. There are about 10 staff on the solitary machine, and each seem to be having long conversations with each passenger and moving at a glacial pace. A bunch of people rush to the front of the queue with that serious “i’m going to miss my flight but i’m also a bit embarassed to be queue jumping look on”. We stand around. As am getting close to the front, an uninspiring lady says – “go to the next machine, this one’s broken”. Sorry doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary. Trundle off to next door machine. Bags go in. Laptop stays in bag – yay – and am through security.

>> Getting through the world’s slowest “Fast track” security line: 20mins

And then I have to figure out which gate am meant to be going from. Ooh look – big shiny LCD screens. near the exit from security. But no, they are for adverts. There’s a big screen in the middle of the foyer, I go there and find that I’m in Gate B45. That means getting to the shiny shuttles – reminiscent of most American airports I’ve been to. So on i hop, and emerge at the B gates.

>> Going from security to the B gates. 10mins (includes running up two escalators with bags)

I arrive breathless at the gate, and despite being after the gate closing time, we’ve not boarded. Great. Mill around for a while, and then when we are called to get on, they announce that the shiny new walkway is not working, so we’ve going to have to take steps down to the tarmac, then steps up to the plane. That’s my favourite bit about Heathrow – they always seem to have broken walkways, but this on day 4 of the next terminal seems a bit rich.

>> Getting on the plane and dozing the stress away: priceless.

So, in the end i got my flight. Yet it was just a collossal disappointment that had nothing to do with a bunch of lost bags. It was as if we’d spent £4bn on a nice shiny car, but nobody had bothered to learn how to drive it. There really should be as much thought going into the processes and the staff as the buildings, and that is where I blame BAA management for now figuring out the process better. It wasn’t a question of early hitches - this seemed like a terminal without a plan and the people didn’t seem to have been told what they should be doing. Still, the good news is maybe they’ll learn given the massive media pressue, and the roof looks nice. The bad news for me is they won’t learn by the time I have to use it again – twice – this week.

American Golf vs. Stephen Johnston - the saga continues

2008-03-17T03:52:00.000-07:00

Lo, my trust in the perky and honest sounding chap on the end of the phone at American Golf to get me off his mailing list about 6 weeks ago was misplaced. I just received another monthly installment of the (for me) zero value, environmentally ruinous monthly mailing, again forwarded from my old address, which just made me mad. Grrr.

So this time, I wrote to them saying please remove me from the mailing list, enclosed their brochure, and then put it in an envelope (cost 35p) with a stamp (cost about the same). So, best part of a quid, and a couple of grey hairs later, I'm wondering if this is going to be effective, but rather expecting that it's not.

Spamming the spammers

2008-02-29T01:57:00.000-08:00

There has to be an easier way to remove your name from a company's database. We've all done it - absent mindedly give out your address while engaging in a low level transation with some shop or other. In this particular example that has me riled, I was getting some new grips put on my golf clubs, at the cost of about £20 at the Sunbury Outlet of AmericanGolf - a fairly large chain of golf shops that seems to have nothing to do with America. Anyway, I signed up for the club card for future discounts at the shop, but was assured I wouldn't be contacted. However, since then have been receiving the general marketing crap by both email and post - colourful yet anodyne brochures and emails.

Since I seem to be unable to remain in one place longer than a few months, I am deeply wary about giving out my home address to marketers. Not only do I inflict annoyance on the next inhabitant of the flat for years after the original post office redirect has run out, I stand the chance of occasionally missing something that I might like, and also needlessly wasting resources and paper etc. I'd love to know how much of a company's mailings of this type are to the wrong address, or if the right address are unwanted. I suspect more than half. And that's a whole lot of global warming and lost profits.

So back to the story. I unsubscribed fairly painlessly from the emails from American Golf, but getting my name of the mailing list for their brochure fluff has been a tragi comedy. The phone number on the brochure only ends up at a store locator. So I phoned up the original store I went to and asked them to remove me. The confused sounding guy cautiously said OK, and I didn't expect it to work. It didn't - the fluff continued to come. Having just received another one I was getting really annoyed, so went to their website, searched around a bit, found another number that seemed to be more about general company enquiries, phoned it up, spoke to a nice lady, she said hang on a minute, and passed me over to another department, and a nice chap in this department said, yes, he could do that for me, did i have my membership number. No, of course not, but he was able to locate me by postcode, and then with so authentication model in place to prove i am who i am (confirmation if any was needed of the low value of these transactions), said i'd no longer receive mailings.

Will it work? I hope so - the guy sounded fairly sane.
Do I want to have to do this detective work for every company that i might someday have a relationship with? No, absolutely not.

What we've got here is a broken process for managing the distribution of my contact details and the ability for me to update my preferences for receiving marketing information from different companies.

There seem to be four approaches to this:

1. Distributed permanent addresses:
This is the status quo today. Quickly becomes inefficient as the contact information gets out of date, or my preferences change.

2. Distributed temporary contacts
This works ok for email - I could have given them an email stephen_americangolf@stephenjohnston.info for example, and then delete that email when i don't want to subscribe. But this quickly gets hard to remember who you said you were to whom, and doesn't solve the problem that they're still sending out spam emails ineffectively. This could work for a phone number, but they're expensive to do using the telco world, so would need to have some kind of web based system like Jaxtr. Again not easy to manage. Could in theory work for physical addresses, but harder to manage since you end up with physical not just digital backlog once you stop using that address yourself.

3. Aggregator
This means that one company keeps the contacts details and preferences of lots of people. I can then manage my contacts details on their site and the companies can go and get information about me - depending on whether i've granted them permission. Lots of heavy engineering, data servers etc to manage that system, and then the user control & management piece. Plaxo is the start of something like this, but doesn't seem to be moving to the B2B direction yet.

4. Distributed
This means that I have the list of my contacts and who gets to see them under my own control - either hosted by me on a server or on a trusted 3rd party site. (Certain similarities to openID here, except that this is not just about identity abut about relationships. Does OpenID2.0 and OAuth take us further here I wonder?) There shouldn't be any reason why i can't have multiple locations to store my things - so i could use Fodor's to manage my favourite hotels, Zagats for my favourite restaurants and Bloomingdales for my favourite clothes companies. I could go to their sites and say - ok, am fed up with receiving Ralph Lauren catalogues but happy to have a closer relationship with Gant. And then my inbox would respond accordingly. This would probably require a certain amount of standardization in approach, or it could be done at a sector level (all restaurants adopt a marketing outreach format from Zagats). In theory this could be completely distributed, with some kind of web protocol (XML) sitting between me and the companies that i like and informing them of the information that i am permitting them to have access to, and the appropriate way to contact me.

One of the elements of a distributed approach could be the creation of a people-generated company address book, to turn the tables on the companies who are great at getting hold of our information but seem strangely opaque about giving out their own. This Wiki White Pages could be a rich resource of company contact information, what tones to press on the IVR to quickly get through to British Airwarys or what the name and mobile number of the CEO of that company you're receiving spam from is. Then if you consistently get annoying material from a company that does not sign up to this system automatically, you can return the favour and send multiple requests to their CEO to stop spamming you. Should get the point across quite quickly.

Is option 4 a pipedream? Something like this seems to be increasingly important with the growing eco-awareness, antipathy towards waste and need for better ROI on marketing campaigns and also increasingly feasible with the arrival of web standards and a browser on every phone. If and when something like this gets off the ground, here's hoping that American Golf will be one of the first to sign up.

Is it safe?

2008-02-09T01:28:00.001-08:00

Is it safe?
Originally uploaded by sdbj

Just stayed in a hotel in Berlin.

Good news - there was free Wifi

Bad news - it involed a 26-digit WEP key to get to it.

This took me three goes to get right, and at the end I was cussing and spitting like a navvy. A competitive advantage in hotels would be to make getting on the Internet as easy as turning on the hot water. Low tech solutions such as cables work fine for me, but if it's got to be wifi, a simple human readable name is surely enough.

Happy New Year - and a resolution

2008-01-07T07:41:00.001-08:00

A new year and new resolutions. They seem to have a similar theme - get fit, get better at my job, and do more for charity. Don't have a particularly good record at achieving them, but I see it as a war of attrition - in the long run I'll grind them down. This year i added one - do more blogging. It's not much a resolution, but it's one of the things I enjoy, and if anyone else benefits, that's a bonus.

Now as my New Year resolution suggestion to the rest of Nokia, I'll propose one -- get better at listening, in particular to our expert users. It's sometimes hard when things are moving so fast, in particular as we're trying to come up with new services ideas at the speed of those nimble startups, but i really think a lot of the time we can save ourselves pain and expense by listening more. Here's a case in point - this is a round table chat by a bunch of Nokia-focused external bloggers that was held at Nokia world in Amsterdam in December.

Carlo Longino pointed me to this, and it's quite fascinating hearing people talk with passion, knowledge and plenty of opinion about our range of products and services. As Carlo said in his email, "I know Nokia does tons of research on its customers and users, but I thought this was a good example of how social-media marketing isn't just about spreading the word about a company's products, but can also be turned around and harnessed by the company to help it build better products."

I think this is a great example of really valuable insights from some of our expert users that we can harness - for free. Let's hope that Charlie and his new team of Nokia bloggers and social media gurus harness the outboard brains of these guys, and work out how to turn their insights into new products and service innovations, rather than just convince more people to buy the current stuff.

Happy New Year to one and all. Looking forward to talking a bit more and listening a lot more.

C'mon BA, get a grip

2007-12-15T02:08:00.000-08:00

Now, I'm no UI designer, but I do happpen to be a human being. And as such this rubbish on BA's website really irritates me. I have no idea who designs their website, but please - telling your customers they can access "post-PIN content and functionality" is just a horrible mangle of pretension and obfuscation. And getting someone to click a box NOT to be remembered just completely does my head in. I've been griping about this for months already - but who do I tell? What are these guys smoking? And can I have some.

Seven suggestions for an Innovation stream

2007-12-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

This week I've been in Amsterdam, in Nokia's annual jamboree - the rare occasion when the Finnish modesty and reserve is traded in for a colourful look-at-me celebration of all our cool stuff, good people and great partners. It's actually quite glitzy, and I hesitate to say, "American" in theme, and getting more so - a hedge fund manager I met at lunch said this was the first time that he felt Nokia was behaving like a media company. He thought that was a good thing, and given that he owns a large chunk of our stock, I didn't like to argue. And it is true that this really was a very well organized, vibrant and confident conference with some strong messages about Ovi and our new Internet services ambitions that made people sit up and take note. However I'm not sure that associating with an industry that has - in parts - an imploding business model and famously dubious business practices is necessarily a good thing. But that's for another post. This post is about innovation seminars, and what makes them sing. Or sink.

I can honestly say that one of the highlights in my 4 years at Nokia was being asked to be the chairman of the innovation stream at Nokia World this year. Nokia World is a Big Deal - we spend a small fortune putting on a real spectacular two day show that highlights most of what we are as a company and it involves all the top management. It's not completely clear why I was chosen; my co chair - Lee Epting, the VP and head of Forum Nokia was a more obvious fit in terms of the other moderators. Probably had to do with the Speaker Series sessions I host, and the fact that I've been mouthing off about Internet innovation recently.

Anyway, I'm writing this post to consider what the best possible innovation stream at a conference would look like. In short, I don't think we really got it right -- the audience in our session started off large and gradually shrank over the 2hours, losing energy all the while, and in terms of format it was fairly standard stuff - 4 presentations with just a few Q&As at the end. I felt the topics were actually interesting and relevant - Nokia's UI vision; mobile payments and NFC from Citibank; Yahoo! on web development and a session presenting the winners of the Open C developer challenge competition. The latter was the highlight for me - interactive, interesting and the demo of the winner (MobiTubia - lets you browse YouTube videos) was really cool. Ironically, getting the N95 live demo worked fine, but the lady from Citibank was tripped up by the first of her videos not working. We didn't have any really cool gimmicks - we killed off the audience voting feature since the tool had SMS disabled and we weren't convinced of the usability of the WAP portal. The irony of all this was that there was a huge amount of stuff that we could have talked about and showed off - just a few yards away in the Expo the innovation stream had 19 demos with some of the coolest gizmos, gadgets and services that I've seen during my time at Nokia, including the mobile web server, Point & Find, voice recognition and an eye-controlled UI.

The contrast with the panel I was on the Economist Innovation Awards Summit a few weeks ago was stark, and also the Internet and innovation Conferences we've had at Nokia over the past couple of years. The first Nokia2.0 Conference we organized in March 2006 received a huge amount of positive feedback and led to a set of tangible actions.

So, with these in mind, here's some guidelines for what could be the bones of innovation stream 2.0, in next year's Nokia World or similar event. Would be interested to have feedback from participants of the Amsterdam session, and general thoughts on what would make an innovation-themed session as good as it can get.

1. Suffer the children
Any panel on innovation should probably tap into what the real innovators are thinking - and in the web space nowadays that means kids, not fusty grey suits. I first saw a panel of kids being interviewed stage at one of the Web2.0 conferences when Safa Rashtchy did this to great acclaim (my favourite was the kid who said he'd never pay a penny on DRM'd music from iTunes but was spending $50 a month on ring tones). Don Tapscott's New Paradigm group has done this quite well too. Nokia has hundreds of expert groups including teens, we should just reconvene one of them on stage. This is what I was trying to move towards with the call for videos on my blog, but I didn't push hard enough to make it happen.

2. Do an Oprah
Always fun to give stuff away, and Nokia's been more generous recently - giving away phones used to be taboo, but now it's more common. Random gifts under people's seats can become muted if people expect it, and can have a downside - as Oprah Winfrey dramatically discovered.

3. Pack in the powerpoint
The presentation by our user experience director was - I thought - rather beautifully done, with a new kind of presentation that it half video and half powerpoint. The crowd asked for more specifics about our touch screen strategy, but we weren't able to talk about that. In future combining great presentation graphics with data points makes sense, and in any event, the time for dull slides with small fonts is definitely over. If there are no powerpoints, then maybe the answer is to adopt a conversational tone...

4. Conversation not presentation
Nobody wants a sales pitch at these events, however most powerpoints slip into a few sales-y spiels at some stage. The Economist event was different - three of us were up on stage with Tom Standage - a super sharp guy and not used to being overly nice to business types. We had no idea of the questions, apart from they'd be about innovation, so there was little time to prepare a spiel, you just had to answer the question. Am actually thinking about inviting Tom to join us on stage for next year, if am involved.

5. Lighten the load with a dash of humour
One of the best sessions from last year's Nokia World was Clive Anderson. Ok, he's not known for his innovative views on technology, but provided a wonderful and insightful moderator. One of my favourite comedians is Stephen Fry and his recent blog posts / tomes, have proven that he's no slouch when it comes to geekery - for all those with a spare hour or three, peruse his thoughts on smartphones and the like here. So, my second invite would go out out to Stephen Fry. Stephen - fancy a chance to deliver your message to the heart of the borg?

6. Shiny, new things. Aka more signal, less noise.
Demos and launches are always noteworthy, and make people think there is something new and unique happening at the event they are happening to be at. Nokia World happens just once a year at about the same time, so why don't we make a point of launching a bunch of cool products here, rather like Apple does at its annual conference. Even if we don't launch products, let's make announcements that people are looking for, and issue a blizzard of statistics - people love data. Think Mary Meeker at Web2.0. Less of the fluff, and more of the "Phwoar, that's so cool!".

7. Breakout the backchannel
The audience voting worked ok in the end using WAP in other sessions, though i still prefer SMS. What was missing, and something we discussed ahead of time since we'd had this in some internal conferences, was a "hecklebot" to display comments from SMS or in an IRC-type format. This can be quite disruptive if managed badly - people tend to be quite unforgiving if they're not impressed, but it does make for a real sense of electricity in the room, and can work wonders at creating a sense of inclusiveness.

Funnily enough, looking at these ideas, it seems that the new Nokia values have them embedded (these are, btw: Engaging You, Passion for Innovation, Achieving Together & Very Human). Hmm, maybe should have brushed up on them in the planning stages...

Anyway, we live and learn. Let's hope we take some of these learnings into account next time.

Looking for videos of kids talking about mobiles

2007-11-13T15:01:00.000-08:00

Am giving a presentation at our biggest conference of the year in December - Nokia World and I thought it'd be quite cool to open it up with a few videos of kids (which I guess is 5-20) talking about their mobiles.

I guess there'd be 4 questions:
- How do you use your mobile today?
- What do you like best about it. What don't you like?
- What would you like to see happen to mobiles in 20 years time?
- What do you think about paying for stuff on your phone? Would you like to use it instead of money?

Am only looking for a few (10-15) seconds on each issue and they'll probably be edited down anyway. The more colour and enthusiasm the better. The video montage would be shown to hundreds of Nokia's customers and employees as an interesting - and hopefully amusing - intro to a bunch of innovation related presentations.

As it happens, I don't really know any kids of that age, and am a little reluctant to stand around school gates with a video camera. So if you know of any telegenic kids with loads of opinions about this stuff, feel free to point a camera at them and email me the resulting video (should be under 5MB) to stephen dot johnston at nokia dot com.

Nokia's innovation story part 2 - Internet innovation

2007-11-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the tardiness of this second and final installment of this gripping story - a 2 day USA business trip has turned into a 10 day one, and my admin has gone to pot. Now back in UK, the advantage of jet lag is it gives you odd windows to do stuff. Carry on...

So, we could go on forever counting trends, but rather than just watch the world spinning ever faster we need to act. In the pulsating, chaotic maelstrom of today's globally connected economy, we need to put a stake in the ground, and I think that starts with defining what industry we're in. This is not as easy a question as it once was - we used to be in the telecoms industry, but no more. It's probably best described as the converging digital industry, and that now touches almost every sphere of life. Or to put it another way, we used to be a product company, and now we're a product and services company.

The red thread running through this is, in a word, the Internet. It brings accelerated innovation into disparate industries - fashion, travel, finance and sport to name just a few, and combined with mobility, heralds disruptive potential in a host of new markets. As such, the focus of our current innovation activities is the Internet. That's what lies behind our somewhat strange-sounding statements about becoming an "Internet company" - we are talking about the way we work more than about what we produce. It's about learning from the most innovative companies, especially startups, who have the Internet in their DNA. Of course, a big established, product-focused company such as ours will not have the agility of a fleet-footed startup, but heck, even bigger brutes than us have been learning the steps for years. And even that's not the point - you ask any garage full of pizza-scoffing, code-writing 18 year olds how they're going to scale their startup globally and the answer will probably be that they don't know, or "get bought by Google" (unless of course one of them is called Zuckerberg). Ensuring that Nokia's history, expertise (esp in mobility), size and scope is an asset not a liability in the Internet era is for me, the challenge du jour.

However, Internet innovation is an unwieldy beast, and I'll divide it up by stakeholder group - customers, employees and partners / developers. I leave out shareholders here, since they are the outcome, not the input to these efforts. So, what does Internet innovation mean to each of these groups for Nokia?

- Customers Internet brands have a deep relationship with their customers - either on the individual level (e.g. Amazon) or the aggregate (e.g. Google). They collect data about the service relationship and use it to improve the offering. Needless to say, Nokia currently has little or no relationship with the end users (customers, consumers punters, peeps...) of our phones. Our efforts here need to be about establishing a relationship with the end user to learn more about them, and helping them improve the experience of connecting with what matters most to them. One of the interesting angles to all this is IPR - how are we going to develop solutions together with customers, and not just expect them to hand over good ideas to us for free. Innovations in this area, together with payments to our customers (in cash, in kind or in kudos) will be key.

- Employees We need to ensure that our employees are as informed, motivated and effective as those in a startup. In a small company it's easy for everyone to know everything that happens, however siloes emerge naturally as the company grows. Information velocity matters - the right ideas need to find the right people, quickly. Motivation is an interesting topic - Nokia currently sits lower down the risk / reward axis than a startup. Should that change, if so how? And finally effectiveness - we need to figure out a way to let individuals take control and see that they are making a difference.

