Bringing three dimensional back people to life

I've long harboured an ambition to do more with this rather moribund blog, and some recent conversations, together with a wealth of interesting activities going on right now means I'm going to try and be a bit more regular.

First thing I did was to consolidate to this blog some other posts I'd had in other places. Second thing I did was to invite my old friend and co-conspirator Rob Neild to join on this blog as an author - he's one of the most creative people I know and him and I have spent many hours in recent months putting the world to rights and coming up with all sorts of killer apps in this space where the internet and real world merge. The original ambitions of this blog are still valid - to report on how mobiles are becoming Internet devices and the Intenret is becoming mobile. I hope Rob will post some of his thoughts from time to time - he now has an account, so no excuse.

Third thing I'm doing is actually planning to more systematically add new content - part aide memoire, part advertising unofficially some of the things that we're doing at Nokia that can be put in the public arena, and part because I think these issues are far to big to keep internal. Rather fittingly, this post will conclude with a point to a couple of new applications for Symbian whch are the poster childs of the Internet - BitTorrent and Gnutella. New versions have just been announced by Budapest University of SymTorrent and Symella. So, a bit of fun for those with generous bosses, data plans or wifi phones and big memory cards - all those open source speeches you've been meaning to download can be yours. I must admit, I've found them a bit buggy on my E70, but imagine that'll be ironed out soon.

extWeb Conference: Europe can do web2.0 too

Carolina - one of our charming Dutch hosts

A rather last minute decision to attend The Next Web conference in Amsterdam on July 7th paid off handsomely. A colorful cross section of about 160 European entrepreneurs, bloggers, academics - and corporate schmucks like me - were treated to sparking Dutch hospitality, flawless logistics and an excellent old-new venue (NH Hotel). This note summarizes some of my higlights:

Transparent, low flat fees needed before mobile social networking will take off. Hyves are YASNS, but from Netherlands this time, and have some success with going mainstream - most interestingly with cabinet-level politicians joining up and collecting thousands of 'friends'. I asked a question to the “Chief Hyves Officer” (CEO) what needs to be done to improve the mobile experience and he indicated two priorities: first, make the pricing cheaper and second make it more transparent – so low, flat fees for data in a nutshell. He didn’t seem too concerned about platform issues or porting problems to different handsets. 

Brand Arrington releases his 10 Commandments. Michael A. - pin-up of the web2.0 chattering classes – blessed and dismissed in equal measure. Refreshing to see that his opinions are not moderated despite having 80,000 feed readers hanging on his every word. He promised to deliver a top ten of European web2.0 companies, and in fact delivered two  - a  B team also. 

His “almost picks” included openBC, cocomment, ebuddy, spotback, licketttship, esnips, vpod.tv, pageflicks, feeds2.0, fleick.

His top 10 were:

• Allpeers - Private p2p network



• Bebo – Next MySpace – founders have moved from UK to San Francisco



• Facebook – 75% of college kids use this daily, and it has more page views than Google. They (foolishly) turned down $1billion



• Last.fm – collaborative music recommendations. Turned down €30m offer



• Netvibes – popular french Ajaxy – make-your-own-portal



• Riya – Scarily powerful facial recognition, a tech story. Turned down Yahoo!, almost acquired by Google, but deal fell through at last minute.



• Wikio - best European hope against digg



• Youtube – video success story - $1m bandwidth bills per month



• Zlango – Israel start up using SMS icons to create a new language



• And at #1: Digg - $1200 dollars to start up this company. Now 9m page views per day, similar audience to NYTimes. Very disrputive to media. Rather ironic in a way - a bottom up voting site receving top marks from the top down Mr. A.

He also spawned a meme-let - as is his wont - with his boycot of the phrase Web2.0 due to the legal attack dogs kerfuffle.

Communities as big as email. Nielsen didn't tell us a great deal new - and conspicuosly didn't have any figures on mobile internet usage - but it was interesting that while 71% of European Internet users use email, the number's almost matched by those who participate in some from of 'member communities' (69.3%). He didn't define the term further.

Companies mentioned that seemed interesting: shopzilla, neuf telecom, videolan, kijij, ogame, buycentral, measuremap, truveo, la fraise (selling customer-made t shirts), red hot tomatoes, feedo, mp3.nl

Guy who backed Skype places his next bets in 5 areas. Mark Tluczsz, co-Founder and Partner of Mangrove Partners identified five areas that he was most excited about new opportunities. His investment rationale was the easy-sounding – thing BIG and follow your passion.

