If you’ve read my previous blog post about my personal handset history, you will have noticed that I have owned quite a few Nokia mobile phones in the past. You may also notice that the last one was from 2006. Not that it’s been a purely conscious decision to avoid Nokia for the past years, rather my current employer has been biased towards HTC and Windows Mobile (lately they’ve also given up on WM6, but that’s another story). My first mobile device that I paid with my own hard earned cash since the 2005 purchase of Nokia 6670 w/ Symbian S60 was a Samsung Galaxy Spica with Google’s Android OS. Did I consider buying a Nokia? Quite honestly, no, and I don’t think I would in the near future, as I’ve grown to be more and more pessimistic about the chances of the Finnish mobile giant being able to reclaim the leader position it once had.
Back when mobile phones were all about hardware, radio technology, silicon chips and plastic casing design, Nokia kicked everyone’s ass and it was a proud time to be a Finn (also a Nokia employee for a while). That time period was around one decade ago. I guess you could compare it to the 80’s when personal computers were still a messy playground with tens of competing manufacturers pushing their hardware+software packages to consumers, and Commodore building a comfortable lead with their C64 killer product. We all know where Commodore is today, or more specifically, most of us have absolutely no idea of where they are. Since those early days we’ve moved on quite a bit and everyone’s using either Windows or Linux on very generic hardware (apart from the crowd who choose to pay for the Apple/OSX device lock-in). That, in my opinion, is where we have been moving towards im the mobile phone markets ever since 2007 and the release of the iPhone. Nowadays we carry just big screens with us, either with or without a slider qwerty keyboard, and that’s pretty much how exciting the hardware part gets. Take a look at the HTC product catalog if you don’t believe me.
How is Nokia doing in this brave new mobile world? Not too well. Sure, they’ve got as many devices on their product catalog as ever and they completely own the non-smartphone market in developing countries. But do they really live up to the promises of their product marketing department or, more importantly, the expectations of their most loyal customers, their advocates? Well, you be the judge. Here’s one example of how a N97 customer felt after his purchase: Continued…
Tinchy was massive with his second album in 2009 and it looks like he’ll be challenging for a Number 1 again this year with the offerings from Third Strike, to be released in August. Here’s the first single.
My ISP Welho, a Finnish cable TV company that was recently sold to another operator called DNA, finally sent me the new 40M cable modem I had already ordered six weeks ago. It’s not the speed I was really after, since my previous 10M internet connection was fast enough for anything I would need. It was the price reduction in the monthly fee that you get by upgrading your modem, from €44.90 to € 35.90. Sounds like a sweet deal, even with the 6 month contract period.
Anyway, the packaged arrived to the local post office, I went to pick it up and started examining the contents at home. Alongside the new modem there were a couple of campaign flyers. Here’s the first one:
“The package does not contain the cable required for connecting the modem to the antenna network, nor the Y plug splitter for your TV. Please re-use the components from your old modem.”
Ok, makes perfect sense, I’m all for reducign the environment footprint of my various gadgets. Then there was the second flyer promoting another campaign:
“Recycle your old modem to your friend, ask him to plug it in and order a 10M subscription at welho.fi/ekoteko. You will both get free months as a reward.”
Well, that’s another nice idea for a “save the environment” themed campaign. Of course the only problem here is that my friend would not have the necessary cables for plugging in the modem, since you didn’t send me any. So he would have to jump in his car, drive to your store in downtown Helsinki and pick up the parts from there.
Let’s be honest here: everyone of us has Googled themselves. If you are reading this blog, meaning you have basic the Internet skills of surfing beyond the big brand media sites, then you’ll surely have noticed that the web is actually made of people, not computers. Being one of them entitles you to reflect yourself on a mirror, which in the virtual world means basically punching in your name to the search box and hitting enter.
With the explosion of sites and services where many of us register with our real name and create a real profile, the number of potential hits to be found is growing. This makes it all more interesting to see how Google ranks different sites that publish your name, because they are very likely to be not something you would have expected. Anyway, that’s just a side track of the topic I’m trying to get at, so let’s see what the results for a search on Jukka Niiranen looked like today on Google.com:
The first hit goes to a namesake of mine. Nothing unexpected there, as there’s plenty of us. My personal domain niiranen.eu comes in on places 3 and 4, after that we move to the usual LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. But wait: what the —- is Bantam Live, and why does Google think it’s the second most likely page that a person would be looking for when searching my name?