- Developers and partners Our external network of developers provides the content - the applications and services, that make our stuff better. We have certain core offerings, but we need to be as open as possible for web developers to build on our platforms. Our external developers need to be able to make money. And they need to be able to scale their applications to connect with the installed base of Nokia phones (one of our greatest assets) and find it easy to connect with the technologies and people inside the company. Our internal developers need to be free to innovate quickly and get rewarded for their efforts above the call of duty.

So, here's a selection of ongoing innovation activities we're doing that relate to the above areas.

1. Customers
This is probably the most visible part of the Internet innovation story - since it is about the products and services that we ship. This can be seen in two ways.

First, bringing "today's" Internet onto our devices, so that people can connect with their existing web services. This means that our browser needs to be the best in the world at squeezing a normally big screen web into a small screen real estate. Our current browser is damn good at this, and as an open source effort and shares much of its codebase with the iPhone one. It also means that the web needs to be natively integrated into our software, to turn what used to be known as applications into services. The core of the phone - contacts, calendar and call history need to benefit from web connectivity in ways they don't today. Another issue is that people are fed up with "empty icons" - which when pressed ask you to "enter your settings". This is offputting and intimidating for users, and dumb from a business point of view because we are fragmenting the valuable attention and real estate, distracting the user from using other things that work well. This is the result of a fragmented value chain that was not organization not user-centric. Hopefully it is changing now as operators, distributors and device makers realize that if they don't get figure out how to make a smooth, joined up user experience they'll wither on the vine.

The second and more interesting way that the web will be coming to our devices is when it moves from "stateless" to contextually aware. The experience that you will get from your web service will be different because that service is interacting with the intelligence in the device. This will make services much richer, but also involve the consumer more directly. Companies will need to figure out what deals will entice them to give out their location information in order to receive tailored offerings for example (anyone thinking of doing this without their permission, better find a new job). This is in essence the three dimensional web (as in the title of this blog) and I see it involving 5Cs - context (e.g. location, proximity) contacts, calendar, call history and content (stuff you've made, recommendations and linkages you've created).

One other point to mention here - we'll be seeing a lot more use of the phone to merge people's real world with their online and virtual personas.

Nokia doesn't talk about future product (or services) releases, so there's not much detail here, but now that there has been a major reorganization to create a services and software group, new acquisitions (Gate5 and Navteq for navigation, Loudeye for music and Twango for social networking) as well as a new brand vehicle to launch consumer services (Ovi), expect to see a lot more in this area in the coming months, and check sites such as womworld and noknok and other forthcoming blog sites for details.

2. Employees
Nokia's culture and values are one of its major assets - there is the assumption that people from all over the company will help you out if you ask them, and there is a mountain of stored knowledge in the employees' heads. However, as with any big company, it's not always easy to know who to ask, especially if you're new (I remembered with dismay when I started they didn't have photos next to the names, and I was constantly befuddled by long Finnish names that seemed to consist entirely of Ks and umlauts). Information sharing - often and early - reduces the danger of not invented here, duplicative products and repeated mistakes.

This can be done as a one off event or as a process. We worked with IBM's innovation team last year and held a "Jam" - when each of the employees was asked to contribute to the creation and dissemination of our Internet strategy during a 3 day online meeting. This will probably continue on a regular basis, and meanwhile, at the micro level, we've been making heavy use of blogs and wikis. One story illustrates how this came about: A colleague from the research group, Harri Lakkala, was fed up with using the traditional knowledge management and collaboration tools, so started hosting his own wiki solution for his projects on a spare computer under his desk back in 2003. Word spread about these new tools - which are basically just simple web pages editable by anyone - and soon he was hosting hundreds of wikis with increasingly business critical information under his desk. Happily our IT group figured out that if you can't beat them join them, so now wikis are supported internally and used regularly by over 6000 of our employees. Similarly we've got about 300 internal blogs (and a bunch of external blogs) which have helped to change the culture to become more open and collaborative.

You don't have to be a psychologist to realize that cash is not the only motivation for employees. I'm constantly amazed at how much discussion and active participation there is on the mailing lists about issues that are not on people's short term objectives plan. So, while innovating the compensation will undoubtedly be one of the actions discussed, the most obvious motivational efforts are about giving people the feeling that they are in charge of their own destiny and recognized and rewarded for going beyond the call of duty. This is what happened to Harri - he was given an innovation award, saw his project go mainstream, and is now working on a new team dedicated to bringing about wide-scale change across the company.

On a more systematic basis, we have created a process that allows any employee to have the chance to create a new application or service: Nokia Labs. This was the top recommenation that came out of an Internet innovation conference we organized last year, and is intended as a handy place to showcase they many early stage projects around the company, share the ideas, improve them and engage the creator as "intranpreneur". This has now grown into the public Beta Labs and the internally facing, earlier stage Alpha Labs, which is where many Beta Labs ideas come from.

3. Developers / partners

The third leg of our innovation story concerns developers, and here we have an organization that is devoted to serving them full time - Forum Nokia that is leading most of these efforts, together with our research centre. Some of the more exciting web efforts here are the web runtime and widgets (and widsets for a J2ME service) and the contacts book extensions (e.g used by Gizmo). There are many open source efforts going on, such as the S60 browser, Maemo development platform, Python for S60, Affix (a bluetooth protocol stack for Linux), Hildon touch screen app framework, Carbide development tools, the mobile web server, and Open C which which allows web coders to more easily code for S60 using C and C++ libraries.

In this category we'd also include outreach to universitites, academics and researchers (such as via research.nokia.com and through our collaborative work at the NRC office locations of Palo Alto, Cambridge, MA for MIT, and Cambridge, England where there is a nanosciences lab). Also, corporate tie ups abound, with both the gorillas (e.g. IBM) and the startups as either developers or technology partners and vendors.

Forum Nokia starting to extend beyond the traditional developer demographic with more consumer focused platform MOSH, and the regular Mobile Mashups have started a discussion forum with VC's and start-ups in Silicon Valley, the most recent on on 1 Nov on the subject of Mobile Social.

So, probably time to draw breath and leave it there. I'm fairly confident that this review only partially identified the range of Internet related innovation activities going on around the company, so more than happy to be put right by well meaning readers, and hear about areas where you think we might not be doing enough. But for now, there's quite a bit to be working on.

Nokia's innovation story, Part 1 - key trends

2007-10-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

Blimey, this is turning into being quite a tome. It looks like there's going to be two parts to this story - first, some of the key trends that set the context for the discussion, and second a selection of the innovation activities that we have been working on recently to ensure we accomodate these trends.

During the conference mentioned in the previous post I only got to talk to about a few of these ideas, but I wanted to document them while fresh. It's worth bearing in mind that everyone at Nokia will have a different take on this universally discussed, but rarely adequately defined theme of innovation - since there is an assumption that innovation is owned by everyone. In terms of what innovation is, this was a topic of the night before, and the Editor of the Economist's favourite definition, courtesy of Goldman Sachs, was "fresh thinking that creates value". That works for me, since it reminds us that new ideas alone are nice but irrelevant if they don't have an impact.

So, to the trends. As a company we are grounded in fundamental trends. Nokia is full of fact-loving engineers, and there needs to be data and evidence for what we do. We're unlikely to jump like a jitter bug to the latest shiny thing. That means that sometimes we may be seen as cautious, and may not get it right first time, but when we do it, we know we're doing it for the long haul. (N-Gage comes to mind). When I joined Nokia in 2003 in the delightfully named Insight & Foresight group, one of my tasks was to write the macro economic section of the annual Nokia WorldMap of the top trends in the converging digital industry. This was organized in terms of consumer, business, technology, macro trends, and some overall disruptions, and had about 50 trends that were the summary of a year's worth of analysis of the team. These are updated every year, and I picked a selection that I found most compelling to set the tone: the net generation, the search for authenticity, the information wake, harnessing collective intelligence, mass customization, consumerization of the enterprise (aka Enterprise2.0) and leapfrog innovation. So, now to provide more meat on the bones:

The demographic shadow of the baby boom generation is the net generation, today's 14-30 yr olds that are globally the most influential demographic, accounting for 25-40% of populations (highest in India and Pakistan) and something like 80% of consumer tech purchases, since they advise their parents (data from Don Tapscott's Net Generation project). They live in a polychromatic world (one of Joi Ito's favourite phrases) - vibrant, instant, colourful and multichannel, sharing their lives, often in breath-taking technicolour intimacy with the world, but more often just the people and communities who matter to them. These are people used to being exposed to 3000 brands a day, but not letting them stick. They filter out noise and froth, as if reared subconciously on the Cluetrain. They're the teflon generation, which drives traditional marketers crazy. They're used to being intimate with each other, and ironically, can also be intimate with brands, in particular those that demonstrate authenticity. Authenticity here can be defined as tranparency coupled with high performance, in areas such as environmental sustainability, provenance, employee relations and conversations, not marketing. It means cutting out the spin and the intermediaries between people and the things they want to connect to. Relationships - undiluted. Authenticity means people and companies articulate and share their own unique values, they don't just follow fads. And perhaps more than anything it means mountains of data. There is a high bandwidth for information, and the filters are expected to be client-side. The more blogs the better – not just from the CEO (unless he or she is interesting in their own right), but from the product managers who can talk with loving micro detail about obscure features. The data doesn’t need to be packaged – the rawer the better, otherwise it seems patronizing. Hence the carbon footprint of a packet of crisps – let the people decide. Data about the provenance of things and people is everywhere nowadays, and the smart companies are collecting and analysing it to create better services. Last.FM, Amazon and NefFlix filtering that learns your taste and suggests new things being a simple example. Up til now, these smart recommendation engines have been constrained by the paucity of useful, unique data sets that help the services know that your favourite thing and mine are one and the same. Similarly singers and their products, with the notable exception of a number of Stock, Aitken and Waterman clones from the 80s, are generally unique and different. Meaning can be layered on top, and smart algorithms do their bit. The most obvious (and bankable) recommendation engine to date is of course Google, that uses that wholly unique asset, the URL.

So, here I believe lies the potential of the mobile web – opening up new datasets for analysis and recommendation, with monetary values far in advance of the pennies that vendors pay for the click of a potentially interested surfer. If Amazon can use its smarts to get me to a buy a book based on my behaviour, why not allow someone to recommend what car I should be driving based on an analysis of my actual life, not just the slice of me inferred by my purchasing habits on one book-orientated website. The beauty of the mobile device is that it's not only smart, but connected. According to a China Mobile study, 91% of owners keep within 1 metre of them 24/7. Unlike traditional surfing through the web, this mobile device is moving with you through the "three dimensional" (i.e. real) world, leaving an information wake. The mobile device has the ability to capture and deliver a vast number of different data streams, such as location, who are your real friends (ie those people in your mobile phonebook, not the pale imitations found on social networking services), who do you call the most, and even in future, what you buy, what you eat or how you exercise. This data is created by the user and as such is – or should be - owned by them - getting them to part with it in order to receive useful and services is one of the primary innovation and creativity challenges of our generation. So far, I don’t see clarity in the industry on this and it’s dangerous. We allow Microsoft to create the tools that allow us to write novels, but do not expect them to claim ownership. Similarly, we hire the phone companies for the reason of connecting us with people we chose to connect to. If in doing that, we create a digital trail of commercial value, it would be folly not to assume that most of this value resides with its creator.

Smart companies will figure out how to get the customer to let them tap into these data streams, and use them to generate collective intelligence about what the customers want, often before they even know they want it. Automating data collection and feedback on products will be a breakthrough in terms of productivity, and here again the mobile has the potential to be part of this story. I often wonder why on earth the operators don't actually do something useful with their aggregate view of mobile users. How hard would it be to deliver very powerful real time traffic reports, just based on observing the anonymized progress of the swarms of phone-toting commuters?

Product innovation will be a lot easier when every product has an online service component providing usage information to improve the experience. Who would have expected that rowing machines - a product if ever there was one - would be turned into a social-networking compliant "rowing experience" by bundling net-connected service with the product, allowing you to race against other strangers and friends around the world. With products that can now talk back and among each other, it's a lot easier to have an aggregate view of what is actually happening around your customer's world, and how to fill the gaps. However, this is happening everywhere, with a surfeit of products and services clamouring for the every drop of customer attention.

The natural response to this is to dive into a niche, ever closer to the customer. And it is here that mass customization starts to become both necessary and ubiquitous. With the provision of a service layer on top, even the most anodyne, commodtized product can be differentiated. Telco companies have been trying for years to inject higher level valuable services over the creeping commoditization of connecting bits that is happening to their communications services. Whether its Nike's online service for creating a unique pair of shoes, or the 3D printer that can create a product while the customer waits, people are expecting their products in any colour they like, including black.

However, this supply chain flexibility does not come cheap, and will be another factor that puts pressure on profit margins, in addition to declining entry barriers and commoditization. As such corporate managers suffer quarterly performance anxiety, and face intense pressure to control every moving thing, and cut costs to the quick. Letting go of control and allowing innovation to meander throughout an organization, unencumbered by ROI concerns, must be very hard for people in this position. However, this is exactly what needs to happen in some cases, as in any event, corporates are losing control of their employees. Consumerization and Enterprise2.0 means, in short, Web2.0 principles and processes coming to the workplace, and the resultant empowerment of the edge (in this case employee rather than employer). Employers are learning they are often only coming second (or third or fourth) in the prioirity of their employees. No longer poorly designed collaboration, knowledge management and communication services stand up to scrutiny - employees now have more advanced collaboration technologies in their personal lives, and will expect to use them in the workplace.

Employers letting go of control of their employees is just one element of Enterprise2.0, the changing shape of the corporation being another. Why do we need marketing if a product sells itself and manages the customer support through its own Satisfaction-like community? The only interaction a customer may want with a company is to speak directly to the product manager themselves. As mobiles become more contextually keys for advertising, how will companies be able to accomodate the switch from mass, non specific advertising, to micro, personalized conversations with an audience of one. Finally, not only with corporate hierarchies change, but geographies too. Micro-multinationals mean that companies can locate anywhere, and take advantage of different cost structures and innovation clusters to become worldclass on a shoestring budget. In this vein, leapfrogging occurs - innovations happen first in the developing world as they are driven by creativity inducing constraints. Hence the best place to get cataracts done is in India, and most advanced mobile payments services in Africa.

So, here are a handful of the key trends that I feel are most important in shaping our competitive space - some more relevant than others, and some still debatable. Anyway, next post I'll take a look at some of our innovation activities that we've been putting in place to meet the challenges posed by these trends head on.

Economist Conferences: how they all should be

2007-10-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

My colleague, fellow brit, sailing enthusiast and co-conspirator on some dangerously interesting ideas, John Clarke, is the CIO of Nokia. Unfortunately for him his role means he has real customers to keep happy, vendors to whip, and crises to solve.

Fortunately for me, a perfect work storm hit him this week, and he had to grudgingly hand over to me his attendance at the tremendously interesting Economist 6th Annual Innovation Awards Ceremony and Summit. As a peon normally labouring several layers under the public radar screen, I normally just hawk my wares to an internal audience where I do only limited damage. Hence, when handed this opportunity I was a little nervous. The idea of sitting up on stage with bulging-brained business editor of the Economist, Tom Standage, the CTO of BT and a VP at P&G and talking to a press-strewn room of senior execs about Nokia's innovation story was a little disconcerting.

But actually things went rather well, I think, and my next blog post outlines roughly what I would have said, had I not been answering questions the whole time. But first, it's worth describing the context of this uniquely colourful and interesting meeting. The night before the Summit is an Awards Ceremony at the Science Museum. As a Speaker, I was invited, albeit last minute, and brought along my bemused friend Daryl (who I had planned to meet up with). He had great fun in trying to embarass me in this esteemed company, and fracture the delicate artiface of grownup professionalism that I wear rather awkwardly. However, as the champagne flowed, we started to get into our stride - we buttonholed famous Peruvian economist Hernando do Soto for 15 minutes. He's one of my heroes (I think I may have actually used that phrase to him) - his work on identifying the importance of property rights in developing countries has had a profound impact in his lifetime, and as such he now consults to 21 heads of State. His think tank is described by the Economist as one of the two most influetial in the world. We were seated at the table of Economist editor John Micklethwait, and inches away from the procession of Nobel laureats, billionaires and brainiacs that were honored in this year's awards. My shoulders were brushed by some pretty impressive midriffs: scientists who developed a way to do AIDS tests really quickly, the Chairman of India's outsourcing marvel Infosys, the founder and CEO of RIM (garage tinkerer to hero in 10 years); pioneers in LEDs; the guys who invented GMR (memory storage) which made my iPod possible, and finally an African telco entrepreneur who just sold his corruption-free business for $3.4bn. Phew.

At the end of last night it was obvious that I'd already had more than my money's worth and was starting to enjoy myself. The event was expertly managed, with delicious food, crisp timing, inspiring surroundings and ridiculously bright and successful people at every turn. Encouraging words from Tom Standage put me at my ease, and all I had to do now was think through what was the Nokia innovation story that I wanted to tell. I soon realized that actually, we've got a lot to say, the question was picking the right bits. Whether I did or not, you decide. That's the topic of the next post.

I want to build a tool for hate

2007-10-06T23:24:00.000-07:00

I want to build a tool that allows spittle-fuelled invectives, deep dark howling rants and purple prose that takes your breath away. But relax, this isn't a story of bad hatred - of people, politics or puppies. No this is about good hate. Good hate is hatred of bad things. Crime, corruption, inefficiency, lawlessness, thuggery, treachoury, cantankerousness and deeply bad service.

What started this train of thought was a specific incident last week as I ate the gruel of tatty "service" that the beleaguered Heathrow airport serves up cold. Arriving late night in Terminal 4, there was a long queue of several hundred people waiting for passport control, and a separate queue for the iris scanning machine. Now, having had my iris scanned I went up to this shorter line, pleased with the prospect of a sharp exit. After about 5 minutes of waiting around and realizing that the line wasn't getting any shorter, it was clear that the system wasn't letting people through. An official overseeing the mess from the command center then saunters up and says, Nope, the machine's not working, so we'd better go back to the line. By this time, a few other hundred people have arrived, so we stumble back, with more of our lives wasted. So bad enough that the machine wasn't working (happens on about 1 out of 3 times I've tried these machines) but nobody could be bothered to even put up a sign saying sorry, don't waste your time. Just one example, there are countless more, at that airport alone.

My annoyance at the appalling state of our airport is mashed with embarrassment that any foreigners should be exposed to this as the first thing they see, liberally sprinkled with utter helplessness - both due to not being able to do anything about it but also because of my inability to vent my frustration in a satisfactory way. Of course there was huffing and puffing by my co-victims in the queue but we're all in the same boat.

I should shrug it off, toughen up. God knows, as a Londoner I have ample opportunity to feel frustrated with what goes by the name of our public transport service. I felt like jumping up and down and screaming NO, THIS IS COMPLETELY SHIT!! However it's been about 30 years since my last public tantrum, and civil society impedes a direct 1-1 relationship between the rages in my head and my vocal chords.

But, let's leave aside this dark story - the reverse, happier side is also true. I also want to create a tool for Love. Heaping large amounts of love on a person should be easier than it is today. I want to say that I love that building, that organization, that hero that I've never met.

And to an extent the Web does give me a voice to do exactly that. However, it is not really well designed to deal with real things - it prefers to deal with URLs. It organizes by [http followed by indecipherable code] rather than [that which we commonly refer to as...]. Having a naming convention built around real things and real places would be really helpful. Where do I go if I want to complain about Heathrow? Well, if I wanted to complain about a restaurant inside Heathrow I might be lucky, and find something on Yell or Timeout or Squaremeal or LondonEating or wherever. But what about Heathrow itself? This creaky, wheezing behemoth is a major part of our lives, but its online presence is an anodyne, sterilized boilerplate, which clearly has no intention to allow us to peak behind the curtain to the conversations that real people are having with each other about this infernal place, and attempting to have with Heathrow.