1. Search. Most search engines return similar results, and only 25% of people ever look beyond page 3. Despite Google and Y!’s PhDs, he feels this area is ripe for innovation in user experience, in particular around the empty white box.

2. Human service makes a come back. Customer service: automation has resulted in a broken link between customer and supplier. CRM strategies that include the human touch will become a “business necessity”. Avatars will be big. E.g. Ikea’s Anna.

3. Eastern Europe.  Big, hungry and shedding their socialist tendencies quicker than you can say Polish plumber. 

4. Mobile experience. Derision and disgust for today’s expensive, patchy and uninnovative mobile experience.. “Look at WAP - we are paying for the industry’s R&D”. The one thing they’ve done well is to embed the address book. 2bn phone uses vs. 1bn Internet users = opportunity.

5. Power of the many. How to benefit from the collective intelligence of a group. collective power. Digg etc..

Kevin Kelly - da man. The founder of Wired was on great form. My favourite quote - "The Web is only 4000 days old! Give it a chance." Andy Grove apparently said that, already “everything ever said about the internet is happening”. Physical production is growing 7% per annum, while information is growing at 66%. So, information about X increases at the rate of 10X. The next web will be the convergence of real and virtual. E.g. RFID tags in clothes, place notes, PLAZES embedding info. Any screen will look into the web. Managers should do well to treat every product or service as if it was free. The hyperlink and the tag are two of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century. We now need an open source “hardware” phone, camera, TV, car.

Overall - a great success. A lot was packed into a few hours. The organizers of the event are onto something – an appetite for European innovation and slightly more homely, relaxed feel than similar conferences in the US - I hope this remains. Nokia was there with its Widsets venture, and I hope we'll be back next year in force.

Bumptop desktop - bringing real world back to the virtual world

I'm interested in how we can get our computing experiences to recognize the fact that most of the time we're in the real world. But how about bringing some of the richness of the real world into the otherwise flat PC experience. This project from the dynamic grpahics project introduces some interesting concepts:

This is an extension of the classic desktop metaphor such that files can beloosely arranged, piled, sorted, flipped through like pages of a book,etc. objects can be casually dragged & tossed around, influenced byphysical characteristics such as friction & mass, much like wewould manipulate lightweight objects in the real world.Bumptop allows users to use the strategies they employ in the realworld to convey information about the objects they own. another goal isto support casual organization of information in a manner where usersare not forced to commit to categorization, such as the immediatenaming & filing of documents.

bumptop physical desktop - data visualization & visual culture - information aesthetics

technorati tags:3dpeople

Blogged with Flock

Bittorrent on Symbian

Now, in addition to Gnutella on Symbian, we have BitTorrent on S60. Ever get the feeling that technology doesn't care about legislation?

One's grey and one's pink. PC vs mobiles

This extract from the Communities Dominate Brands blog suggests four distinct differences between PC and mobile phone, in a post suggesting (correctly IMO) that mobile access to the Internet is going to be bigger than the PC:

First of all, a mobile phone based internet is totally personalized. Our PC is often shared - such as a university campus computer, or a family computer, or the PC owned by the employer with its limitations and at times access by the IT department etc. But our mobile phone is totally personal.

Secondly the mobile phone is always on. It means that any alerts, urgent news etc can be delivered. With laptops we need to find our access, connect to a WiFi etc network, but mobile phones are always connected and can for example be reached via SMS text messaging for alerts at any time.

Thirdly the mobile phone is always within hand's reach of its users. No other technology is so close to us physically at all times. We don't take our computers to bed with us (well, most don't do that), but over 60% of all mobile phone users take their cellphone physically to bed with them at night. We notice we've lost our wallet in 26 hours. But we notice we're missing our mobile phone in 68 minutes.

Finally - and most importantly - the mobile phone offers a built-in payment mechanism. The PC based internet does not have that. On the traditional internet we need to set up a payment system like Paypal, or we need to submit credit card info etc. But on the mobile phone we can (if our carrier/operator has enabled it) handle any payments at the click of a button."