Yesterday I was sitting on a bus to work and I saw a guy in front of me browsing through a Twitter feed on his N97 Mini. As it just happened, I was also deep in the Twitter world with my mobile. I couldn’t resist the temptation of spying on his Twitter handle and then looking it up. Suddenly I found myself staring at the world through the eyes of a perfect stranger who just happened to share the same mass transit ride to the office. Which people, companies and celebrities he was following, how he described himself in the profile, what he had to say to the world, what kind of friends he had following him, when he had registered to Twitter in the first place, etc.
I felt like such a stalker, but was I really stalking on the poor guy? That is a question I was left pondering as we parted our ways and I moved on to the next list of tweets. Unlike in Facebook and some other networks that are repeatedly making headlines for alleged privacy violations, Twitter truly represents the raw power of untamed social networking applications. There is no privacy, period. The name of the game is in the public broadcasting of your thoughts to an unspecified audience. You don’t need to worry about the concept of a “friend”, as there are no friends in Twitter. You can of course follow other users, but this doesn’t have any impact on what they can see and know about you. It’s all out there and that’s why we love it. That’s what makes it the ultimate sharing platform.
Let’s take a look into the future for a minute. Layar is a great mobile app for demonstarting the concept of augmented reality. How it works is you launch the AR browser in your mobile phone, point the camera to any direction and Layar will start to append the image with location based information. The usual stuff like restaurants and points of interest are of course available, but you can also view things like geotagged tweets. With the kind of devices we are carrying around in our pockets, it is not at all far fetched to envision a time when you can pull up an augmented reality browser that shows you not just the buildings around you but the names of the people. Think of avatars and @username’s floating on top of the commuters in the traffic jams. The ultimate nude scanner for your mobile?
In the tech or media industry, or any knowledge work intensive line of business, it can no longer be considered bizarre behaviour to be constantly revealing yourself to the world through various social media sites and services. It is rather becoming the norm of what is expected. You better be active on Twitter and Foursquare, otherwise there’s a risk of people thinking you don’t “get it”. Ok, I’m perfectly fine with that trend, with my active sign-up policy to new and exciting web apps.
It is only when the virtual world meets the physical world that things can start to feel ackward. When you meet a familiar avatar in flesh and blood, there cab be a sudden sensation of “OMG, I know too much about you, yet you don’t know anything about me”. The unilateral nature of the relationship can play tricks with your head. People you’ve never met but who you’ve followed through Twitter can start to feel like pseudo celebrities, even though they are likely to be far more average Joe’s in reality than you are, with nothing better to do than posting stuff online 24/7.
I think we’re reaching the uncanny valley of social networks. This concept was originally introduced for describing how in the field of robotics there is a point in which the machines can begin to look too human, thus causing a natural feeling of revulsion in us human beings. In the world of social networks, this same sensation may be achieved by simply knowing too much about the stranger standing next to you. Something that is perfectly cool when sitting in front of your monitor at home can suddenly feel just plain “wrong” when meeting face-to-face. Sharing your life and thoughts is great, but just don’t do it when I’m around. God, us human beings can be such weird creatures at times.
Is there going to be a moment when we simply get enough of revealing ourselves to others? Will the new sociality trend reach its peak and make way for the ultimate privacy backlash, where people simply refuse to give out any personal details to any online service? I’d say that’s an unlikely scenario. Certainly we’ll need to go through the emotions and find the right balance, time and time again, but eventually we’ll have to make it across the valley. With social media and robots alike.
The annual Eurovision song contest, a.k.a. ESC 2010, is right around the corner. After a mighty disappointing set of contestants from Finland this year, it’s time to start looking elsewhere for a new country to support. While this track from France may not have all that it takes to win in the ESC, I’m pretty sure it can grow to become a winner in the summer anthem 2010 category out there in the real world. Or even World Cup 2010.
(After a continuing disappointment with YouTube’s support for RSS feeds, I also decided to take a look at alternative service providers and went with Vimeo.)
This is the personal blog of Jukka Niiranen, where you’ll find posts and links to random topics that just happen to interest me. If you’re looking for CRM related stuff, head to http://niiranen.eu/crm