What I think we need is a place on the web that can be the hub of discussions around an airport, a brand, a government, a city, a product or, well, just about anything, whether or not the owner in charge likes the idea. Of course these conversations are happening in a fragmented way today, and Google is doing a good job at knitting these together for those who search for them, but this is ad hoc. Each of us enter queries differently, and the results that Google delivers are generally between them and us, with few search terms on brand names delivering the genuine voice of the people rather than the PR department. However, there's no denying - it would be nice to have a global directory of things that we all use and refer to.

Happily, am seeing some small steps in this direction. People-powered customer service directories is not something I knew existed until recently, and now there are two. The founders of Silicon Valley startup Satisfaction were over in London last week to speak at the Future of Web Apps conference, and I've just heard about another startup from South Africa called HelloPeter, which has been doing the same kind of thing for a while. I had a good chat with one of the founders of Satisfaction, Lane Becker, who was also one of the founders of the rather wonderful Adaptive Path. I was struck with the simple proposition of their site - they're going to help your customers have conversations about your brands, so you might as well join in. This level of transparency requires a company to feel good about their product, and their customers, and some impressive, customer-focused companies such as Timbuk2 are already using it to have even more open conversations with their customers.

Well, you can guess the rest. Reared on a Hollywood addiction to happy endings, I'm hoping that need for hate will disappear. So I created a channel for Heathrow at Satisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/heathrow) noted my problem, and now wait, patiently and ever optimistic (like those in the line for passport control) that Heathrow - and bad services around the world - will start to listen. And maybe even respond.

Speaker Series: Sean Moffitt on Wiki Brands

2007-09-27T14:49:00.000-07:00

I met Sean Moffit, the founder of Canadian word of mouth marketing company Agent Wildfire, a few months ago at one of Don Tapscott's seminars and he gave a convincing talk on the need for brands to be more defined by customer interactions - hence the name Wiki Brands. He came over to Nokia House a few days ago and delivered a well-received presentation that delivered a blizzard of case studies and statistics in a compelling way that left most people with a clear picture of some of the major changes happening in branding today.

We also had a few of Nokia's own word of mouth experts in the room (we've got a fairly active programme) who shared what they'd been up to.

Your favourite 2.0 pundits?

2007-09-10T22:11:00.001-07:00

Quite a few people are asking me for recommendations about good social networking and 2.0-type thinkers and speakers, not necessarily just from the mobile space. Most of the requests are UK/Europe, so probably makes sense to start there.

Have you heard someone you think is good recently that you'd like to recommend? Or - no time for modesty - are you yourself interested to be "on the circuit" and willing and able to share your strong opinions about matters 2.0, social networking and / or enterprise 2.0? Would be great to hear from you. Either leave a comment or ping me on stephen dot johnston at nokia dot com.

Pablos comes and stirs things up

2007-08-29T09:34:00.000-07:00

"Pablos" is quite a well-known hacker, security expert and futurist, who I saw give a great presentation at the DLD Conference earlier this year, so invited him to come to Helsinki and talk to Nokia.

He's worked on numerous cool projects, such as OQO and the hackerbot - which drives up to people with open wifi and shows them their passwords. We had a roundtable brainstorming with him afterwords and my key takeaway was the many overlaps that exist between the murky world of hacking and the gleaming prize of innovation. As we start to launch our new internet services, we're going to need to learn how to be fuzzier, murkier and more willing to embrace the hacker ethos that Pablos and his uni-named friends embody.

Enterprise2.0 - what does it mean for mobile?

2007-08-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks I’ve been having a number of interesting conversations about “Enterprise2.0”, what it means for mobility in general and for Nokia in particular. Despite a handful of productive and insightful commentators, it’s rather an anemic oeuvre compared to its Big Brother Web2.0 with very little written on the mobile aspects – as we could probably expect, given its U.S. origins. So, I’ve had some chats with some reliably smart folk such as Marc Orchant and Ajit Jaokar (who has also started musing on the topic), done some exhaustive research (yes, dear reader, minutes not seconds), and am liking what I see. It seems that many of the defining elements of Enterprise2.0 are a natural fit to the mobile space, in particular the possibility to capture and more easily transmit new kinds of data (for example putting location, context and communication history as an integral part of E2.0 services), the modular architecture of web syndication (RSS and user-defined filters work well on mobile) and, not least, the opportunities for the mobile to replace the PC, in particular for small businesses and / or emerging markets.

All is not rosy however. The mobile industry faces major obstacles in being part of this interesting arena, for example i) fragmented mobile operating systems, most of which are not built from the ground up to be web native ii) the default PC-centric approach towards enterprise2.0 applications (big screen, keyboard and sophisticated browser) and iii) despite some signs to the contrary, still slooooow progress by the mobile operators to get out of the way of innovation and introduce transparent pricing and proper flat-rate tariffs.

So I’d propose that the mobile industry should stop scrapping over who gets which share of an ever dwindling consumer pie and instead target the bigger prize – helping companies go 2.0. And that means a new, open and collaborative approach with a much wider range of partners than the mobile industry normally works with, so that we can figure out how to bake mobility into Enteprise 2.0 from the start.

Defining moments – people, not process

Definitions are often tricky, but in the case of Enterprise2.0, it shouldn't be hard - since it is really just Web2.0 goes corporate – from the frat-room to the boardroom. Harvard’s Andrew McAfee, one of those most active in the paternity battle for this new babe, defines it as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”. A more expansive view would also take in the people dimension, such as this summary from a recent Enterprise2.0 conference: "a radical change in the way businesses operate and is as much about the people, the culture and the processes as it is about the technology, tools and platforms.” So either way, this is a story of socializing the enterprise (not a word that comfortably fits in most capitalist dictionaries). But if this approach puts people front and centre in companies, rather than inflexible processs and acronyms, I’m all in favour.

McAfee provides a helpful acronmyn (SLATES) which highlights key 2.0 characteristics that will generally be found in these solutions: search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals. More explanations in his original paper. Social software is a key building block for Enterprise2.0, and it is starting to attract IT managers’ attention. Gartner’s July 2007 research paper, “The Emerging Enterprise Social Software Marketplace” predicts a compound annual revenue growth for social software of 41.7% through 2011 (from $120m last year to $700m in 2011). They say it’s now moving beyond the traditional blogs and wikis to include “social software platforms, bookmarking, communities of practice, discussion forums, expertise location and information feeds”.

The timing is right for this discussion, as Enteprise2.0 is rapidly going mainstream. McKinsey found three quarters of executives planning to increase investment on these kind of collaborative tools. A Forrester survey of 119 CIOs found 89% “had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging - and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools.”

So, to the mobile angle. Mobile has generally been the ugly duckling of the 2.0 world, but things are changing. Just when we were finally seeing mobile browsers tackle full Ajax-y web pages well and start to convince people thinking that the mobile web and the real web aren’t really that different, along came rich browsing applications that raised the bar still higher for our already fiendishly creative geeks. The Big Browser paradigm is inimical to mobile, and if we try and squeeze it into little screens it will end in tears. One example, while reading a NYTimes piece on how your friends can make you fat, I noticed that you’re able to double-click on any word in the story and pull up a definition of it, without that word being in hypertext. That is a fairly new concept to me, and if it becomes widely adopted, could pose yet another challenge for mobile, as today’s mobile browser user experience do not seem to allow such doubleclicks. However, we all know the world is going mobile. The interesting question is whether the mobile element will be an afterthought, tacked on with limited functionality, or will be a fundamental part of the experience from the beginning. So I looked back at the Web2.0 principles Tim O'Reilly wrote in 2005 that seem to have weathered the discussion well and have now become part of the furniture. Most of them as we can see are relevant to the enterprise space, but what do they mean for mobile?

1. The Web as a platform

On the consumer side, the Web is now clearly the global platform for developers, entrepreneurs and individuals. Consumer-focused startups now need a fraction of the money they used to in order to get up and running, and scale with relative ease. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook have brought social networking to the masses – people who neither know nor care that such a term exists. That this trend is going corporate is one of the tenets of Enterprise2.0. Consumerization of IT is afoot, and consumer-focused tools (IM, VOIP and social networks) are appearing either neat (19,337 Microsofties on Facebook) or diluted to taste (LinkedIn and other less colourful offerings). However, the fuzzy, beta-nature of many of these services mean they’re not suited for business critical functions such as the software that runs our big manufacturing plants. Also, it is still hard for web-based startups to break into the big corporate accounts – you can’t yet code a business lunch or round of golf in Ajax. Supporting this, the Forrester survey found that 71% of companies would prefer “tools to be offered by a major incumbent vendor like Microsoft or IBM [rather than] smaller specialist firms like Socialtext, NewsGator, MindTouch, and others”. So, the web is not yet as advanced for enterprise offerings as for the consumer side.

As for the mobile industry, let’s be honest – we still have a way to go. Fragmented operating systems, screen sizes, resolutions and capabilities frustrate development efforts, few entrepreneurs are making real money out of the mobile internet or seeing large scale service adoption, and few people would chose their operator (or handset maker? let’s see) to provide their social network rather than their fresh-faced, agile web innovator. However, let’s remember that the mobile is much more recent arrival than the PC, and there are uniquely challenging constraints regarding form factor, UI and battery life etc. It is worth mentioning here that Nokia has been focusing like a laser beam on this topic in recent months – it has dominated recent corporate strategy dicussions and is now at the core of our recent reorg and new company structure. Our CEO has made “we’re an internet company” pronouncements whenever he’s been offered a microphone; Symbian is taking great strides in becoming more developer and web-friendly, and our browser is one of the industry’s best kept secrets (and incidentally, shares most of its code with the iPhone). We’re also starting to deliver some rather funky new apps, including a mobile web server, real-world browsing and of course the web tablet and open-source Linux platform (Maemo). Advert over – but worth saying, and no doubt other mobile players are being active here. As an industry however, we’re still playing catchup.

2. Harnessing collective intelligence

Amazon is often held up as the first example of a service provider that lets users benefit from collective intelligence through their collaborative filtering engine. So, why would this not also work in areas other than books? For example, "intelligent" CRM software could scan the salesperson's customer responses, and suggests appropriate product offerings based on large numbers of other interactions, potentially also outside the company. (Actually, maybe it does already, it’s been a while since I worked in the industry). Most sales people are inherently mobile, and providing lightweight usable tools that expose this collective intelligence at the right time and in the right context, could be a very valuable offering to mobile users.

Wikis are great at capturing user-created intelligence and are rapidly becoming mainstream in the enterprise space, but if you’ve ever tried using one of today’s wikis from your mobile, you’ll appreciate the inherent problems here. Socialtext have been making moves in this regard, but here is a standard chicken-and-egg problem – limited demand resulting in limited development time, begetting limited offerings. UI and synchronization are the key issues to solve. As noted above, services requring smart and big browsers face an uphill struggle on the mobile. Today’s wikis often suggest side-by-side version control review, and require a big screen to see the differences. Synchronization is a key conceptual challenge with mobile, since they generally are not always on. Wikis rely on having one version of the truth – two people making changes to the same item when offline then syncing later makes would vex Schrödinger himself.

Today project managers in Nokia that I work with will generally just create an empty wiki space as they start a new project. This example is being played out across the corporate landscape, and could well disrupt collaboration applications that are built on the assumption that the designers – cut off from the action – know what’s right for each project. Here Nokia’s interests are well aligned with the wiki companies and web services companies in general – do away with the need for a PC and keep the smarts in the cloud. Once bottom up “architectures of participation” are in place, powerful learnings can then be harnessed - enterprise-focused social networking tools (Ryze, Tribe, LinkedIn) are able to unearth links, activities and dependencies around the organization which traditional hierarchies and organizational structures miss.

There are plenty of ways that mobiles could be used as both in-the-field data gatherers, providing relelvant context, or being the mobile manager’s tool of choice for viewing and interacting with the wisdom of the crowds who have gone before.

3. Data is the next Intel inside

A key element of anything with a 2.0–suffix is about shift of control and content creation to the edges. In most companies, ours included, there is a lot of valuable data being created by our employees and customers that is currently not captured or utilized. As the locus of value moves from product to service, capturing and understanding these conversations is becoming a key requirement. These customers and employees at the edge now have the tools, techniques and – significantly – expectations about their ability to make change happen. Wikis and blogs are now full-to-bursting with valuable first-person thoughts, reflections and data - some unstructured, others in an array of formats. This data is now the beating heart of today's enterprise, and often a unique repository of insights from the key experts in the company. Few senior managers will fully appreciate this resource because it has arrived via the back door.

Nokia's own efforts at promoting wikis and blogs internally continue and are now reaching mainstream. There is still however plenty more scope for their use in the harder-to-reach, business critical areas of the business, such as the sales teams and factory management. When you’re making 300m+ phones a year, the fuzziness inherent in wikis needs to be selectively applied. Also there is room for more innovation on top of the many tools that are available. TiddlyWiki (recently purchased by BT) integrates IP-communication plug-ins to the wiki framework, thereby allowing in-house IT executives to hack together innovative IP & mobile communication experiences, without needing long requirements lists, lead times, operator involvement or large amounts of money. They used to burn people at the stake for such heresy.

I expect to see companies doing more with wikis and blogs, using them for key product and customer data, with relevant user-level access controls if necessary. At Nokia we are using the open source MediaWiki engine used for a Nokia Infopedia, to make it easy for people to find and then use the key data about our products, solutions, organizational change initiatives, pricing, strategies, marketing initiatives etc. Often overlooked is the change of pace that needs to take place when the early adopter tools move mainstream - today's wikis are still too complicated and hard to use, so a top-down campaign to encourage wiki use will fail without adequate thought and resources being given to training and education, as well as experimenting with new simple UI developments such as drag and drop and other concepts that people are already familiar with. Salesforce.com's AppExchange and Jive Software's clearspace are interesting in this regard. We need to get the balance right between innovation and communication in order to bring all employees along this path.

Customer conversations that happen around our products represent the possibility to collect insanely valuable data, and engage in genuine conversations with the people who buy our stuff. Currently, as a product company, we don’t yet do this on a large scale – just a few pilot initiatives and ad hoc discussions around individuals’ blogs. Contrast this to Google - every second their search engine receives primary user data, about terms that matter to them, and the effect of every change that Google makes to its site can be callibrated immediately, and they can get a sense of the pulse of the world in real time.

Moving from the source of data to the type of data - we are going to be seeing next generation web services start to be built for a three dimensional world, and one in which context is king. This will massively increase the number and type of data-sources available as inputs in the creation of web services. The scope and type of services that can be built using this data are difficult to imagine, because so much of the web today is in two dimensions - when you are reading your email client, the email sevice provider does not know if you are in Sydney or Sidcup.

Data can be defined broadly here - from active, user generated tags (modular, and easy to submit, so perfect for mobiles) to specific data, captured in the background such as usage and communication metadata. How easy is it for users of our devices to access their own data - where they've been, who they've talked to, what applications they've used the most etc? In short, not easy at all, yet.

Nick Carr highlights a critical piece of the puzzle suggesting that Enterprise2.0 may have a better chance than other new fangled technologies – they make life easier not harder. In particular, the system gets smarter as people use it normally. “Knowledge is captured, in other words, as it's created, without requiring any additional work”. The classic consumer examples here are Last.fm’s music recognition and Amazon’s collaborative filtering – both services allow your profile to become smarter and more helpful to you over time, if you give it access to what you do. So the incentive to use it increases. A fascinating question to me is to what extent can relevant data be automatically captured from the mobile device that you carry with you 24hrs a day, and itself be an input to new Enterprise2.0 applications.

It is the different types of data available to creative entrepreneurs that should make the mobile industry sit up and take notice. Location information is one key ingredient that is trapped and lying dormant for want of a ha’penny of innovation. An entrepreneur I spoke to recently said he would have been charged €0.15 for each call that his application made to the operator to get a location fix from their cell ID. What a wasted opportunity to add value. He is obviously now routing round the roadblock and using GPS or consumer-created information database. Location is just one piece of data, but there are many others on the phone – which companies you call the most, who your friends are, who was in Bluetooth range over the past few days. With careful management and consumer-friendly usage, such data could lead to new technicolour applications and services that will make today’s Enterprise and Web2.0 services look black-and-white.

4. Perpetual beta

The mobile industry has unwittingly delivered plenty of betas in the past (WAP, MMS…), but they weren’t marketed as such. Instead of failures, they might have been seen as tentative first steps. But then it’d have been hard to justify charging consumers so much for them. Few in our industry seem to have recognized that the value of rich, direct feedback from users can far outweigh the minimal revenues that are captured by overpriced and underwhelming services. This requires a change in attitude, and a more open conversation with customers. This will in turn require changes in our transparency and "corporate voice". It is not about shipping and forgetting, but about partnering with customers who are trying to maximize the value of their investments. The Web2.0 software company 37signals does this well - a product-focused blog keeps news of almost-daily upgrades flowing and rapid and personal customer support for paying customers results in a high comfort level, and willingness to engage.

The beta mindset is coming to mobile: recent examples include Orange’s coding camp in August for developers in San Francisco (which perhaps included some marketing element to boost the launch of their Bubbletop web/widget service) and Vodafone R&D labs’ Betavine which aims to “encourage collaboration in the area of mobile and internet communications”. At Nokia, we’ve launched Nokia BetaLabs for the public and internally we have a service called AlphaLabs which now has about 75 applications and services for employees to test and provide feedback on. However, I see most of these activities as table stakes – we’re not really raising the bar of innovation beyond what is happening on the web, and in any event, it’s often far more challenging to be a beta tester on mobile – installation is harder (though our PC suite product is now actually pretty usable), user numbers are lower so there’s less feedback, and there’s always a danger that we’ll alienate (and bankrupt) our users who download data intensive applications without a decent data plan. Another challenge here is the current community forum experience on mobiles – it’s fairly poor, and most examples are just web-based forums squeezed to a small screen.

The more interesting issues relate to the topics that today’s beta aspects can’t handle well, and here mobile connectivity makes continuous feedback possible, and smart contextual awareness means that feedback can more easily be provided automatically. As mobile platforms mature and become more integrated with the web, expect to see greater use of the mobile as both a direct channel for feedback on mobile services, and a feedback tool integrated with existing web services (an example could be the integration of music recommendation service Last.fm with the music player on the phone).

5. Lightweight Programming Models

New open web standards are being deployed across the enteprise in particular to enable richer user experiences (e.g. AJAX), mashups (XML) and syndication of content (RSS). These allow individuals to create personalized feeds based on information that is important to them, but may not have a critical mass in terms of numbers of users, to get a tailored solution built for them. Related to this is the concept of "hackability" - how to make sure that the individuals (either employees or the customers-themselves) have enough control over the system to create their "own-label" solutions, and then, ideally share with others and improve for the benefit of the whole ecosystem. The concept of hackability is anathema to the mobile industry, and there are some pretty solid reasons for this: sensitive personal data and the ease of running up large bills being two obvious places to start. So clearly there needs to be some thought given to what is opened up and what is locked down. I’ve heard a number of people say that J2ME is not that interesting as you can’t do very much with it – such as accessing the calling and connectivity features. However, I’m a business guy not a technologist, so I can’t add much here, apart from to say that the mobile industry doesn’t have the luxury to sit on its hands and do nothing in this area, as our customers’ communication needs are increasingly being met by internet players who are embracing hackability.

One obvious example here are the core applications of the phone. How many fabulously interesting consumer and enterprise applications would be developed (within 24hrs) if web developers using lightweight protocols such as XML could easily gain access to the phone book’s contacts book, call log, message archive and calendar?

One test for lightweight programming models will be the extent to which "presence" becomes mainstream in corporate usage. Still the preserve of the young, IM-reared generation, and considered somewhat sceptically by incumbent executives, this is expected to become more mainstream. Alex Saunders has some good thinking around what he calls "new presence" with new value-enhaching applications such as call management, advertising, and enterprise solutions that are enabled by lightweight, interoperable web based standards such as XML. It is unlikely that the pace of innovation in this space will fit within the traditional top-down standards bodies processes; the mobile needs to allow innovators in to access the data and create new applications and services on top.