I think this is a useful exercise, and these are good, but am not convinced that this is the definitive list. First, in developing countries, mobile phones can be, and are, shared. I don't know of much shared ownership being enabled at the software level yet unfortunately. Second, 'always on' is dependent on cellular operators and some of the best next gen mobile apps will have intermittent or time dependent connectivity, such as location specific podcasts delivered over wifi. Third - proximity to user. Absolutely agree. That's the key, and undervalue point of mobiles. Fourth easy payment. Well, again dependent on mobile operators. Mobile PayPal is here, and operator billing won't be the only game in town. More importantly, if we help make the Internet go mobile, then the expectation of paying for everything just because it is mobile will be eroded. New business models based on advertising and commerce rev share will not require direct payment by end users.

I do like this list, but am wondering if there's more? One that I'm missing is the possibility for easier user data input. In particular multi-media input (e.g. camera phone, BT, RFID). We should not be stuck with current limited text input when we've got a veritable magic wand with multiple features.

Wikis at Nokia

Info Week interviewed me about wikis at Nokia :

At Nokia, the first wiki was brought in as an experiment by the Corporate Strategy team without consulting the IT department. Stephen Johnston, our contact in the department, told us, "After installing it we were told that it was probably against company policy." According to Johnston, resistance from the IT team stemmed from misgivings about overhead costs, the delegation of control to users, and the fear that wikis were a fad. However, the wiki (built on an open-source platform) quickly proved to be an effective means of saving time and effort previously dedicated to the task of distributing and storing corporate intelligence.

Johnston says wikis have proliferated within Nokia since the initial test. The company has purchased 200 seats of Socialtext, and four wikis, on both open-source and proprietary platforms, are being used by between 1,000 and 1,500 employees. As a result of the wikis' success, Nokia has agreed to fund and support a companywide wiki as well as a host of other collaborative tools. A skunkworks, or new technology project team, has also been established "to provide new tools such as wikis within days to business groups that ask to test new tools," says Johnston.
...
According Nokia's Johnston, the test wiki implemented by the Corporate Strategy department was part of a larger initiative to harness the power of social software – blogs, for example, are also very popular within the department. Nokia's wikis are part of a long-term transition to two-way communication, what Johnston calls "a world of read-write rather than just read." His comment highlights one of the raisons d'être of the social software movement – the desire to use computers to create a means of open discourse and introduce feedback into formerly static environments.

Read the whole story.

Making phones work for non-literate people

Jan 20

Jan Chipchase from Nokia Research Center, Tokyo makes some practical suggestions about modifications to the phone, ecosystem and infrastructure that can be used to improve the mobile experience of non-literate people:

Menus could have additional iconic support and hardware buttons other than soft keys should as much as possible be reserved to one button for one task. A two-way rocker button can confuse and may be perceived as one button. Wherever possible, phone settings should be automated to avoid the need for editing - for example, by default setting the time and date on the phone from the network.

Successful outcomes can be reinforced with audio feedback including for example playing back the number that was dialed prior to calling. Another option is spoken menus, though again this is a non-trivial understaking given the scale of languages and dialects to support. One radical approach could be to replace the digital contact management tool with a physical/digital hybrid that the user could annotate by pen or pencil.

A mobile phone equipped with a sufficiently high quality camera and display would enable the capturing and location shifting of written text, for example taking a photo of a hazardous materials sign at work and showing it to a literate relative at home.

This is on the new info portal for Nokia Research center which also has links to the Nokia opensource site.

Still So So MoSoSo

As mobiles, and the people who carry them, finally start to become part of the Internet I expect that one of the first killer apps will be mobile social networking. Unfortunately, today, it's still waiting for takeoff.

Social networking on the web has reached mainstream. I heard stats today that 40% of UK singles use online dating (and that's probably 90% of all singles with internet access then); 10% of newly weds in the USA in 2004 met on the Internet; and a UK divorce counselling service said that "Internet adultery" accounted for fully half of all reasons for divorce in their survey.

However, people have to switch off their digital prosthetic and go out into the rain and the real world to make do. Their urbane banter on IM or Orkut gives way to the rather more difficult task of meeting and speaking with real people. This is a pain point for many, and one that a mobile version of social networking tools could get right. The missing link is location information, and the operators are rather protective about giving up this information for other people to make money with. There is progress, especially in the US, which has implemented the E911 rule.

I predict that the transition path to a breakout success will not be a mobile startup with a great technology reaching critical mass, but will be an existing group of people deciding to integrate with a pre-existing mobile technology. I think aSmallWorld would be a great candidate, since there is a high homogenity across members - most members are happy to meet others, as it's still got an early adopter cachet; and there is respect for top-down proposals. These will make it easier to reach critical mass of adoption - always the problem with new networking services.

Not original. But still cool.

I know it's a cliche, but I'm blogging from seat 26H of the Lufthansa flight to San Francisco, using their flawless wifi service. And my Sonera Homerun roaming account is picking up a bill for an all-or-nothing €32 for the privelege.

Update: now paying twice, since pc died and i switched to the 770 tablet. the service says i'm still logged in - no timeout! note to self... however, good news is i'm loving the 770. excellent for reading blogs, and the internet radio works a charm - listening to lateshift on virgin now...

Will someone please create a good feedreader?

So, I've been getting increasingly frustrated about Bloglines. It's as if the founders cut and run the minute that Ask Jeeves bought them...

The Rant
We are moving from a web of searching through archives on big screens to syndicating to information about people places and things that matter to you. (And this will be on mobile devices rather than the big screen of course). And what tools do we have at our disposal? The modest feedreader. I haven't met one I liked. The crazy thing is that the same tool is needed in the enterprise and consumer space, for informing and for entertaining. So about all of the waking hours of those Web junkies that tend to influence things. Everything else (desktop apps, search engines) could be second fiddle to this interface if it is done well. I'm surprised at how little innovation there seems to be here.

The landscape
Frankly, it's thin pickings. Bloglines is so creaky I get frustrated everytime I go there, and wish they would hire some ajax / Ruby on Rails programmers. It's hard for me to easily delete and add feeds, no intelligence in presenting my feeds, no filtering... Firefox's sage is a bit better, but I have often have issues with Firefox (remembering passwords, getting stuck with firewalls etc). SharpReader and Newsgator do the plain vanilla OK but they are PC based (and NetNewsWire is Apple only), but I need it to be web-based. Google and MyYahoo are dabbling but have not delivered the kind of smooth experience that makes sense. In short, 37signals' Basecamp comes close to the user experience (not surprising since they basically invented Ruby on Rails) and I hope they are planning something like this.

(Similarly, blog creation tools are fairly flaky, but I guess that's going to have to be another post. The way that typepad allows the browser to navigate away from the post under construction (e.g. if you click a link in another app or hit the 'page back' button on the keyboard) has caused me to bounce off the ceiling numerous times. In that category, a good simple seems to be Ecto which lets you compose on the PC then post, but it shouldn't have to be a PC app.)

Hopefully some of the new web2.0 tools - such as findory, rollyo, loomia and other machine-generated names - will make strides in the right direction. I guess more announcements will be made at this week's event.

Anyway, here are some suggestions for a good feedreader:

• One click sorting and filtering along the following axes:
  -- frequency - that I read them (default, most read rise to the top so I can easily cull the stuff at the bottom)
  -- alphabetical - the name of the podcast
  -- date added - when I added it
  -- readership - the size of their audience
  -- tags - so i can create categories on the fly
• Easy flagging and tagging for later personal storage, management or sharing.
• Use Ajax / Ruby on Railsto allow drag and drop e.g. to add feeds or throw away feeds you're no longer interested in (Apple-esque - would be nice to have a puff of smoke too).
• Collaborative filters - guide me by what other people are viewing. Ideally, even communities that I create myself.
• Smooth integration between blogs and podcasts - they're the same thing, when you have Blinkx turning video into text and text to speech.
• Smooth integration with my mobile device - I can read and edit my feeds from either, and they will be updated on both. I can save clips / stories from my feeds on my mobile without leaving the page and marking all the feeds as read (as in mobile.bloglines.com)
• Ability to change the rules for certain blogs as 'I'm really interested in this' and if anything is posted here, send me an SMS, MMS, email or carrier pigeon (tick as appropriate). Same for when someone comments on my blog for blog creation tools
• Transparent collaborative filters - don't just tell me what you think I'll like. Let me build up my suggestions from you in stages. Give me the top 50 feeds based on [Tech] and / or [mention "mobiles" ] and / or [come from India ] and / or [are read and rated by people I rate]

Update: Google just launched google.com/reader here at Web2.0. My first impressions about this are not that great - confusing UI, delays and minimal features. OK it does tags, but still. C'mon Google, impress us.