So, again, lots of potential IF the mobile industry embraces these lightweight models. In addition mobiles would work well with “loosely-coupled” services, such as mashups that tailor and filter data before it reaches you, helping you reduce information overload (one example would be an enterprise proximity social networking app that would display the current status of customers’ accounts that you are about to bump into at a conference). Maps mashup showing houses to rent within 500yards of where you are now). RSS is also well suited to mobile – not only does it deliver modular, packaged stories that work well on the small screen (or headset), but a feed reader or podcast client can load up a full days’ worth of content using free wifi.

6. Software above the level of the device

This issue shares many similarities with the “Web as a platform” principle, and if it is not handled well could represent a great sucking sound of value leaving mobile platforms. There is little point in having just a mobile platform – your services should be available on the mobile, just as they are on your colleague’s computer, or your car on the drive home. The mobile industry can no longer make phones that treat the web as a place to go, but needs to make devices that seamlessly extend the services available on the web, and provide the benefits of physical form.

Tim O'Reilly himself uses the example of the mobile industry’s biggest (unused) asset to date, the contacts book, to demonstrate how this will be affected:

"It's easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you've explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn't found in the local cache. Lacking an answer there, the system would query the broader social network".

We cannot just decide not to lose control of the contacts book – again, we do not have the luxury of choice. We need to actively ensure that core functions have an internet strategy including but not limited to: have the web as a back up, channel for access and platform for innovation.

The calendar function is similarly powerful, and there seems to be an opportunity here for a really good cross-device core application suite - seamless syncing the user’s core information across multiple devices and platforms, with a core offering that lives in the cloud. Again we can turn to the web for lessons in innovation – Zyb, Soocial, Fidgt, Tabber, Anywr and of course Plaxo are doing fun things with contacts, 30boxes, and SyncMyCal making calendars work better, and RememberTheMilk and TaDa for task lists.

Apparently 93% of cameraphone photos never leave the phone – clearly because the software so far has not been above the level of a single device. This is changing too – companies such as Sharpcast and Shozu, and of course Nokia’s own Twango and Mosh, are intent on making it far easier to move media off the phone and on to the web.

In additon to core applications and one’s media taking to the cloud, the browser is also going agnostic and making the entire PC go virtual. Soonr allows you to access the contents of a remote PC from your mobile browser - something that shifts value away from the PC to the mobile. In the enterprise side, companies such as Zoho, DesktopTwo and ThinkFree are natural partners to mobile companies that seek to commoditize PCs – turning any of them into your own personal machine is true commoditization. So, again while it is still early days, the potential for mobile is strong – here we should aim to be a central part of an ecosystem in which intelligence lives in the cloud and uses the most appropriate device at the right time to allow the customer to intreract with the service.

7. Rich user experiences

Finally, the concept of user experience is key, and has been the driver of much of the shift towards consumer tools in the workplace. Compare the experience of using Skype with using our IBM-supplied IM Sametime-client and you see the point: one is fun, the other is grey. As Nokia we need to move beyond grey and give these tools a human face, this is perfectly consistent with our new tagline of creating “very human technology”.

The emerging "Millenials" generation (teenagers – 30yr olds) are looking to connect on a personal level with others, and more at ease with a meritocracy of ideas than a hierarchy of job titles. Creating visually appealling and accessible solutions (Second Life job interviews, Skyping the boss, AJAX interfaces on corporate websites) is going to be just another part of what it means to be Enterprise2.0.

What does this principle mean for mobile? Well, as processing speeds, screen resolutions and speaker qualities increase there is a natural tendency to make the phone sing, dance and perform to the nth degree. There’s certainly room for that in some consumer experiences, but when it comes to the enterprise space, a rich user experience gives me only what I want at the time I want it, and delivering this is the job of many of the principles above. Del.ico.us is a good example – almost everything on the page is there for a reason, and a click can filter and slice the data in intuitive ways. Efficient functions, no wasted space, no flashing gizmos – perhaps a good starting point for mobile service design?

Summary

Above I’ve reviewed O’Reilly’s original principles with my enterprise hat on, and with a mobile in my hand. It’s worth noting that these original principals were extended in a more indepth (commercial) report here, which gave a nod to Web2.0 poster child Chris Long Tail Anderson, and Dave Small Pieces Loosely Joined Weinberger. Dion Hinchcliffe notes that this report doesn’t change the substance of these principles, but does provide more context and affirms the link with Enterprise2.0 by providing more discussion of the enterprise impact.

Looking at it this way, the mobile seems to be an Enterprise2.0 story that is not often told, but one rich in potential. I’ve picked out a few potential implications for Nokia – and the mobile industry – that fall broadly into two categories - internally focused on improving our transparency, collaboration and speed, and externally focused, market orientated solutions, encompassing opportunities for both devices and services / solutions. I think this is a good time for us to take the initiative here - show the Internet incumbents (GYM) that we can match them at innovation, speed and customer-focus, and beat them solidly when it comes to helping companies adopting enterprise2.0 strategies that have mobile as a central element, not an afterthought.

_____________________________________

Some related resources:
Introductory slideshow to Enteprise2.0: http://www.slideshare.net/slgavin/meet-charlie-what-is-enterprise20
Andrew McAfee: http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/the_three_trends_underlying_enterprise_20/
Dion Hinchcliffe: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/
Mark Orchant: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant/
Don Tapscott on Enterprise2.0: http://www.enterprise2conf.com/whitepapers/pdf/enterprise2conf-donald_tapscott.pdf
Ajit Jaokar: http://www.opengardensblog.futuretext.com/
Umair Haque: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/
Enterprise2.0 Conference, Boston, 18-21 June 2007 http://www.enterprise2conf.com/
- presentations here: http://www.enterprise2conf.com/2007/presentations/
Office2.0 Conference: 5 Sept 2007 http://o2con.com/index.jspa

Dan Gillmor speaking at Nokia

2007-08-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

Dan Gillmor is rare in that he is both a leading commentator, as well as a creator, of the next generation of the Internet culture and business, having been a reporter for San Jose Mercury News for many years, and more recently as the founder and face of Citizen Media.

Given the obvious connections between increasingly powerful and Internet-connected mobile devices (sorry, computers) and empowered individual journalists, I've been trying to get Dan to come to Helsinki for ages and talk to us, and just before the Summer we managed it (video below). The slides don't really come out, but most of the info is in his talk anyway.

(In case you're wondering about his opening remarks, he slipped and fell over the carpet 2mins before this video started, spilling water over his laptop. Happily, damage to man and machine was not fatal.)

Looking behind the car seats to find half a trillion of value

2007-08-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

Here’s a hypothesis: One of the most interesting places to look for new business value for the mobile industry is in the other industries that can be disrupted by the selective application of mobile intelligence.

The taxi industry is one such – an industry that is crying out for a dose of efficiency (or rather, has customers that are). How many people take cabs from any airport to the city centre, while the person behind them in the cab queue is about to do the same thing? Funnily enough, it again comes down to a communication problem – make it easier for the right information to pass between the right people at the right time, and you’ve got yourselves some savings, some of which could be turned into value (the way that Skype turns saving telco bills into willingness to pay).

My colleague Stephan Hartwig published a paper earlier this year about this that’s worth a read if you’re into this stuff. The intro says it all:

There are 500+ million privately owned passenger cars worldwide, thereof 236 Million in the US. These cars travel in the magnitude of 5 Trillion km per year. Let’s assume 2 empty seats per car and a small hypothetical value of only 5 cent per km and seat, the potential value of empty travelling seats amounts to 500billion€.

Of course, there are some pretty formidable social, technical and business model challenges to plugging into these opportunities, but that's what entrepreneurs are for. I wonder where else the selective application of mobile intelligence could also have the potential for change? Government tranparency and charitable donations could be candidates, and journalism and media in general surely have lessons to offer.

My MoSoSo preso

2007-07-26T12:14:00.001-07:00

Just gave this presentation on mobile social networking to the Mobile Social Networking Conference here in San Francisco.

The deck lists 6 big ideas that I think will shape the space:
- Intimacy not irrelevance
- Push not pull
- Filters
- 3D not 2D
- Marketing not advertising
- P2P = Pocket to pocket

Business Week on Nokia

2007-07-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

A nice piece about Nokia in Biz Week:

[Nokia] seems to be doing everything right these days. Nokia's supply-chain management may be the best of any company in the world. It has a big head start in fast-growing markets such as China and India. And it has $9.5 billion in cash and practically no debt, so it can invest far more than rivals on developing new products or conquering new markets—and thus build even more intimidating economies of scale

The guys at HQ can savour this for approximately 2 seconds, and then get back to being paranoid. Things go down as well as up, and we're not likely to forget it. My $0.02:

- The story focuses only on the "phone as the product" market, and the 40% market share that we've been chasing for a decade (and seems to be tantalising close). But I wonder if when we reach it, the concept will be meaningless. What will the definition of a "phone" be in 2-3 years? Is it because one of the multiple wireless engines (wifi, bluetooth, wimax), happens to use government regulated cellular spectrum that it counts as a phone? Despite the current iPhone boost to the concept of a product business, in the long term, margins on all such products are declining, and the key test for our future competitiveness is the extent to which we can nail the services that build on top of, and extend, the devices.

- Let's bring some of that prodigous Indian innovation back to our markets. The pieces highlights a "$45 model [that] can go more than two weeks without a recharge and has a built-in flashlight" and "[a Nokia van that provides] instruction on how to use mobile phones. Two ideas we should implement in UK asap! :)

Stop the misguided visionaries in Westminster Council before they do real damage

2007-07-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

I thought this story must have been a joke when I first heard it. Apparently some bright sparks in London's Westminster Council are going to remove parking meters and instead rely on mobile phones for payments. The arguments, such as they are, suggest that it will be cheaper not to have to send people round to empty the meters, and it will be so much more convenient for the motorist, because they can for example add more time on by phone without going back to their car.

Unless there have been major usability improvements since I last was unfortunate enough to encounter Westminster's mobile payment parking process, I think this will be an unmitigated disaster. Clearly, saving money by axing parking attendants will be one benefit, but the real revenue will come in from fines for cars whose owners have failed to master the technology to book their slot. The usability of the scheme is so far away from acceptable that I'd be surprised if it doesn't result in a minor revolution (or the English equivalent thereof - a letter writing campaing to the Times).

Looking at the guidance material, it is clear that nothing has changed. The instructions for setting up payment are painfully complicated:

Call 0870 428 4009 and follow the touchtone prompts.
Using your phone keypad you will need to enter the following:
Your credit or debit card number
Card expiry date (2 digit expiry month, followed by 2 digit expiry year)
Card start date or issue number (debit card users only)
Vehicle registration number (VRN)*
*In order to enter your VRN, you need to press the key on your phone which displays the first character of your VRN followed by the number which represents the order it appears on that key. For example, for the letter ‘C’ you will need to press 2, followed by the number 3.

Have you got that? I had the unfortunate experience of trying out this mobile payments misery a few weeks ago, and after 5minutes of pain, gave up and went off to find a new non-mobile bay. Westminster Council helpfully provides a log-in option on their website to allow people to create accounts, and this seems to me the greatest ever folly. People who know about, and have registered in advance for the Westminster Council online membership scheme are probably locals, whereas logic suggests that the majority of those needing to pay for parking are from outside the borough, and have not the faintest idea of any of this.

I do applaud the ambition, and mobiles are wonderful things, but forcing people to use them when the technology and usability is not there, is just plain wrong. (As is assuming that everyone has them, and they haven't run out of battery or credit.)

We laugh at the futurists who expected all of us to be zooming round in our jetpacks by now; just because the technology is in place, it does not mean the experience is ready for the mainstream, be it in personal jet propulsion or mobile payments.

I do suspect that the secret agenda here is to make parking so terrifically complicated and painful, that people will leave the car at home. But if that is not actually the case, my suggestion would be to do as Oyster have been doing and trial NFC which seems a logical answer for mobile payments, and allow that to be an alternative channel, perhaps with a discounted rate to encourage adoption. Killing off cash at this stage would be premature, will unfairly penalized those with less tech savvy (am putting myself in that category) and, I predict, lead to far higher levels of pavement-rage, resulting in huge hospital bills that dwarf any short-term savings.

Westminster: Relent, before it's too late!

Finally, the truth about 2.0

2007-07-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

This was picked up in an internal mailing list:

dsully: please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
jwb: you make all the content. they keep all the revenue.

Without a mobile, you're nobody

2007-07-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

From Bruce Sterling's Wired piece (found on A VC):

Anyway, fact is, a passport is redundant — even if it's crammed full of RFID chips that howl your ID to every passing parking meter. The US should do what the Japanese do: track every foreigner's mobile. If he does anything freaky, jump on him.

"But Mr. Feldspar, suppose this international criminal doesn't carry a mobile?" demanded representative Chuck Kingston (R-Alabama). It would have been rude to point out the obvious. So I didn't. But look, just between you and me: Anybody without a mobile is not any kind of danger to society. He's a pitiful derelict. Because he's got no phone. Duh.

He also has no email, voicemail, pager, chat client, or gaming platform. And probably no maps, guidebooks, Web browser, video player, music player, or radio. No transit tickets, payment system, biometric ID, environmental safety sensor, or Breathalyzer. No alarm clock, camera, laser scanner, navigator, pedometer, flashlight, remote control, or hi-def projector. No house key, office key, car key... Are you still with me? If you don't have a mobile, the modern world is a seething jungle crisscrossed by electric fences crowned with barbed wire. A guy without a mobile is beyond derelict. He's a nonperson.

Meta me

2007-06-26T04:17:00.000-07:00

Been trying out the mobile codes apps from Beta Labs - pretty interesting possibilities when the web merges with the real world, almost of which I haven't even begun to think about yet.

On stigmergy, ants and VRM

2007-06-19T13:58:00.000-07:00

Joe Andrieu writes a savvy post on the VRM concept. My brain is tired from doing the requisite backflips, but happy for the workout. He relates vendor management to one of the "you know it's important but how" concepts - swarm intelligence.

This suggests that it may be easier to rearchitect supporting business systems around the user, just as we know we need to do for the consumer experiences themselves. Here the user is the local store of intelligence which vendors (and whomever else) can then interract with, and in so doing improve that user's intelligence. So, if we can get systems to learn that everytime the individual gets on a plane he takes the window seat, maybe we can infer something useful that we can use for picking seats on other modes of transport. Or maybe not - but it'd be fun to have the data to play with.

This is a natural extension for mobiles, and one that may be a counter signal to the "data is always and everywhere in the cloud" schtick. Guess what, sometimes the data can be local too.

"instead of a bunch of individuals running around leaving a disparate data trail which is hard to keep track of, the individual represents the digital environment where data is stored by vendors. When the next vendor comes along, the data is there, available for use, without the need for complex integration, processing, or systems maintenance, just like the environment is there for the next ant to come along, allowing that ant to do what they do without a complicated brain or sophisticated map of the territory.

It doesn’t matter that Doc was physically moving around in his example. From Doc’s perspective, he was always right there. “No matter where I go… there I am.” This is more than just a solipsistic view of the universe, it is perhaps the most critical insight of the VRM user-centric gestalt. When you put the user at the center, it makes it trivially easy to manage and integrate the entire digital experience of the user. Because it is all right there, all the time.

Two obvious messages here. First, we all need to do a helluva good job in getting vendors in many different industries and sectors to agree on protocols that speak consistently to their customers. And second, this is very much about the mobile industry - and we all know how good our industry is at quickly agreeing global standards. The upside here as far as I see it, is that this is more of a device story than a network story, so may be a little easier. Anyway, fun times ahead.

Internships two-point-oh

2007-06-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

It's not been confirmed yet, but there might be a couple of internships going at Nokia this summer around the theme of Internet innovation and 2.0, to work on a few cool projects that we've got cooking and need some help. Location probably Helsinki (it's great during the summer).

It's rather late in the season for this, and I suspect most people have got their internships lined up, but if this strikes a chord, ping me at stephen dot johnston at nokia dot com, and let me know if you have any particular skills or interests that we could put to work in the spirit of transformation.

Real time transport mashup of Helsinki

2007-06-04T02:28:00.000-07:00

This mashup - showing Finnish public transport system in REAL TIME on google maps is wonderful, and strangely addictive. (Did that bus break down? Ah, no, there it goes again.) As I am now living in London, I am painfully aware that such a transparent and technically advanced solution would be impossible here.

Learning to muzzle the legal attack dogs

2007-05-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

Good to see that our legal department is fairly quick to move and apologize for a oversight. This incident saw one of our most passionate blog sites receive a legal threat to shut down for posting pics of a future phone (that escaped from a factory).

Some in the company have remarked that this new found agility and humbleness (we're not known for that, apparently) is proof that some of the "2.0" messages have been getting through. Either way, good to see. Cluetrain, come on in, your time is up...

Get the service right first, and figure out the techology later

2007-05-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

Am going out for dinner tonight in London, and two savoury tastes have been swirling round my palate, competing for primacy. First was Indian (our national dish), exemplified by the excellent Bombay Bicycle Club. Second was Italian, and my sister recommended Numero Uno.

So, as a good considerate brother, I naturally prefer my own idea, and try and book a table at Bombay Bicyle Club. No such luck. Their website (kicking off with a flash movie, yuck), talks a lot about their "story", but when you go to "contact us" you get a web form. Forgedaboudit. I do find the phone number of the Balham branch under their restaurants section, but get a recorded message saying they're closed til 6:30pm. Nobody around to take orders by phone, really? Must be because they have such a sophisticated and effective online system then.

So, I try and use their whizzo online ordering capability. This is provided by Livebookings and creates a java popup to identify the slot you want which is quite cute. Unfortunately, it then requires you to register your name, ADDRESS and phone number. I already have far too many social networks requiring me to register with them, now I have to register at some obscure service (ok, used by other restaurants too) with username and password etc. They then reject my proposal because my password suggestion is not 7 characters long. Look!, I cry, this is a bloody restaurant booking service, not my bank.

After cursing and muttering about the excess of information, I get to the final submit screen, only to decide that I need to have the table half an hour earlier. OK, my bad, but these things happen. I click on Back, and everything is wiped out. As my blood pressure rockets I throw my long suffering Nokia across the room (it survives, always does) and curse loudly at the screen. And at Bombay Bicycle Club. Do they realize that they've just turned me, a long time fan of their product, into an annoyed non-customer, through the use of too much technology.

I then Google the Italian, find its phone number, call them up and book a slot. That takes me 15 seconds, and has delivered my evening's business to them, whereas all that Bombay Bicycle Club have got from me is frustration. If I had wanted to change the time, I could have done it verbally, and he'd have said - perfecto.

Underlying this is the fact that still have a long way to go before we can provide a "very human technology" experience for the management of customer service, with a big sticking point being identity and authentication. The reality is that the phone still does that job far easier and quicker than overly complicated web services. There is tremendous scope to get both of these working better by working together, and we've got some ideas for how this could happen, but if any of them involve sacrificing the experience in favour of some misguided technology vision, they deserve to fail.

The evolution of the web, according to Fido

2007-05-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

So, according to my cerebral canine companion, my tinpot evolution of the web theory can be equally applied to dogs as well as people.

Pets.com came - and went - first. This iconic dot.bomb went from IPO to liquidition in nine months. Here your PC-savvy pooch could find information about petfood - information ruled the day.

Second, came online social networking for dogs: dogster. Here Fido can start yapping enthusiastically at other gorgeous german shepherds or touch nose to screen to nose with a winsome wippet. His vocal chords and floppy ears are given full reign, even though he may need a little help from his friends to press the buttons on the video camera to record his chat up lines.

And so now, proof of the arrival of three point oh, we have SNIFLabs - Social Networking in Fur - (no joke). This company makes cute collar attachments (and has an inspired logo) that the dogs can use as digital scent - marking their territory and people they amble into. MIT Tech Review picked them up again recently since they're launching soon (doggy cliches have been flying for the past couple of years.