What is Web 2.0 2.0?

My answer? Web 2.0 = Web Bubble 2.0 = Bubbly 2.0. I want some. Om has others:

Last night, I was at a dinner, where one of the topics of discussion was Web 2.0. More appropriately, what is Web 2.0? It is a damn fine question, and difficult one to answer. D. Keith Robinson writes, “Depending on who’s using the term, you could be talking about the Web as a platform for applications, a philosophy in building and designing Web applications, a group of powerful Web technologies, and much more.” Mark Sigal says, “At the core, it is an applied web service model that blurs the line between software and service.”
Dave Winer says, “Web 2.0 is a marketing concept used by venture capitalists and conference promoters to try to call another bubble into existence.” Richard McManus has his own take here.
From my perspective, I define Web 2.0 as a “collection of technologies - be it VoIP, Digital Media, XML, RSS, Google Maps… whatever …. that leverage the power of always on, high speed connections and treat broadband as a platform, and not just a pipe to connect.” Clearly, Web 2.0 is different and many things to many people. What is your definition? How do you view it? Curious to find out, especially before next week’s Web 2.0 conference.

Am excited to be going to Web 2.0. Not because of any major new insights or product launches (cheaper and more efficient to just read the blogs) but because to be at what should be an electrically-hyper event, of the kind I missed out when I was discussing trade policy over long lunches at the European Commission in the Web1.0 bubble at Millenium's end.

Bill Joy calls mobile Internet the 'here' web

When will there be more wireless Internet users than wired? Mid 2007 would be my guess.

Bill Joy is putting his money--or, more accurately, his VC firm's money--on the Web as the platform of the future.Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a driving force behind the creation of Berkeley Unix and Java, among other technologies, said the explosion in devices like cell phones, PDAs and other wireless gadgets connected to the Web is radically changing the technology industry.He calls that phenomenon the "here" Web, because the Internet is always "here, because you access it through a device you always carry."

Link: http://news.com.com/Joy+Future+of+the+Web+is+mobile+devices/2100-1016_3-5885769.html?tag=nefd.top

What is Web 2.0?

Posted from Tim O'Reilly's Tech Crunch.

There's a moose loose

Story about True Blue - another good find via Jyri:

True Blue Love is a mobile phone social networking experience, designed to explore the politics behind intimate phone-based relations. Designed as a program for mobile phones; each participant enters into the program the characteristics of their ideal sexual mate, chosen from a series of preset selections. While the program is running, every time another phone comes within range, a love metric is calculated which is a representation of how close the incoming person matches the participant's ideal mate. If the match is close, the phone will emit a raucous mating call that will be unique to that participant.

Cute idea, but I can't see it taking off - surely the idea is to use the phone to solve the problem of embarassing human interactions not make them more acute...! My modest proposal would be to shift the focus onto a shared common experience, such as music, that one can happily discuss without embarassment. It's easier to say, 'So, you like the libertines too?" than "So, you are desperate too?".

I want to break free

From Jyri:

Three, the UK operator, sells 3G contracts but doesn't tell its customers that it blocks them from accessing the internet.
Al Iguana shares the experience: I got an amazing new phone, a Nokia 6680. Symbian 60, dual camera… you can read reviews of it all over the internet. Superb bit of kit. My wonder-phone has a flaw. a serious flaw. because I’m on Three. I can’t access the internet. They’ve blocked it. No blog clients. No RSS readers. No Wap. All I can do is visit Three’s website. A Pay website. Want to read the news? Each item costs 50p. The weather? 50p. OUT-FUCKING-RAGEOUS!!! So I have all this stuff on the phone, Opera, Lifeblog, Yahoo Messenger, and I can’t use it. Whats the point of that?? quote Three: “Due to a business decision 3 have chosen to promote a great range of products and services available via the 3 browser instead of offering open internet access Open internet access is something we are currently looking at, however, I can provide you with no definite information at this time.”

In the comments to the post it is noted that 3 offers open Internet in other European countries, just not the UK.

First Past the Post

This blog is going to be looking at what happens when the Internet goes mobile, bumps into people and veritably collides with the media industry.

It will be sporadic, of wildy varying quality, and the posts will be liberally doused with inpenetrable English asides, tossed in pretension and given a light sprinkling of off-topic rants. These are all my own words, and not those of past or present employers.