It's fitting that the perenially walkie-obsessed dogs are able to break free from the tyranny of the wired PC and take social networking out to the real world before us (though don't forget Imity is already there). Perhaps it's not surprising - it's easier to be an overt networker about somebody or something else (dogs, music, hamster fanciers) rather than just yourself.

I was asked by a relative last week when are we bringing out a tracking system for people, so that she can check up where her kids are, or so people can find her if she is kidnapped while out horseriding (Hampshire being the new Gaza). This system does not use GPS, but sounds sophisticated enough to do most of what she wants. I wonder if they'll be used as kid trackers?

It used to be that on the Internet, no one would know if you were a dog. Now that the third generation of the web is cutting the chord, the dogs can prove that they are indeed dogs, and no longer need to hide behind the mice.

The obligatory 3.0 post: this time with added You-nicorn

2007-04-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

Does it strike anyone else as odd, that just a few months after Time celebrates a new era of the empowered You, most of the chatter about the next great leap - that some are calling Web3.0 - is a paradigm shift for technology (namely the arrival of the semantic web), not the end user?

The what is web3.0? question has been stewing in my mind for a bit, and like many jargon-weary commentators I thought it best to ignore it and hope the urge would pass, since fluff to the power of fluff is just more fluff. But then the excellent and deeply credible R/WW kicked off this (tongue in cheek?) competition, so I might as well dump the contents of my 3.0 cache here for the record.

Basically, if I had to assign a numerical framework for the evolution of the web, what I'd do would be something like this:

Web1.0: Brain & Eyes (=Information)
Web2.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice & Heart (=Passion)
Web3.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice, Heart, Arms & Legs (=Freedom)

I would try and map the evolution of the web to the increasing benefits to the individual. The first breakthrough paradigm enabled by the web was information, the second was passion, the third - I would like to suggest, is freedom in the physical sense - aka mobility. In Maslowian terms, throw in a bit of food and sex, and you're basically done.

1.0 was about accessing information

From the individual's perspective, the web has progressively been about genuinely empowering them to do more and more with the things they care about. 1.0 provided the web as a disintermediater - where information was the novelty, and most of it happened to be in static text and graphic form. 1.0 was about knowing that a price is cheaper on Expedia than on the BA site, or reading about human rights abuses in China. The 1.0 poster children (eBay, Google, Amazon, Expedia and Wikipedia) allowed people to connect them with what they were interested in - such as cheap stuff and tough questions.

2.0 was about finding your passion

The arrival of You on the scene is not a passing fad. The web has always been about You, the only thing was that the You in 1.0 was deaf, mute and immobile. In 2.0 the gag came off. We started to sing, shout, dance and generally make a mockery of How Things Should Be Done. 2.0 represented another leap forward in terms of making our lives better. Bandwidths increased, allowing music then video to flow (with copyright spinning in the wind). Software and services became easier to use and companies such as mine made it easier to create and distribute content. Social networking sites allowed niche passions to connect with each other. The result is the individuals themselves started to have more fun, more sex, more life. They could perform for millions - anybody who's ever had the buzz of being on stage and adored by thousands knows how good that feels. (Apparently an Oscar nomination adds four years to your life.) YouTube has made people stars - made them sing dance, cavort, laugh, cry. Colour arrived to the binary, command-line network of networks. My simple suggestion for world peace is to play the Kiwi and Mocha videos on a big screen at the beginning of every UN security council meeting.

So, with the added emotion in our lives from the second version of the web we're really starting to be convinced that these tech guys actually are good news. Just when we're working ourselves up into a frenzy of excitement about what could be even bigger, even better for us and indeed be the Next Big Thing, along comes an old fashioned committee and tells us that the future is about resource description frameworks, web ontology language and, of course, XML.

Semantics is to Web 3.0 what horseshoes are to a unicorn
Sure, getting data to talk to data is an important step but to me it is plumbing. "WOW, you've got a flying horse, that's absolutely freaking, bloody amazing, I love it!!" is the refrain I'd like to hear as I tell people what I'm working on. Not, "A-ha, look at these nicely roughly circular, sturdy iron protective elements on the feet of the horse, I bet they're useful when it lands".

To be asked to imagine a future vision of where the web is going, and then be told that any vision is fine as long as it is semantic is rather claustrophobic. There is nobody on the planet that I think more deserving of unlimited wealth, chocolate and a permanent serenade by a chorus of angels than Tim Berners-Lee (despite him turning down our invitation to the Nokia Speaker Series when he collected his $1m cheque). However this necessary plumbing is not a sexy vision that will sell to our respective parents and kids. And as we know, sex sells.

We in the tech industry seem to be slipping back, like incurable alcoholics, to the bad habits of focusing on the technology and not the benefits of what is coming next. Of course, we know that it'd be great if microformats actually worked, and people could get more joined up services, but frankly, most of the benefits seem rather marginal compared to what we're able to do now. It's hard to package and sell it to Average Joe. For example, Wikipedia suggests as a use case that "a computer might be instructed to list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings". Hmmm, anybody spot a geek in the vicinity? This would probably be to Joe just an incremental improvement in Google's already fabulous problem-solving offering. And also, it neglects that fact that people would probably still trust the recommendation of their friend over any semantic goodness. Digitizing relationships and reputations has proven to be particularly challenging.

3.0 will be about finding your legs, and your wings

So, 3.0 to me is more about taking what we had so far and extending the reach - both physically in terms of another dimension, but also in terms of imagination. Letting you do what you do today on the web but when you're mobile is the first necessary step - table stakes - for this, and for that we have browsers, widg/sets and AJAX integration. But a lot of that is not new innovation, just necessary replication. What I'm looking for in 3.0 is the truly breakthrough user experiences that hit you in the stomach, the way that using Google did the first time you used it, or the way that Mocha's little legs wiggled in a furry flurry of happiness. That I can safely say is not shrinking today's internet service du jour and putting it on the small screen, but using the vast amounts of new data sources in innovative ways to create new and improved experiences. Mobile social networking, avatars, maps, mashups, music, marketing and The Man will all I suspect play a part in building this. We've got some pretty cool ideas but part of the fun is not knowing what services will prove to be the most successful.

This is in essence the point of this blog - it's ThreeDimensionalPeople, people. Add a third dimension (and a fourth, courtesy of RSS) and the possibilities for innovation multiply. Unfortunately, some parts of the telco industry seems unable to allow the speed and scope of innovation required, so it will be provided in due time by others many of whom are both willing and able.

So in summary, I think we need our politicians, business people, relatives, academics and shop floor workers to get behind our vision for where we're going next and get excited about the possibilities about what it can do for them. Sure, the €100bn orgy of excess of 3G was painful, but just because one entire industry collectively overpaid, overpromised and underdelivered on a set of mistaken assumptions has nothing to do with the reality of what an Internet set free of wires could become. The mobile device plus the Internet has the potential to revolutionize our lives in ways that we haven't begun to dream about, and I suggest, deserves significantly more attention from our entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are striving to build new new things, whether they come with a number attached or not.

Man, I wonder how much they'd be making without that pesky Internet?

2007-04-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Booz Allen's Strategy & Business magazine contains some interesting data points - salutory reading for those who might think that the web has dismembered industry as we know it:

Companies are sitting on mountains of cash, much more than they need. Holdings
at NYSE- and Nasdaq-listed companies topped a record $2.7 trillion in 2005, and
they are growing at 24 percent annually. By industry, the largest cash increases
in the past decade were in media (1,700 percent), utilities (1,360 percent), and
telecommunications (1,300 percent).

Some principles for good data management

2007-04-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

As companies around the world wake up to the new reality that the web flattens the playing field and offers more choices for people than they had before, there is realization that being customer-centric is probably a Good Thing. The next logical conclusion therefore it seems is the need to amass vast mounds of data about their customers, mine it every which way and that, in order to better understand people's behaviour. This has been fuelled by a Google paranoia, in which companies tremble if they don't have a data centre the size of Kansas tracking every possible thing that you, me, and them could, would, should, or might do sometime, yesterday or tomorrow.

My concern is that, as with the environement, the real costs of data collection and not externalized, and so business and governments have little incentive to act responsibly with this data. In addition to my suggestion that the provider is rarely compensated adequately for the potentially interesting uses of their data, the costs of storage continue to plummet, resulting in a simple equation for most managers - grab as much data as you can and hang on to it.

In Europe, data collection has been a hot-button issue for a while with more stringent safeguards on collecting and protecting user data than in the US. (I remember during my time working at Siebel an 'interesting' meeting between one of our more assertive West coast salesmen and an official from a French ministry. The concept of the CRM system that this hapless salesman was attempting to foist on the French government to better manage their citizenry was, we were told in no uncertain terms - illegal. It is against the law in France for this government department to share data on citizens with another department. Clearly, not great news for the efficiency levels and problem solving abilities of the French bureaucrats, and not great for the salesman.) Anyway, if there's money to be made, savvy business people will gravitate to the least cost option, so probably base their policies in the most amenable jurisdictions.

This to say that there should probably be some principles or code of conduct, to use a phrase du jour, for how companies manage their customer data. Kim Cameron's laws of identity seem to be the gold standard here, and are rather related, but not the same.

In conversation recently with a smart chap at one of the great British institutitions (didn't tell him I would blog it, so won't say which one), he outlined his principles about data collection that their organization uses. I noted them down rather quickly, and here is the list (a bit mangled as I'm taking a bit of translator's license here).

Ownership: The data about the user is owned by the individual, and companies are able to borrow it and use it to provide better services for the user, while they have a relationship with that user.
Minimum: Only collect the minimal data required to deliver certain functions: i.e. "just in time not just in case". So a vendor only needs to collect enough data to know that you have enough money to pay for the goods, and they don't need to hang on to it when you're gone.
Modular: The service doesn't need to have an all-or-nothing approach to data for it to work -- the data can be separated and functional with different uses.
Tradeable: Data can be used to interact with other services, if you have agreed that it can be shared with them to improve your service. Clearly, generic data such as location has multiple uses, whereas specific proprietary application data has more limited uses.
Tangible: It is clear what impact your data has on the system, and whether it's being used to impact the service level that you're receiving.
Extractable: You can remove all elements of your data from their system. This is something that Google is apparently doing, which I think is tremendous. Like their search engine, they are happy to send people away, not try and hang onto them if they don't want to be there.

I'd be interested to see other principles relating to good data management - this is now the time to shape people's opinions towards what is still a rather abstract issue, but which is increasingly becoming the cause for debate. And profits.

Three out of four kids would like targeted ads on their mobile

2007-04-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

Tomi T. A. points to an interesting recent finding.

Q Research is reported in this week's issue of New Media Age (April 19, 2007)
with a survey of 1,500 UK youth aged 11 - 20. When asked simply - do you
accept ads to your mobile, the survey found 32% willing to
accept. Then when asked - would the youth be willing to accept ads that are
about their areas of interest, this jumps to 71%. Then, when
asked if the ads offer discounts and coupons, it goes up again, to 76%. And finally - this is the eye-opener - if the youth
is asked if the ads would give them top-ups to their prepaid phone accounts, 84% say yes, such ads would be welcome...

Good news, but the real innovators in this space are not waiting for validation before they take ideas that they think are good enough to the market. I think it's time for these discussions to move from the theoretical to the practical.

Nokia Beta Labs soft launch

2007-04-16T05:08:00.000-07:00

Today is the soft launch of our very own Beta Labs - a place to test our new applications and services. Kind of strange that we've not had a place for betas in the past, but I guess it's further evidence of our gradual move from products ("Here you go, it works ok") to services ("How we can get this to be even better?").

Just a few apps to start with, but am happy to see that they're suitably "3dpeople compatible": for example mobile codes lets you create bar codes to build that real world - digital world overlay, and sports tracker is all about getting people up and active. The main thing is that we now have a place to go to test new internet services, get feedback and start a discussion. Plenty of improvement ideas are in the pipeline, and the key one for me will be to build up a sense of community of Nokia early adopters and use them as lead innovators to help us know what we should be working on next.

S60 introduces web widgets

2007-04-16T04:25:00.000-07:00

S60 has just launched web widgets. The Web Run-Time which allows the use of web widgets using standard web technologies - e.g. AJAX on the mobile and no separate download. This is one of the ways that the web makes more sense on the mobile than just slavishly trying to shrink the PC web interface.

2007-04-14T02:01:00.000-07:00

Peter Kim picks up on Lester Wunderman's comments at this week's Forrester Marketing Forum:

We used to be in the business of direct marketing – now we’re in the
business of relationship marketing.
We will eventually move on to personal marketing, which will be facilitated
by the use of data.
Four goals for direct marketing: Relevance, relationship, repurchase,
and retention.

Couldn't agree more, but how are the current marketing tools facilitating this? Email, SMS, MMS - not much of relationship there. Mobiles are of course deeply personal, are the broker of relationships, and throw off much more data (location, call history etc) than things with wires. So, an interesting question for me is "how to help companies use mobiles to improve their relationships with their customers?".

For society's sake, don't make those search engines too good

2007-04-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

Dr. Helen picks up a profound quote: Men talk to their search engines more than their girlfriends, work colleagues or even their families. (And alas, this trend is set to continue - due to search engines being as smart as this, and as easy on the eye as this.) Search engines, like dogs, offer unquestioning loyalty, uncanny perception and an ability to sniff out the most obscure things. However when they move from the means to the ends, we've got a big problem.

On a related note, I had a good chat today with someone who must be one of the most networked people in the networking business (he has over 600 recommendations on LinkedIn, and comes 21st on this list): Thomas Power. (OK, so there's another Tom with as of today 170m 'friends', but they're just kids, damnit). One of the interesting things Tomas P. said, and something he's based his career on, is that the abundance of digital communications and networking is actually paradoxically making many people lonelier. There's a real need to help people get up, out of their chair, and into the real world. That I guess is one of the messages of this blog, and happily it fits nicely into Nokia's remit too.

----------

And so here's a free business idea for Google (as if they need my charity): Allow wives and girlfriends to buy the right hand column on their partners' screens. Maybe something like a flashing "Come to bed!!" would remind the unremitting Googlers what the phrase I'm feeling lucky used to mean.

From advertising to a direct dialogue with customers. Are you ready?

2007-04-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

This note is aimed at brand owners, frustrated by the increasingly expensive and ineffectual advertising spending on traditional media and wondering how best they can get their message out. It suggests that today's disrupted media business is too frail to support the demands of brands wanting to advertise. This is no bad thing in itself because the advertising business itself is bloated, inefficient and outdated, and companies would be better off figuring out how to interact with and delight their current customers, rather than wasting money on trying to reach and influence non-customers.

Advertising heal thyself
Today’s advertising business is suffering from (at least) two major flaws. The first is the industry that the traditional media business can no longer offer an economically viable channel to allow brands to deliver their messages to a sizable captive audience. The second - bigger - challenge is that the concept of advertising is becoming less relevant in today's flat-earth world.

Challenge one: the advertising industry is overly reliant on a lame and enfeebled media business
The “traditional” media industry is fragmented, broken, confused and failing to deliver on one of its major tasks - to help brands reach people. (If you don't agree with this, read Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario before reading on.) The media machine that is pulling the advertising load is to put it bluntly, knackered. Reaching non-customers is getting harder due to a proliferation of alternative media channels and consumer-side filters. Cheap tools and the Web as a distribution platform for connecting people allows anyone to be a broadcaster (or podcaster) resulting in massive fragmentation. Reaching 80% of US TV viewers used to require placing adverts on just four shows in the 1960s, today it would take over 100. Those who are 'formerly known as consumers' employ both hardware (e.g. DVR) and software (e.g. RSS) filters to give them control. Forrester says that 92% of people skip ads on DVRs, and half of US households are expected to have them by 2010. Ironically, brands have until recently been forced into paying ever more for in "upfront" fees for broadcast slots on US TV networks, simply because there was no other place for them to put their money. No wonder P&G's Jim Stengell says, "I truly believe, and I know many of you do, that today's marketing model is broken."

Further complicating the picture is the reality of “media multitasking” – no more the whole family sitting rapt around a television set or radio – today’s audience (kids in particular) will be IM-ing and gaming at the same time as watching TV and listening to the radio or podcasts. This plays havoc with those already creaky viewer figures. The result of this is that some brands are getting desperate, and “outsourcing” their brand to celebrities of various ilks, but these can be crushingly expensive and more importantly, unpredictable and prone to embarrassing PR gaffes.

Beware the siren calls of the search engines

So if traditional media is broken, how about the new media experience? Internet advertising is growing rapidly as advertisers move their money towards where people are spending their time. UK ad spending – up 40% year on year, now accounts for 10% of total advertising spend, and is typical of the trends here. Several flagship advertisers are now massively increasingly their online spending this year and scaling back TV spend. And happily for the brands looking for simplicity, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft account for a lot of the internet traffic, and claim the vast majority (appx 80%) of online ad spending.

So surely search engine marketing provides salvation for brands fed up with the old media offerings? Well, not really for a number of reasons. First, there's a long way to go before the demographics overlap - PC penetration is not TV penetration, in particular in the key markets of China and India. Second, the model itself has flaws – industry experts suggest that click fraud can account for up to 30% of revenues. Third, bidding on competitors’ keywords is now rampant and resulting in spiralling costs (though this practice is probably one class-action suit away from being history). And fourth, just when brands had been extracting themselves from a reliance on an expensive media middleman, the emergence of search engine as intermediary will cost them dear. Overall however, is the issue that search engines are still intended to deliver advertising messages to non-customers and attract them to become customers. Here’s the second major flaw in the advertising industry's model:

Challenge two: advertising itself is an increasingly outmoded concept
The second major challenge facing the industry is that advertising itself is an increasingly outdated concept in today’s transparent and connected marketplace. Influencing prospective customers is ever harder; people are increasingly immune and sceptical to the battering of thousands of commercial messages. Typical of the ennui in the market, the ad agency WPP found that nearly a quarter of US ‘baby-boomers’ are insulted by the advertising messages that companies are sending them. The emerging Generation C reject marketing gimmicks (and can smell astroturfing a mile away). They make purchase decisions based on their trusted advisors and require transparency from the companies they deal with. People it seems, now generally prefer word of mouth to word of the Man.

Consider how Barrons defines advertising: a “paid form of a nonpersonal message communicated through the various media by industry, business firms, nonprofit organizations, or individuals.” These concepts seem outdated – advertising, we are told, should be about a bunch of things which the web is making redundant: in particular paying intermediaries a lot of money for the job that you could be doing better yourself. The new opportunities of free, personalized two-way communication delivered directly to users sounds more like blogs and community forums. As Bob Garfield points out, the head marketer at P&G puts it like this: "What we really need is a mind-set shift, a mind-set shift that will make us relevant to today's consumers, a mind-set shift from 'telling and selling' to building relationships."

Forget non-customers – turn existing customers into your new sales force
So with the advertising channel broken, and the approach itself increasingly irrelevant, where next for brands trying to get the message out about their products? At issue is the need to refocus attention from advertising to non-customers to serving current customers better. Sounds obvious? If so, why aren’t more companies doing it? Making great products, informing, interacting with and delighting their existing customers, rather than prospecting for hard to reach non-customers should be the new priorities. In an increasingly confused consumer maelstrom, advertising to people who are not your customer still serves some purposes – brand recognition, credibility (wow, that startup can afford a SuperBowl ad!?) and general feel good.

Fine, but when it comes to shifting products off the shelves, getting product feedback and innovation suggestions, the relationship of business value to customer intimacy is I would propose, strongly positive, something like this:

The key here is how to meet the needs of a more engaged customer base without incurring massive costs or raising expectations. Creating and fostering an open dialogue with customers is a daunting but necessary exercise. This is one of my pet topics, and there's not enough room to expand at length here, but at a high level, I'd suggest the following elements to achieve this within a reasonable time and cost scale (presuming that you've already got a great product to get excited about):

Make every employee an ambassador. This requires creating a mindset within the company that emphasizes openness, collaboration, speed and employee problem-ownership (presuming they're the relevant experts). It's also about installing tools such as wikis (shameless plug...) so that individuals not only feel empowered but are empowered to collaborate with others and take the initiative themseles. All the better for reacting when you...
Engage in direct dialogue with customers. Interacting with customers directly, for example allowing them to subscribe to web-based feeds of product news and releases. The use of syndication (RSS, Atom etc) makes dialogue an asynchronous and therefore more manageable process - this is not about giving the CEO's mobile number out to every customer. Well managed, honest external blogs are useful tools for smooth information dissemination that arguably fulfills the role of what advertising used to do. An even easier way to foster dialogue is then to...
Facilitate customer-to-customer dialogue. Forums and chat rooms are great examples here - apparently over 30% of HP Europe's customer queries are answered by the Q&A from message boards. Being a fly on the wall to these discussions is important, even if they're not on your own sites - tools such as technorati allow Dell to search for phrases such as Dell Hell on blogs and join the discussion if necessary.

These activities are now pretty much table stakes in the move from being a company that just doesn't get it to one engaged and benefitting from a richer dialogue with current customers. Of course, there will always be room for some old world advertising - somebody has to spend the expense accounts after all. But it may be a worthwhile exercise to look at your company and ask where along the scale between "advertising to non-customers" or "conversations with current customers" they're sitting, and whether they're moving in the right direction.

The final point, which takes us beyond table stakes and into the realms of the Truly Interesting, relates to the eventual primacy of the mobile rather than the PC as the way to interact with the web. I would dearly like to see a new mobile marketing paradigm that allows the mobile to be the platform to allow companies to carry out ongoing conversations with their customers. Mobile devices are the natural interfaces for receiving filtered and tailored customized subscription information from companies that interest then. Note, this is not advertising as we currently understand it; it does not involve any use of the hackneyed “30 cents off a Starbucks” cliché. And it certainly is not about unsolicited spam. It would be a foolish company that abuses extraordinarily intimate relationship that the mobile device can deliver.

No, this is marketing, or more accurately – business as usual. We used to talk about ‘Internet companies’ – but that now seems quaint, as we recognize that the Internet is embedded into every facet of a company’s operations and their customers similarly expect to use the web to carry on conversations with the company. I’m looking forward to a time when brands are able to dramatically improve the quality of service they deliver to their customers rather than wasting money on inefficient advertising campaigns, and they incidentally will use an internet-enabled mobile device as the mechanism for this.

So, in summary, the media business is in turmoil, but the future for brands is not to simply take their old advertising approach over to the Internet. Instead, the smart companies will recognize the need to shift their focus from non customers to current customers, and harness the power of the Web to deliver a personalized, direct interactive dialogue with customers, and then to start thinking about what that personalized, intimate experience would look like on the mobile platform.

Credit card info sits on your hotel key card?

2007-04-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

One of our security guys gave me a piece of photocpied paper, anonymous apart from a note at the bottom saying: "Information courtesy of: Kent Police". It was in the first week of April, but it seems plausible enough not to be an an AFJ. If it's true, I wonder what the hotels' policy is on this?

"Ever wonder what is on your hotel magnetic key card?
Answer:
- Customer Name
- Customer Partial home address
- Hotel Room Number
- Check in date and out dates
- Customer's credit card number and expiration date!

When you turn them into the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a handful of cards home, and using a scanning device, access the information onto a laptop computer, and go shopping at your expense.

Rather wasteful to destroy the cards each time - maybe the hotel desk could have a magnet that you can use to see that your card is wiped.

Nokia hosts a mobile mashup in the Valley

2007-04-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

Good to see this happening - an invite only event for Mobile2.0 movers and shakers in Silicon Valley on April 24:

Come ready to experience new, revolutionary solutions through various emerging technology demos from the Palo Alto-based Nokia Research Center, exciting third parties, and emerging start-ups in a "fast pitch" environment. Attend the 2007 Mobile Mash-Up and explore new products, services and ideas with Nokia executives as well as network with more than one hundred industry leaders in Silicon Valley

More attention, energy and executives' time is being spent in the Valley nowadays, and our new research center office there is helping to raise our presence. Am planning to attend - if any readers of this blog are planning to attend, let me know. Should be a interesting day.

Easter fun time: Ask Nokia...

2007-04-05T14:34:00.000-07:00

I think Brad Feld's doing a great job at demystifying the somewhat perplexing aura of the VC world; today's post is a case in point. I guess some people have similar questions about Nokia - since we're not always as open as we could be. So, as we break for Easter, how about a small a small experiment in openness as a reward to my loyal readers. Ask a Nokia related question as a comment to this post and I'll try and do my best to find the right person in Nokia to answer it, and post the answer as a future post - if both question and answer are interesting...

No guarantees or refunds, and rather depends on the quality of the questions, and not expecting much about the standard off-limits stuff (future product releases, financials etc) which will just get boring answers. Of interest?

Flickr as a conversation

2007-04-04T23:09:00.000-07:00

As numerous people have observed, Flickr (and other publish & subscribe photo services) can be thought of a subtle communication channel, not just content. Indeed, the fact that Nokia's core competence of connecting people is now carried out by just about anybody with an IP connection, a dollop of good looking code and an ounce of entrepreneurial flair is a well recognized challenge in the corridors of Espoo and minds of our execs (...er, shouldn't that be 'opportunity'? - Ed) .

Pictures are indeed worth thousands of words, but also (enter quantum theory for the first time on this blog) each interpretation is different depending on the observer. The same picture can have multiple meanings depending on the personal communication history with individual viewers. So if someone posts a pic of themselves with someone of the opposite sex looking like they're having fun on holiday, it could be an innocent postcard to colleagues, a look-at-me message to their friends, a screw-you to an ex and / or a don't disturb me am on holiday to any casual ('Flickr friends') who might be thinking of suggesting a beer down the pub. Many layers. Arguably written or spoken words can have multiple meanings (and I say this as an oft-misunderstood Brit), but the possibilities for nuance with rich media seem greater.

One the opposite extreme, I just saw this message below. Its novelty and abuptness stopped me in my tracks - like someone shouting in a library. Normally I would expect to see direct communication morph into indirect: kids sending empty texts, abstract images or dialling numbers then hanging up; hacking traditional channels. Here we are seeing direct communication enter by the back door - I wonder if there are other indirect communication channels that have become direct ones? Anyway, hack away Flickr users, and show us even more ways to communicate!

Sonopia: a hammer to crack a nut?

2007-04-02T06:20:00.000-07:00

I was excited when I heard about Juha Christensen's new outfit - Sonopia. He's got a track record for thinking big, knows mobile inside out and this play is in the sweet spot for where the mobile meets the internet: creating and serving real life, not virtual, communities. Sonopia's mission is to "provide every organization, group or individual with the opportunity to create branded mobile service and build a unique mobile and web community of supporters and members". So the idea is that your community of interest becomes your (virtual) mobile service provider, and they take a cut out of your mobile phone bill. Given that few people care much for their mobile operators, you as a customer can then feel better about handing over wads of cash each month, as some of it goes to your favourite cause.

Exploring the communities on offer, I was intrigued by the Food to Go group in Northern California that is devoted to new dining experiences, and also tantalizingly offers the prospect of making friends and finding a dinner date. Food and relationships - sounds like the perfect community. I promptly joined the group, but since I'm not a US resident I couldn't really do very much with it. Nor could I, as a non-resident, set up my own group of worshippers and exhort my hordes of faithful acolytes to join up give me a slice of their monthly income. Shame really, as I'd always fancied leading a sect.

But I digress. Sonopia is a undeniably a bold and visionary move - a breath of fresh air into a space that has seen a lot of heat and not much light. My conceptual difficulty is wondering why the act of community affiliation - an ephemeral, will'o'the wisp flight of fancy, which can fluctuate like the summer breeze, is hard wired into the access and device offering. I can be a member of 100 of such groups, but will only want one mobile service provider. Surely this should be a services, not an access, play. OK, I can get a credit card from my university alumnii society, so why not a mobile phone plan? But what overlap does my interest in the worthy cause of saving the tuna have towards my mobility service needs? Are they somehow different from someone who wants to save the dolphin?

The initial motivation for Sonopia, according to their website is they "wanted the brands we really cared about to light up our mobile phones." If I'm interested in transport services I might engage a car company to provide me with an end to end solution that comes with seats, wheels and an engine. I might express my affiliation with the tuna lovers of the world by sticking on a wittily ironic bumper sticker, or having a pair of fluffy tuna hanging from my rearview mirror. But would I want the gear stick to be tuna-shaped? The steering wheel to be covered in the skin of unliberated tunas? Maybe, but the market size of this niche is rapidly diminishing to the sub-micro, and the handful of people with such passionate affiliations are probably serving time at her majesty's pleasure.

Maybe the job of passion and relationships is one for the top of the stack, something like this.

So, I applaud the concept to the extent that this is a canary in the coal mine for micro-segmentation of an end-to-end mobile experience bundle that can be tailored to specific groups, and that it shamelessly offers tangible benefits to community owners to act as a distributed sales force helping Sonopia to sell more minutes on behalf of Verizon and keep a cut. However, to me, community services are best managed at the higher level of abstraction - separating the tasks of providing connectivity with those of providing community. Given that more middlemen inevitably mean more people fighting for a margin out of each of your communication events, maybe if you do want to give money to a good cause, you'd be better off just sending them a cheque?

Taking the twit out of twitter

2007-03-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

Until recently, Twitter passed me by. It just seemed so small. The delightful dull blog pictured provides dullness should you want it, but with irony and humor. But then the worm turned, and I'm now twittering with the best of them. The reason? I don't have a TV. And this is as close as TV for the web as I've seen.

I've never really been that much into online video, other than on the express recommendation from someone who's opinion I trust. Browsing YouTube is about as entertaining for me as scrabbling around in the trash among yesterday's newspapers - occasionally finding a morsel of interst, but the whole process makes you feel rather grubby.

TV - even in bite sized chunks - seems to me to be the wrong metaphor for the web. The brilliant Web2.0 video should eviscerate any lingering doubt that the web is a collaborative, social phenomenon. A TV show is made by one person or team, and we know now deep in our DNA that the one-way contributions of just one group can only get us so far. Reality TV is dull as it focuses on just one small group (of generally dysfunctional) individuals. Normal TV is made by a small group, but generally has higher production values. But this - the reality Web - is an all together different animal. How many TV shows do you know that have passionate developers pulling them every which way? Twitter shows you that the colourful texture of the web is composed of real people (ok, still slightly geeky ones at this stage). Heck, it's almost becoming three-dimensional. The fact that these twitterholics are alive, connected, and even occasionally interesting brings a tremendously human dimension to what has been all too often an all too solitary web experience. I hope it flies.

Jim, do you want cash or cheque?

2007-03-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Mr Griffin is one of the brightest minds in the business of reinventing the media industry. His insights spring from, well, just being damn smart. And from having spent the past two decades trying to drag the music industry kicking and screaming towards the money trough. I've been so persuaded (or maybe that's brainwashed?) by him that I find myself repeating, mantra-like, his arguments for flat fee music on every possible occassion.

Anyway, was rather chuffed when he singled this blog out as one of his favourites. All very over the top Jim, but thanks anyway.

Stephen Johnston's ThreeDimensional People, 3dpeople.blogspot.com
"Mr. Johnston is one of the brightest minds in the business of connecting people. His insights spring from working on Nokia strategy from London. The site focuses largely on the direction of the new economy and lets readers profit from the insights of someone whose job it is to strategize for one of the leading companies in new media. The site is useful for following the new concepts and themes that are driving Nokia and other companies to develop new products, open new divisions and traverse the space from product to service."

Salutory metaphor for Nokia

2007-03-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

This is right on the money regarding the ever-present need for big companies such as ours to innovate:

Every company innovates until it finds a cash cow. At that point only innovation that supports the cash cow is promoted. Further, any innovation that threatens or does not support the cash cow languishes or is actively killed. Eventually, most of the true innovation ceases as the innovators leave and start new companies and the cycle repeats.

A young company is like a thirsty animal in the desert, desperately sniffing and searching with all its might for a supply of sustenance that will allow it to survive the rigors of the market. If the animals energy runs out before it finds an oasis, or better still a river or a lake, then it dies. If it finds a source of water it survives. It’s all very basic and primal “circle of life” stuff.

If it finds an oasis in the desert can you blame it for not wanting to take another long open ended trek in the desert. The search for the initial revenue stream for a startup is strongly analogous. Once you find it, you don’t want to let it go. And therein lies the rub.

That very act of hanging on will eventually lead to stasis and then death.

The onus on us as a big company is to prove that we can still reinvent ourself, not to rest on past glories, and the cash cows of the past.

Suffer the children

2007-03-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

Kim Cameron reports on a rather worrying situation with UK education - fingerprinting kids without their parents' consent. This from the BBC:

The guidelines, published next month, will "encourage" schools to seek consent before taking biometric data. The move comes after it emerged some primary schools stored children's thumb prints for computerised class registers and libraries without parental consent. The Department for Education and Skills (DfeS) says it does not have figures for how many schools are already using biometric data. However, a web poll by lobby group Leave Them Kids Alone, estimated that 3,500 schools had bought equipment from two DfES-approved suppliers.

Under the Data Protection Act, schools do not have to seek parental consent to take and store children's fingerprints.

Great. So, now the UK government is forcing children to sleepwalk into a privacy quagmire. No doubt these records will be handed over to some A.N.Other vendor, probably to get sold on the black market when that vendor goes bust. My two big problems with this are that you've got absolutely no idea to what uses that data could be used in some future time (so it is best to err on the safe side - aka the "negative option value" hypothesis), and that it is just bad policy making.

The first point should should be pretty obvious - we all know that these databases are never secure. It probably isn't good form to quote oneself (but heck, it's not good form to make death threats, so I think I can get away with it), but what I was talking about regarding giving away the keys to location counts at least as dramatically for your fingerprints:

In the same way that option value depends on the potential multiple uses of an asset, giving away generic and highly fungible personal data such as location can result in negative option value.

Second, this policy of sitting on the fence and "encouraging" schools to get permission is just annoyingly fudging the issue, and pushing the responsibility down to the overworked schoolteachers. I'm reminded of one of my favourite pieces by the late Nico Colchester, a former deputy editor of the Economist, who invented the science of crunchiness - keep things clear, else we'll all pay the consequences.

The humble contacts book: An object of perfection, or ripe for a revamp?

2007-03-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

Whether it's at a dinner-party or late night foray into a strange bar, the fact that I work for Nokia is an easy ticket to talk. People generally have powerful reactions, as more often than not I'm working for the company that makes the product that gets them to work, connects them with who matters to them, and gets them laid. This is clearly quite a burden, but the company wears it well - with a well-deserved reputation for solidity, easy to use, reliability and the fact that the damn thing just works. (Sure there are often also comments along the lines of "why on earth don't you bring back that beautiful silver bullet phone [6310] - it was my favourite thing ever..." etc.) But the fact remains - we are still carrying a good deal of people's goodwill, and we mess with it at our peril.

And nowhere is this goodwill more obvious than in the trusty familiar contacts book. It has been going strong in a similar looking format for well over a decade (I'd guess, haven't been here long enough to remember that far back). Messing with the contacts book would be like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa - an act of vandalism, surely. Surely? Well, I'm not so sure. I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that things must stay how they were because that's how they have always been. Everywhere else the world around is changing upside down, and consumer communication behaviours are being re-written, one twitter at a time.

One of our recent Nokia speaker series guests (Stephen Messer, who had just sold his company for several hundred million dollars, so I listen when he speaks) put it like this - the telco industry has lost the opportunity to innovate in the contacts book, whereas the internet industry has come along and invented an entire new industry - social networking - to fill this innovation void. Hmmm, food for thought? This got me thinking anyway. Even though people do like their contacts book, are we missing out on realizing the full potential of the Internet to make an even better experience? Isn't MySpace just your contacts book with Internet-innovation added? Several ideas jump out at me: automatic backups is one clear missing feature that really should be widestream (and we're actually already, rather quietly, doing this in various places already). How about integrating other features into the phonebook - or perhaps taking some away. What would you like to see?

(I should probably point out that my position in strategy makes me far removed from the actual tech-heads who build this stuff (and maintain your trusty contacts book in its pristine state) so feel free to be as crazy and ambitious as you like...)

Mark Anderson speaks at Nokia

2007-03-22T03:32:00.000-07:00

One of the fun aspects of my job is to organize informal "speaker series" sessions. These are opportunities for thought leaders, techno visionaries, business people and other really interesting people to come to Nokia House (just outside Helsinki) and present their ideas and have Q&A with Nokia folks. This has been running for a couple of years now, and we've had some interesting people - Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Chris Anderson (Wired, not TED). These people come to join us as friends of Nokia (a nice way of saying we don't pay them speaker fees), but generally seem to enjoy the experience, and often get into good discussions with some of our world class geeks.

Earlier this months we hosted Mark Anderson, who's the editor of the Strategic News Service and a widely followed strategy pundit. He gaves us his trends for 2007.

I attach below the vid the rough notes I took at the time.

-----------------

Mark's 2007 Predictions
1. ePhones: Phones will be used to pay for things
Japan already does this. Nokia has been testing this for years.
"Carriers have been the bottleneck" - but why wouldn't carriers do this. Qualcomm are investing in startup payments. Carriers are changing their mind about this.
Many technologies, but security clearly the main issue. Authentication is required.

2. Authentication everywhere.
ID theft is so important, that authentication will be required everywhere. Biometric will be big. Voice is one idea, would be great if it does work. Phones could have a bio swipe, and reduce theft - it costs about $9 to install. Could do this in conjunction with insurance companies - never worry about phones being stolen. This then would allow the phone to be used in conjunction with keys for phones. "Phone" is not the right term for what this is - it communicates more with systems than people. 50% increase in data.

3. Tesla-led - electric car will go mainstream year
Environmental factors going well. Elon Lesk (sp?) founded paypal, now started a startup called Tesla. It’s a plug-in car that charges overnight - 250m per set of batteries. 2-seat roadster. 0-60 in 4 secs. Sold out first 2 years of orders. Plan to move to 4 seater. Could basically replace today's US car and truck population overnight. Could use hydro and coal power.

4. Oil price rises further
Oil is a game, and does not obey standard rules of economics.

5. Mobile advertising takes off up 20-30% next year
Big concern about managing the experience - needs high resolution. Words alone will be ineffective. Needs a creative approach to this.

6. Dollar falls further against the dollar and the yen.
Dollar will weaken - Japan will spend 500bn - 1trillion in interventions. Japan is intervening and raising interest rates and will be dangerous. Carry trade is very dangerous - it's like having 'free money'.

7. New Russia emerges, and brings with it a new cold war.
88 journalists have been killed. Russia's policies wrt missile crises, energy policies.

8. XY (parallel) computing takes over
Easy to make parallel computers, but few people know how to program for these types of computers. Microsoft is unprepared for this. Grid computing - what roles could phones play as grids become more common. Something that Europe has an advantage in - e.g. CERN. Nokia should be looking at mesh networking.
Visual computing will be part of the programming process as input as well as output. E.g. training a computer to look for oil deposits based on visual learning.

9. Year of NAND wars
DRAM wars - 17 different production facilitites (FABs), big declines in flash memory prices. More than enough supply of memory, will accelerate new types of devices, and hasten move from fixed to mobile.

10. iTunes will begin to lose share to competitors with more general DRM approaches, unless iPhone materializes.
(note - he first made this prediction in Dec 06). iPod will maintain, Zune will be a failure. Since this was made in December, the iPhone has been launched and DRM has been attacked in Europe.

Key drivers
- oil - 87% negative correlation between price of oil and stockmarkets. Energy tax likely.
- cheap labour
- liquidity (cash from Japan)

Bad news in general
- Fed has lost control of the US economy in the past 12 months. Fed can't lower rates since they're concerned about inflation. They have to defer to the oil industry. Commercial banks have not been following the lead from fed rate, which means the Fed doesn't have a tool to control the economy.
- Schism between corporations and people. Less of a problem in Europe because of socialistic governments.
- GDP growth (US?) is declining. Europe going up.
- Latin America is a mess.
- Mid east - greatest allies are greatest enemies.
- Healthcare costs are bankrupting our economies.
- Pensions are going bankrupt.

Good news in general
- Medicine is changing - "evidence based medicine"
- High oil prices act as incentives for people to invest in energy efficient solutions.
- Today there are more naturally occurring forests than there were 10years ago.
- Higher broadband availability.
- Education - cause for hope (Mark's new company is called Project Inkwell has 40 members (Msoft, Intel, AMD, Gateway…) and is creating education focused solutions for schools. Wants Nokia to join.

Other trends
- Moving from residential to commercial real estate
- Moving in US from 1party to mixed party government
- River of money will fund online ad sales and drive economic activity. 200bn annually is slowly moving.
- IT spending will be up 12% as long as no major issues
- Moving from refinancing homes as a source of cash
- Few IPOs - Clearwire one of the few.
- Year of Microsoft - shipping of vista etc. will be be v. important

Phone specific issues
- Location based services - voice driven directions. Mark is not a believer in location based advertising ("hey, your favourite shoes 20% off in the next mall"). But would prefer to know where his kids or wife is.
- Recreating the nuclear family in a new way using technologies to replicate intimacy.Technology does not stop intimacy - it provides more opportunities to meet people. Phone creates more opportunities for social interaction.
- Mesh networks need to happen - e.g. to help in Katrina-like emergencies. E.g. emergency only activation.
- Changing business models - e.g. Somebody coming to Helsinki and putting wimax and Intel together.
- iPhone - iRiver Clix device. That and iPhone indication of a move towards all -programmable device.

Back to the drawing board for free energy

2007-03-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

Ever since Wired had the "cycling machines as energy generators" as an Artifact from the Future (can't find the link) I've been intrigued by the possibility of getting the gym goers to replace the nuclear energy plants. Oh well.

Via venturebeat:

Does all that gym peddling create usable energy? -- No. It's been bandied about by crackpots over the years: Generate electricity by tapping into all that energy people expend in the gym -- on bikes, treadmills, weight-lifting. San Ramon, Calif. company 24 Hour Fitness invested $15,000 to test this. Turns out, if all 13 machines in one Hong Kong gym were in use ten hours a day every day, it would take 82 years to generate enough electricity worth the $15,000 investment.

Patent spending

2007-03-17T04:47:00.000-07:00

I wonder if / when Friendster's business model will transition from advertising to IP enforcement?

San Francisco - Online social network Friendster announced this week that it has been granted its third social networking-related patent, this time for a "system and method for managing connections in an online social network."

The company says the patent covers adding friends, personalizing a profile through arranging, ordering and classifying connections made in an online community, and managing these connections at will.

[...] The company did not address whether it intends to pursue licensing or infringement actions against others in the social networking space.

What in the world is WAYN doing with their signup?

2007-03-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

I like the idea of WAYN - a location based social network built around the concept "where are you now?" - though from the loud, garish site, and mulitple flashing ads I guess I'm probably double the age group they had in mind. However, I just tried to register to check it out but it wouldn't let me continue without requiring that I fill in my gmail user ID and password! The idea is so that I can see where my gmail contacts are and invite them to use the service. I'm sorry, but what on earth is that all about? I feel bad for people who sign up to services which then spam their entire address book, but I generally also feel that those people get what they deserve. There was nothing in this service that suggested that experience wasn't going to happen to me, and no way to bypass that requirement. I then had to shut the browser down, and when I went back to the site, it had registered me, and took me to the next stage of offerings. Very odd. By that stage I was jaded. Sorry, WAYN, but you've lost me before I even started. But as I said, am probably not the target demographic.

One bomb could switch off the Internet in the UK?

2007-03-16T02:14:00.000-07:00

This could be fairly nasty, as more and more of our critical functions - not just emailing powerpoints around - rely on web connectivity.

According to an article by David Leppard, Scotland Yard has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda operatives were going to blow up Telehouse Europe, a large colocation facility in Britain that is the country's largest Internet hub. Suspects who were recently arrested had conducted reconnaissance against Telehouse and had planned to infiltrate the organization and blow it up from inside.

Losing my Biz Week cherry

2007-03-15T04:51:00.000-07:00

I guess it's not good form to toot one's horn, but as this blog is also increasingly my aide memoire, I'd mention here my first appearance in Business Week here. OK just a few comments about our deployment of wikis, and not exactly the front cover of Newsweek like my friend Rajesh.

Where are the British rocketboomers?

2007-03-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd create a short video introducing some of the latest web services as an introductory item for some our managers that are too busy doing their day jobs to spend time surfing the blogosphere. Then I thought it'd be much better to have somebody nice to watch for our execs rather than me - my british mumbling would not make for a particularly enjoyable viewing. I immediatley thought of who I'd like to have do this, and thoughts turned to Joanne Colan, Amanda Congdon and Lindsay Campbell - all savvy, well-known, attractive presenters who know more about 2.0 than is good for them. They're all based in the USA (Joanne being a transplanted brit), and probably out of my league for this little project, which anyway has a deadline of next week.

Have I missed any UK-based digital divas that are doing something similar? Do you know anyone who could be the next rocketboom, given half a chance (or an N93)? How about any existing Web2.0 video blog intros that I can use?

Presence: a red herring?

2007-03-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

[What follows is a bit rough, but if I take the time to try and polish it up, I'll never get round to it. Thus here, true to the blogger code of conduct, is a semi-formed rant...]

The need to incorporate presence information into the mobile experience, has been something of an assumed holy grail in this industry for the past few years. (By presence for this discussion, I'm talking about an icon or message along the lines of that we have with IM clients, that indicate the current state of the user, taking e.g. current location as the standard example.) Multiple worthy studies have been done and large expensive boxes have been sold that purport to deliver this functionality. Unfortunately, they're usually not plugged in, so customer facing presence start with the need to enter settings. DOA.

I've recently realized that the odd feelings I've been experiencing when the "presence" discussion comes up are not just coincidental indigestion. The ability for others to see what you're doing now is perceived by many in the industry to be just the inevitable evolution of our increasing interconnectedness, and the visceral negative reactions generated when 'normal people' hear about this ("but i don't want that") dismissed as the quaint yelps of a luddite. If sharing intimate personal details automaticlly is good enough for Japanese school girls, so the lore goes, it's good enough for the other 3bn mobile users; just give it time. If that is the case, then I guess I'm in the luddite camp. Here are 3 reasons why I think presence as it's currently envisaged, may be a red herring.

i) Unbounded data gives unlimited negative option value.
Your location information is fantastically interesting information for all manner of people and companies. In the same way that option value depends on the potential multiple uses of an asset, giving away generic and highly fungible personal data such as location can result in negative option value. I may have no problems with my friends knowing where I am, but I may not want my enemies to do so. If you do not limit the type of data shared, then you have to limit the recipient list. So that leads to the next problem:

ii) The high transaction costs of limiting the data set.
Are you really going to ascribe certain people the right to see certain types of your data? In theory, you should be doing that at a granular level, so that each time any element of your presence chances, you have the option to change who receives that information. Is "family" or "friend" a useful way to subdivide presence sharing? Enough said.

iii) Context not publisher-centric
This means you are a hostage to your state - regardless as to whether you have your presence information set to be update automatically or update manually. If it is the former, then you have no control over the information that is published. The minute you enter the pub, the world (or the subset that you have laboriously scoped down) knows you're boozing. If it's the latter, then your context is going to be out of date unless you decide to change it - so it's even dumber. You have to perform manual labour, and have no choice in the matter. This matters because you have not been given free reign to publish something of interest according to your terms - they have been dicated according to the context of the application.

So, from this rather esoteric discussion, 3 principles for "non-red herring" presence emerge:

- Limited data set. In the absence of certainty about where your data will end up, and trying to limit who will receive it (painful to implement), it's easier to limit the type of data that you're sharing to application specific things. This will ensure that the benefit to me for giving up my information far outweighs the potential cost (negaive option value) of doing so. This is generally not going to be the case when I am publishing generic information (such as location) that can have multiple uses that I do not control, unless that information is captured and only used by that service provider. Limit presence information to be bounded by a specific application or service - e.g. the music I'm listening to or the books I'm reading. I'm more than happy that anybody sees my last.fm profile because a new band or a friend who likes the same music is much more valuable than the potential privacy cost of people knowing what I like to listen to.
- Zero effort. Remove the transaction costs and make it aligned with what I do everyday. Automaticaly updating is part of the story here, but don't make me have to think about do I want that automatic update posted.
- Asynchronous. Switch from updates that are forced by context to subject specific (see i) updates; this is asynchronous publishing when it is convenient for me (the publisher) rather than you the technology or the context.

RSS feeds from Nokia press releases

2007-03-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

A new way to keep up with Nokia press releases, for those with an unhealthy appetite for Nokia stuff.
Our Comms guys are starting to get pretty 2.0... :)

http://www.nokia.com/pressrss/rss.xml

The shift in focus from non-customers to customers

2007-02-26T15:28:00.000-08:00

I sloped off skiing for the past week, so light posting, but am back refreshed and ready to roll. I currently have a "relationship" bit between my teeth, and am finding my thoughts dominated by one seemingly simple sounding proposition: that non-customers are getting less important than current customers. As people insulate themselves from marketing messages and are influenced more by what their friends say than what expensively produced marketing materials say, the trick for companies to shift their wares is to convert current customers into their evangelists. All very Cluetrain 101. However, what strikes me odd as how badly companies manage their current customers, preferring instead to focus on non customers. This pic and post in Creating Passionate Users sums things up better than I ever could:

Don't stop paying attention. Don't stop being kind. Don't gain 50 pounds. Don't stop flirting. Stay passionate, stay sexy, stay caring. Answer their calls. Unfortunately, too many companies are all candle-lit dinners, fine wine, and "let's talk about you" until the deal is sealed. Once they have you (i.e. you became a paying customer), you realize you got a bait-and-switch relationship.

Put that together with Doc Searls' latest thoughts on relationships, and I'm led inevitably towards my thesis - advertising for new customers is not as effective (depending on product, geography yadayada) as it was, but the simple key proposition to is to manage and delight the current customers. However, the current tools that we've got for companies to manage them are pretty minimal. In particular those tools that allow customers to interact with brands using their mobile. This is an area that I'm thinking about quite a lot, so would be interested to hear about solutions already out there aimed at improving the lot of the embattled current customer.

Yawn. Vodafone partners with MySpace.

2007-02-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I'm a bit cynical but is this deal the best that we in the mobile space can do?

Vodafone starts MySpace service: Vodafone customers will now be able to access and update their MySpace websites from their mobile phone. Social networking website MySpace said the tie-up with the UK's largest mobile phone company was its first extension into Europe's mobile sector

Have PC Internet services won the social networking battle. Are we going to be confined to just bringing existing web services, with all existing players and control points, to a smaller screen? I've no idea how the client will look or what extra functionality it will have (it will apparently be preinstalled in future), but I do hope it's a bit more than dumbing down existing content.

To my mind, MySpace is what happens when you take a contacts book and add web innovation on top. We already have a contacts book in the device that people love, so how about some mobile-optimized innovation on top of that? What integration will there be with your existing contacts book, which presumably already contains most people that you actually care about, rather than these other world friends, who exist in some netherworld between real and imgainary.

DRM-free content, data-loving subscribers: the beginning of the end of the mobile darkness?

2007-02-07T01:18:00.000-08:00

For those of us looking forward to a grown up internet experience on mobiles, two pieces of news struck me as significant. First, the big increase in the likelihood of a new approach to digital music. Steve Jobs thumbs his nose at DRM. No surprise that he thinks that, but breaking rank so publicly with a long-held industry consensus is ballsy. We must remember that nowadays, when Apple sneezes, other industries catch terminal pneumonia. I imagine there's been conversations for some time about when the final shove will be needed to push the broken business model over the cliff - to claim credit for being a successful customer-centric champion, but not to unnecessarily antagonize your key business partners when they're still delivering your cash cows. (Any other industries we can think of that this might be true?). Warner's deal with LastFM is another signal that change in attitude of the music rights holders themselves is underway.

The second is this remarkable stat from Helio - $100 ARPU. Actually, just getting 25% of that from data does actually seem low, given that it's a data-centric story. So, with the possibility of unlimited amount of sharable music sloshing around, together with some very real interest in mobile data, perhaps the message is getting through that you need to let go to have any chance of holding on?

Well, I never. It looks like we may well be becoming an "Internet company" after all...

2007-01-31T12:21:00.000-08:00

I've just returned from what what should have by rights been a tedious day, holed up in a subterranean convention bunker on the outskirts of a blizzard ensconced Helsinki, participating in a strategy meeting of our HR group. This kind of stuff, I thought to myself through gritted teeth, was what I get paid to do. Fair 'nuff.

However, after a 13 hour day brimming with powerpoints I've returned bounding with renewed energy for my job, and belief in this very Finnish, very unique company. The day was dominated by discussions around the transformation that our CEO has, with his characteristic bluntness put as "we're a mobility company, now we're also going to become an Internet company". (As to what this means exactly, for our purposes it is closely tied up with the shift to services, and in general, like porn, you know it when you see it.) The fact that Internet issues pervaded our discussions is no great surprise - what gave me the shot in the arm was the universally positive attitude in the room of appx. 100 people - almost by definition not the early technology adopters in the company - that major change was inevitable, we were going to deal with it like we had dealt with other major issues in the past, and we were going to do it damn well.

Letting go of control, embracing uncertainty, welcoming failure, sharing not hoarding, external openness, beta-level iteration, understanding and innovating together with end-users: these were all alien concepts to this company when I joined 3 years ago, and I felt out of place in an environment of highly skilled, disciplined, telecom enginneers, who designed complex solutions to complex problems. Before this gig, I had been coordinating trade policy networks in Brussels where the only way to get things done was informal collaboration, and I knew nothing of telco technologies (and, as a edge-ist didn't want to learn). Now, even in the 12 months that I've been working on these 2.0 and innovation related issues I've seen a major change of approach, both at the top and increasingly in the all-important middle layer. And today I felt on the same wavelength as most of the HR management, who have their tentacles in every nook of the company, and hold the levers to change that all important 'mindset'.

So, will it work? Who knows. It's certainly going to be a long journey as we start to roll out our consumer internet services and explore new business models and partnerships. However, the real sense I've got from today is that we're reached the crest of an uphill struggle for hearts and minds to focus on this issue, and the long winding road of Internet transformation is now looking that bit less daunting. Am looking forward to sharing more specifics as they emerge.

Future competitive advantage: Provenance?

2007-01-30T01:51:00.000-08:00

Brad Burnham discusses the shift from hardware and services to data:

Later, it shifted to systems software, then applications software, and then networks. As more software functionality was delivered to a browser over the internet, the basis of competition shifted from features to service level metrics like reliability, accessibility and security. I believe that today, at least in the area of consumer web services, we have already moved on to a new focus of competitive differentiation based on data.

And then suggests that's not the end of the story, but the next elements "in the stack" could be governance, values and ethics. I like this approach, and would add one of my favourites to this pantheon: provenance. Provenance is about the place where things come from and the history and values associated with it. In answer to Brad's question, perhaps provenance is really the end of the line, since a company's history is pretty much impossible to commodify. How it uses its history as an asset is therefore up to them.

Oddly enough, on my first day at Nokia in November 2003 we had a brainstorming about future competitive advantages, and one of my suggestions was that in an era of commodification, the unique provenance of Finnishness could be an asset for Nokia. There is something unique about Finland's highly educated, disciplined workforce, the remarkable integrity and decency of its people, the bias to openness and transparency (if you see a car in the street you can find out the owner, address and how much tax they paid last year for the cost of a phone call), and the charming, empty, clean, open countryside. In a hectic world which in which the ultimate luxury is conversational currency and the ability to switch off, this could be rich seam. And in a world in which every technical innovation is replicated in the blink of an eye, this seems fairly defendable.

Backup: who pays whom for data storage?

2007-01-29T16:13:00.000-08:00

From the mobile monday email list comes a new service: Mobyko. From their site, the immediate offering is free backup. This makes sense for the mainstream users, who have had to cope with the pain and frustration of lost numbers on top of their lost or replaced phones, and is a service that our industry has been amazingly remiss at making work better (not having any phone numbers makes it hard to spend money calling and texting people, let alone the more prosaic data charging possibilities for over the air backup). So operators are cottoning on and There are others in this space too, such as Fusion, Sharpcast, 02 reportedly rolling it out as an automatic feature, and Shozu adding it to their photo backup offering as a freebie.

I guess my two questions for this kind of service is: why you little startup and not the big, trusted brands with their existing networks, and what will be your business model if you're not going to take the data and sell it to 3rd parties?

Not long ago, people would have paid for this service (in fact people still are), in the same way that some people are still hiring a phone off AT&T with a monthly charge (something like $5). Now it's been offered for free by startups. Next step? Customers being able to auction off their data? I imagine this is something that the Root founders would have in mind. It's not just that the data could be used to target you for spam / targeted ads, it's the insight about people in general that can be gleaned from the information contained, such as the number and type of companies in the book. This is a tricky issue, and I'd be surprised to see a service thrive that does not either big brand recognition, or allow the user to control and benefit from their data in an innovative way. Will be watching with interest...

Imity: through a looking glass darkly

2007-01-25T07:04:00.000-08:00

Are you the same person online as you are in real life? I'm not talking about the 43 year old geek guy pretending to be a 15 year old girl, but the more subtle question about whether you use the web to support or substititute for real life. This post won't be relevant for the latter category. And in fact, it might give you pause for thought: soon, everyone will know you're a dog.

Nokia's Sensor app is/was a rather cute bluetooth-only social networking solution. People liked it but commented how much better it would be with an online component too. Well, thanks to a chat with Nikolaj at DLD, it seems that the team at imity (as in proximity) have done pretty much that: take the sensor concept to the next level, and allow you to interact with people whether they are in the real world, or your online world.

So, what does it do? It combines blueetooth scanning with online social networking, so it can tell you if there's someone in the same room as you who reads your blog or other online site. Or you can see if there's someone visiting your blog who you were with in that bar last night. Here's a deck from last year's Reboot when they were still closed beta. The new site's only be open to registrations for a week or two.

It's interesting that the digital traces we leave as we meander around the web (e.g. MyBlogLog) are becoming real world. So, think twice before you write that rude blog comment; you might find yourself on the sharp end of a non-virtual fist.

I imagine before long they will extend the model to the other dimension: to allow you to trace the shadows of your Second Life pesona and their respective interactions with others. In fact, they ask for a SL name on sign up, so this is probably already underway if it's not out yet. I hope they allow you to automate the meta-matching, so that as you / your avatar / your online surfer passes others, you can tell whether they share your taste in music / movies / books / locations etc. with federated output data of lastFM / Netflix / Amazon / Plazes etc.

As a rather boring 'supplementer' I find the collision of these worlds very exciting. In its current format, it probably won't be that attractive to those who want to maintain the shroud of alternate reality. I'm looking forward to a S60 3.0 version, a critical mass of local users to make the bluetooth scanning work, and the surfacing of many really interesting questions and services that we've not even begun to think of yet.

Have an N73 or E60? Work for us. For free!

2007-01-24T00:28:00.000-08:00

***Updated: oops, my typo - should have been E61 not E60 as previously put. I will leave the title as it is else the links won't work. But it's E61s that we're after***

I'm helping out some colleagues of mine at Nokia who are looking for some informal pre-release testing on one of our forthcoming consumer internet services. Criteria would be:
i) London based (easier for me, but not that important)
ii) you already have an N73 or E61
iii) willing to provide feedback in return for, say, a beer?

We don't need real mobile or tech experts, but a sense of humour would be good, especialy regarding the foibles of alpha/beta level stuff. If we get enough people, we could do a meetup for drinks and feedback on the company tab. Testing period wil just be a few weeks. If interested, leave your details in the comments, or email me at stephen dot johnston at nokia dot com.

DLD social networking panel to mobiles: Sorry, you're not invited

2007-01-22T02:32:00.000-08:00

One of the ironies of today's social networking services is that the device that can deliver these services directly to the users wherever they are, and has access to the kind of information that could be Royal Jelly to the providers, is shunned and relegated to a poor relation. Not to my surprise, today's high-profile panel on social networking had little to say on the subject, but contained some interesting tidbits nonetheless. The panel was moderated by Jamba-founder and one of Germany's entrepreneur-wizz kid brothers Oliver Samwer, and consisted of Matt Cohler, Strategy VP at Facebook, Lars Hinnrich, founder of Xing (formerly OpenBC), Erik Wachtmeister, founder of aSmallWorld (aSW), and an old-world-business model legend, Arend Oetker.

Mobile industry: need not apply
The only reference to mobile was made mid-way through by the eminent Dr. Oetker, who seemed to say that 'handys' were obviously not compatible with these kinds of service, because emotion was so important and emotion was clearly impossible on the small screen. Cue my rant from yesterday about not even needing screens, although to be fair Dr O. was the self-styled non-technologist on the panel. The deafening silence on the subject of mobile throughout the rest of the session was a telling indictement of our industry's ability to reach out and enable these services in a more meaningful way than basic WAP links. The lack of a great mobile client for aSW seems particularly problematic for the users (given their openness for real-world interactions), and something like an updated version of the bluetooth-optimized Sensor could make a whole lot of sense for them. Time ran out before I was able to ask the question about 'what is stopping you from having great mobile experiences of your services', but I'm sure the answer would have been the same as when I asked it during the social networking panel in last year's Next Web Conference. The answer then was high and non-transparent charges, which I expect is still gripe #1.

No new business models
There weren't many breakthrough insights re business models (nor were we expecting any). Business models were generally advertising subscription fees or commissions on ecommerce (aSW has 265 yachts on sale, together with thousands of job listings, though no detail was given of the amount of fees charged). Admittedly, Xing noted that they had revenues from day 1, and have recently been floated (valued at $160m). At this stage, Dr. Oetker's baby-food-and-things-you-can-touch business model is looking the healthiest.

aSmallWorld: real world exclusivity brings real value to members
It was interesting to listen to Erik W. in person - he's clearly a bit of a legend for the 100,000 aSWers whose glitzy lives he has helped make glitzier. As a proud member (though not one of the glitzy ones) I can attest to the value of the site - it provided the chance to meet some fascinating and friendly locals during recent trips to Morocco and Miami, providing a much richer experience for the itinerant traveller. That kind of welcome wouldn't have been likely by trying to connect with MySpace members (yikes), and is testimony to its focus on real-world, trusted social relationships. aSW is unique among these services in terms of its rather paternalistic approach - 6 webmasters moderate the community, and can ban misbehaving members (sending them to aBigWorld) for such crimes as trying to 'conect' with cute Swedish women you don't actually know (this is dubbed the 'Italian syndrome'). Erik's presence here seems indicative of a new activities brewing: he announced they may bring in subscription charging soon and will be bringing out a new version of the software to allow groups.

Helping people make the web more manageable, and real.
One interesting idea was Erik's response to the 'next big thing' question. He said there will be lots of opportunities for helping people bring order to the chaotic nature of the web (one of his major USPs for aSW). This theme is echoed in a piece in yesterday's NYT:

Get ready for a lot of opportunities to join all kinds of networks — and, one hopes, some appropriately Webby new way to politely say, “No, thank you.”

This alludes to the Danah-esque annoyance with these clumsy social structures - the inability to bring the same nuance to online social networks that we can use in real life (for example, feigning that you've forgotten your business card / have an important telephone call or are stricken with a tremendously debilating and infectious disease).

Faithful to their customers or their community / market segment?
Esther Dyson asked the best question (as she generally does) to Facebook: Are you going to mature your service offering as your customers grow, e.g. graduate from college and become young professionals. The answer was a bit vague, but this is a fascinating issue. What proportion of sites are designed to facilitate better interaction of predefined communities (e.g. golf club, company networking tools) rather than individuals (with aSW and MySpace being clear examples)? And what attributes should a community-focused network have compared to an individual-focused network?

From real-world communities to online, rather than vice versa
Although not really dicussed in this session, I'd suggest that the natural evolution of things seems to be taking us down the Long Tail - more niche communities created to align with existing real world communities. And I'd doubt whether any of the existing mass networks are the place to start for this. For example, I'd love to have a more powerful online community component to my sailing club, but it's unlikely that any one of these networks will have critical mass in these real world communities to be feasibe (MySpace is not big in Suffolk). The real-world community itself will determine the technology connectedness of its members, and 99% of real world communities have no internet presence. So, presumably there's a viable business opportunity for a multi-platform community-service provider offering community services to these communities. If I was a betting man, I'd suggest that enabling these communities will be the next disruption to the bloated mass market social networks that are already showing signs of churn.

The web's next trick: to disappear?

2007-01-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

Am in Munich at the DLD Conference and will try to do some posts from what is shaping up to be an interesting - and heavily oversubscribed - event. One of the comments in the opening future-orientated session (by Caterina Fake) alluded to the concept that I've been mulling over a while. She said we're going to see the end of the web as we know it - in short (my summary of her comment) a shift away from the traditional PC experience, and portals in particular, towards more modular web-services broken up and delivered to the user in whatever way is convenient to them, whether it's on the mobile, the TV or wherever. Conversation then moved on, but this idea of a disappearing web seems worth exploring. In a nutshell, I guess it refers to mobilization of the access layer with 'deportalization' at the services layer. This stuff is bread and butter for most Mobile2.0 advocates, and visionaries such as Rajesh Jain, but I'd interested to hear about how others have structured this, and whether these elements hang together.

This is a story about enabling innovation at the services level, rather than the display level. It would suggest that AJAX, gorgeous multi-touch UIs and the browser itself are less important than figuring out how to get semantic, federated data working on any internet accessible device. And, while it's an impressive technological feat that we have a fully featured, best in class web browser on our devices, this line of thought would make that mute. Of course we need to offer the best experience of browsing today's old 2-dimensional web pages, but this would be just 'hygiene'; context rather than core. The disappearing web is a fragmented, modular, data-centric place, in which RSS and widgets rules supreme. Btw this post from the ever-sharp software abstractions blog has more about RSS aggregation and filtering, deportalization and semantic web as top disruptive technologies for 2007.

I would like to think that we could do away with the browser alltogether and the need to navigate portals on either the mobile or PC, because it is a fairly clumsy analogy of a reference library. Please technologists, don't ask me to dive into a strange other dimension that you call the web but looks to me like just links. I want the web to wrap itself around me, a warm blanket of comforting connectivity. And like all good blankets, I want it to be seamless, easy to understand, effective at simply delivering what it promises, and no sharp, bulky edges.

Hence my frustration with people who ask me how on earth a mobile device with a small screen can possibly be an effective Internet device. Gosh darnit, if the next version of the web was any good, you wouldn't even need a screen. I don't want the distractions and infinite choices presented to me by services that abdicate their ability to serve, constantly nagging at me for my input to dumb questions that it really should have the answers to already. I want answers to problems that I either have or am about to have, delivered as pure signal, no noise. I want my phone to buzz silently when I'm in a meeting to indicate that the London flat I've been looking for comes on the market at the right price. I want it to send a painful electric shock when I'm about to eat that sticky donut that, according to my health-care provider who knows my medical and consumption history, will prove fatal with 99% probability given my current heart condition. I want a very subtle glowing icon to indicate that one of my trusted contacts is driving past my house on the way to the airport, meaning I could save a £50 taxi fare by hitching a ride. None of these involve big screens; just smart signals delivered in a multi-sensory way that makes sense to the particular context. All of these require interoperability at the data layer (the semantic stuff), but it's the business and social interoperability (getting companies to open their processes, and for consumers to trust them) that's the harder task. These require a realization that human experiences and the applications and services that serve them live in three dimensions. And the data from these three dimensions deliver vastly more opportunities for service innovation, rendering many of today's 2-dimensional portal-based web experiences outdated, if not redundant.

What this blog is all about

2007-01-21T06:55:00.000-08:00

I love the Internet, but am more interested in how it can help you live a better real life, rather than a different one. Via Boingboing.

And in a similar vein...

iPhone - come on in the water's lovely

2007-01-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

Been in Miami all week at conferences so light posting, and glimpsing the sun outside the conference window (arguably worse than no sun at all). Now in the BA lounge on my way back to grimey London, rife with its religous tension (both in Big Brother and on the street), worst storms for 17 years, and constantly shoddy transport system. Anyway, I digress. I was going to address the question made by my regular (only?) reader from Nigeria, pumba, who asked what i thought about the iPhone. Well, even though this is just a personal blog, and I'm anyway not a spokesman about such things for Nokia, my views are fairly inline with the company's view, which is that it validates our 'worldview' of mobile multimedia internet enabled devices: the most important computers going forward will not need to be permanently plugged into the wall.

The unprecedented levels of exposure for this launch have planted the seeds in millions of people's minds (especially in the key US market) that computing and the internet needn't be about PCs. Until people believe this and start using mobile devices as full members of the Internet, and web developers know this, the promise of an Internet that is dramatically more usable and relevant for people will not be realized. It's as if we've been building cars for a while, but the Americans haven't found a compelling reason to make the leap from horse-drawn carriages. To the exent that Apple - and its slick marketing machine - is joining in and validating the market for cars rather than horses, I'm grateful. The idea of the next Web is going to be the topic of the next post that I've been meaning to write for a while, and if my middle seat in cattle class actually allows me to use the keyboard, maybe I'll get to it on the flight.

Before I leave the topic, would only add that in many respects this is not really a phone such as we understand the category, but a cellular-enabled PDA, that doesn't look like it'll be operated with one-hand, and doesn't have GPS (unlike e.g. N95). So, even if Apple succeeds in validating the market for such a category that hasn't existed until now, it doesn't mean that other manufacturers will be able to repeat the trick.

Democratizing the hardware

2007-01-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

Given that we have so many smart people, and worse, smart networks all trying to add value in this business, it's surprising how many simple opportunities to improve the customer experience seem to be overlooked as people rush to emulate the Next Big Thing. The ever-original Martin Geddes is a source of endless creativity:

Here’s another product I want, but nobody wants to sell me. I hardly dare call
home when away because my kids are erratic sleepers at best, and it’s far too
easy to get the timing wrong. I could text her mobile, BUT that makes a
pointless beeping at inappropriate moments. [..] I want a big LED
display I can put on the wall, and send text messages to. And a row of
buttons to acknowledge receipt and return an pre-canned SMS. “Yes”, “No”,
“Maybe”, “Yes, I still love you.”, “If you’re not home by 5.30 I’m going to
murder them all by myself.” And that’s it. [...]Not everyone spends their day
tethered to a PC screen, or is big enough to even reach the keyboard.

I think his solution would cost about $3 to make in Taiwan and could retail for $100. Clearly this kind of solution would work in an IP-world. So what's stopping this? Maybe it's not that easy for a no-name OEM to interface with the SMS infrastructure?

Service lessons from a jumbo prawn

2007-01-16T10:23:00.000-08:00

Despite being the land that invented service culture, I'm finding that Americans seem to be losing their edge. I just had lunch in the hotel overlooking the beach - cue surf sounds, and when I asked about the size of the 'jumbo prawns' I was told you get 4 wopping prawns that are each about 10 times bigger than standard prawns. Salivating at the prospect of these gastro-crustaceo delights that I guessed were wriggling with freshness, I duly ordered them.

But lo! When the plate arrived (carried by a different waitress) there were just three podgy pink prawns smiling up at me. When I queried my original waitress about The Missing Prawn (accounting for a quarter of my dish) she apologized and came back in a few mins with a solitary prawn delivered in a bowl. No attempt to compensate for mental anguish, such as giving me a couple more for good measure. (I guess there's still a fat margin on the hefty $14 cost.)

A second learning for me was Not To Blame Someone Else. The waitress passed the buck onto the hapless kitchen staff, saying that their "apprentice" didn't know the drill. This hardly made me the customer feel better; merely conjured up the image that they have a scruffy youth on work experience slopping dishes together with dirty fingernails.

Well, a trivial point, but I've noticed the correlation of declining service standards with the shift of the tip on the bills from "optional" (in theory at least) to it being automatically added (17% in this case). The even cheekier bit is the a line asking for "Additional gratuity". Another couple of prawns might have even bounced that tip into overdrive, and made me a convert.

Sometimes you just got to stop innovating

2007-01-14T16:40:00.000-08:00

I had the most beautiful ergonomic, rounded, shiny silver presenter gadget made by Targus (Google images only finds the new ugly version), which I lost. It had a specially satisfying feature whereby the USB key would slide right into the handle when not in use. Obvious really. Tried to get a new one today in Office Depot, and was confronted with a barrage of overspecified pointers. The one I unwillingly got in end was by Microsoft and it is just a classic example of that Apple vs. Microsoft design philosophy video doing the rounds last year.

This ugly ducklying is bigger and heavier than necessary, has a raft of features which I had to consult the instruction booklet for advice on how to use (dual mode between mouse pointer and clicker, mouse controls, on/off switch, buzz-alert timer...) and most annoyingly of all (don't people do competitor research before launching stuff?) it has a separate USB dongle that does not fit together with the clicker, but gets its own pocket in the natty little leatherette case that comes with it. Of course I'll now lose just one element, and the remaining twin will taunt me.

One final thought, I'm disappointed they didn't put a little belt loop on the cover, so that corporate flunkies such as me could strut around with this gadget on our hip, nestling next to our phone pods, like an emasculated Rob0Cop put on parking duty.

OK, this is just procrastination. I really should be reviewing my notes for the presentation I'm giving tomorrow on Social Networks. Right, off to work...

Innovation goes west: Benin the new Nigeria?

2007-01-14T04:30:00.000-08:00

It seems that Benin, a West African country that I was not particularly acquainted with before, is in fact a hot bed of 2.0 social networking innovation. Just got a friend request on the real-world bookmarking site Flagr from a polite sounding gentleman who is urgently waiting my contact details for profitable business. I wonder if friend requests are a new communications medium of choice? So many questions. Is there a higher takeup rate as people assume we're all 'inside the beltway'. And why Flagr? Surely MySpace and YouTube would provide richer pickings than its savvy geeks...

"Dr. Mark James, the newly appointed Director for Foreign Operations at
Financial Bank of Benin (FBB.). I am urgently waiting for your message, I have
very good and profitable business for you just email me with your full address
and phone number ok."

The Trouble with Flow

2007-01-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

The always readable and delightfully colourful Creating Passionate Users blog wonders what comes after usability. To that question I'd say, nothing. When you have it, that's it. You've won. Collect the prize and go home. However, I think that the end state of usability -- 'flow' as depicted in her graphic here -- is getting harder to achieve.

What strikes me as we go up the stack from red to blue that the focus moves away from the product and towards the service layer, and then above that, to the uniqueness of every individual's own data. Can a product in itself deliver flow? A BMW M5 perhaps, or a well sharpened axe. Presumably it's easier to create flow with a service, such as an opera. But what if the user doesn't like opera? It's harder than ever to get into flow, when niches themselves are fragmenting, and, in the spirit of HSBC's brilliant campaign, one user's Bach is another's Beastie Boys.

The SIMply frustrating reality of the lost phone

2007-01-07T16:53:00.000-08:00

Foolishly, and most irritatingly, I forgot my phone on a flight on Friday. I can picture exactly where I left it (the seat pocket) and went straight to the BA desk (picking my way carefully through the 100,000 pieces of luggage and mewling babies and parents) in the luggage claim area. After waiting best part of an hour and checking with them a few times, they told me that they had finally sent someone out to check the plane, and couldn't find it. Having recently spent 2.5 years living in Helsinki where wallets full of cash left on the street are returned, this came as a shock. But as someone said to me yesterday, this ain't Kansas, Toto.

Anyway, this little exercise has brought home to me the utter frustration caused by the most useful component of my identity being the subject of the twin tyrants of i) a physical form factor (the plastic sim card) and ii) intermediaries who control "my" identity. I had to report its loss via an internal corporate service desk, fill in a replacement SIM card form, and then hope that at some stage that intermediary connects to the Vodafone intermediary, so somebody somewhere can flick a switch somewhere that will rekindle my life.

The last couple of days have been a complete social wasteland for me (the extent to which the phone's loss is responsible is however debatable), my travel plans have been skewered and I have no insight into when I'll be back in the land of the living, or what the process is. How much easier would it be if i) I controlled my communication identity and could change it at will ii) i could access it at from any web connected device, grabbing a physical device as needed, and otherwise just using my Skype as an OK approximation of my cellphone, able to send and receive messages and calls. Hmm, will take a while I guess, and meanwhile, idiots such as me will continue making work for paper and plastic pushers the world over.

Improving the performance of social networks with real world data

2006-12-29T02:17:00.001-08:00

Today's online social networks have done wonders in connecting you with what matters to you, given that they have very little data to go on. And this data generally requires you to painfully input it at each site, resulting in a proprietary lock-in. We manually add our friends and interests in a binary fashion that ignores the glimpses, hints and nuances of reality. What might be useful here would be to have a 'friendly fly on the wall' - watching you, and allowing these services to understand you better and therefore serve you better. (Note: this would be primarily of interest for those of us who are realists rather than the escapists.)

As far as I see it, there are two types of data that could be useful to capture to improve the performance of these networks: digital and analogue. Google is already doing a rather good job at capturing the first type - starting with your web-browsing clickstream and moving into your email and documents. They are starting to sniff around the second type of data which is naturally harder to come by, with Checkout. However, this is where their exalted web-only existence puts them at a disadvantage against the relative neanderthals with desktop presence and the and the positively jurassic players in the telco space. Desktop apps are much better at collecting non-web data such as what iTunes is playing, and mobiles are the ultimate fly on the wall for capturing and brokering the real life data stream (we've been using the term "Lifestream" for this).

Mobile devices could come closer to improving the equation - they know where you go, who you speak to most, will know what you listen to (if you believe Tomi), what you watch, and the list goes on. In short, they have a better chance of knowing who you are than yet another social network service that is about as smart as a new born chicken. So, what irony that these are the most successful social network services -- making do without access to these multiple rich data streams, but with crumbs from the user's desk.

I've being using this rather crude sketch to illustrate this irony -- by integrating mobile-generated data into social networks, the services could be better. (Btw - this ideal of implicit data is to my mind more of a feature than a new paradigm of the web.) So, while in the PC world I am sitting alone at my desk trying to figure out who are my top 8 friends, a social networking service that I allow to have access to my implicit location, purchase, media and communication service (privacy issues being resolved with a wave of a magic wand...) could do a lot more heavy lifting on the back end and act as a broker to my actual, rather than imaginary friends. Naturally, all the implicit or supplementary data that could be relevant for such a service does not have to be mobile, it's just that much of it is likely to be.

An ohmygod moment I had today brought this home to me. I saw LastFM's events tab -- populated with concerts in London over the next couple of months, most of which i'd really like to go to. Far from this being some happy coincidence, it was purely the result of their site connecting their listings with the filter of my recently scrobbled music. I was immediately drooling at the possibilities -- what else could I listen to, watch, see, and who, could I meet. Hey, life's complicated and busy enough already, and I'm more than happy to outsource short-list making to experts, if they have enough information to go on to make good decisions.

So, what interests me now is how to move from painful, limited, proprietary data entry into every online YASN towards an open model whereby you own your data, and can plug it and to different service providers. Things need to change from the telco side (APIs, walled gardens, data & location tariffs, richer and easier developer environements...) but also greater adoption of microformats, open APIs and clearer transparency on data policies by online sites would be helpful. Will the mobile move from wireless telephone to best friend supplement - a broker to help me navigate news stories, purchase suggestions, places to go and people to see?