If you’re not living in one of the world’s major airline hub cities, the reality is that the availability of flight connections will have an effect on where and how you choose to travel. While there’s no direct connection from Helsinki to any of the Scottish cities, luckily Ryanair offers low cost flights from Tampere to Edinburgh. Now, if you’ve been to Tampere-Pirkkala airport, you’ll know it’s not exactly the kind of buzzing international hub that makes you feel like a true jet-setter, rather it’s like being inside a small town bus station when boarding a Ryanair plane through the old Terminal 2. Still, everything worked just fine, the tickets were cheap and, quite surprisingly, our 3 hour flight landed in Edinburgh 1 hour ahead of schedule! Comparing that to the usual HEL-LHR flight times with Finnair and BA, it really made me pay attention to Ryanair’s tagline: “the on-time airline”.

Edinburgh was our first destination, but we didn’t plan on staying there for more than 2 days. The Scottish countryside felt like a more attractive environment to explore, plus Edinburgh is not a very inexpensive city to stay in. The Fringe festival kept the city center pretty much packed during day and night, offering a nonstop flow of entertainment around every corner. Since we hadn’t made any plans for attending specific events, we mainly focused on touring sights like the Royal Yacht Britannia and the Museum of Scotland, occasionally stopping for a moment to enjoy street artists from all around the world giving their performances to an equally international crowd.

To get to our next destination, we hopped into a rental car. I did have a bit of practice on driving on the “wrong” side of the road when visiting Ireland in June, but getting used to shifting gears with your left hand just ain’t easy to learn. Otherwise driving around Scotland was quite pleasant, as long as you manage your way through the ever so frequent roundabouts. Following the advise of a GPS navigator offers the joy of surprises when you discover yourself driving on winding single-track roads for 20 kilometers. Narrow roads on steep hills were something that we had to get used to when heading up north towards the Highlands.

We stayed in 6 different places during our 7 nights in Scotland, so there was quite a bit of driving and check-in/out procedures to complete along the way. First we visited Dufftown in the Speyside area, famous for it’s whisky distilleries. Then we drove through Inverness to Tain, and still a bit further up north to Dornoch. Next we started coming down south along Loch Ness and stopped at Invergarry. We continued south to Fort William at the end of the Great Glen Fault and stayed in Newtonmore, before returning back to Edinburgh through Stirling.

After touring hundreds of miles, I have to say Scotland is a beautiful country indeed. The wilderness gives you the perfect opportunity to calm down and just spend time spotting the countless sheep who inhabit the green fields all around you. The scenery bears resemblance to what I would expect to find in northern Scandinavia, so it’s no wonder the vikings felt right at home when they took charge of the Highlands some 1200 years ago.

Ah, whisky, the water of life. The most important export of Scotland and for a good reason. There’s no finer form of alcohol than a single malt Scottish whisky and no better place to explore whisky distilleries than Scotland. In Speyside there’s practically a distillery round every corner. We visited first the very modern facility of The Glenlivet and then Glenfiddich, which is probably the biggest distillery attraction in Scotland. The process of whisky production was thoroughly explained on both tours, which made you all the more anxious for getting a taste of the end product. The sensation of stepping into a warehouse filled with thousands of oak casks full of aging single malts is something your really need to experience with your own nose. I’ve been gradually developing my taste buds to appreciate the finer side of whiskies and I’m sure this little educational trip worked wonders on that front. Looking at my liquor cabinet back home, I have to say things are quite well when the 12 year old Chivas Regal is the worst bottle whisky in your possession.

Did I mention it rains a lot in Scotland? You bet it does. During our 7 day trip, there was one single day when no drops fell from the sky, but other than that it was more a case of “when will it rain” rather than “will it rain today”. Oh well, that was pretty much how I expected it to be. After the record high temperatures in Finland this summer, the Scotland visit was a nice little change of climate, which also reminded us of how great the summer weather had truly been. Normally you always travel from Finland to a warmer place, so when returning home it was bizarre to experience the sunshine and “heat wave” when stepping out of the plane.

As always, the full picture set can be found from my Picasa albums. Have a look, get your kilt on and then go explore Scotland yourself!

There are other definitions to “hot”, which is something I learned during my trip to the United Arab Emirates. July is not among the most favourite months for tourists to visit the area and I don’t blame them. We landed in Dubai on a Sunday morning and tried our best to perform a tour of the city’s main sights before spending the next few days in the office. With the weather forecasts setting the temperature at +45C every day (there weren’t too many live thermometers visible in Dubai), the tour ended up consisting of short hops outside of the air conditioned malls, shops and busses. The summer weather in Dubai can be best described as walking into a hot sauna with your clothes on to check if it’s ready for bathing, with the difference being that you can’t step outside after your done. Anyway, I managed to grab a set of photos where the lens is not all steamed up, so here you go:

My next stop will surely provide a much cooler experience, as we’re going to spend a week in Scotland, driving around the Highlands area. Better remember to pack my umbrella and rain coat, I suppose.

Google Wave was an island

There was no easy nor logical way to incorporate Wave into your ordinary workflow. If you weren’t opening wave.google.com on your browser, you were not “on the wave”. The most critical thing was that even though it looked almost exactly like a webmail client, and your user account had the form of username@googlewave.com, there was no email integration whatsoever. It’s bad enough that you couldn’t subscribe to any Wave updates to your inbox (later this feature was added without much fanfare), but the fact that a company hosting one of the largest email services in the world goes and assigns users pseudo email addresses you can’t send messages to is something that still boggles my mind. Ok, I understand that Google Wave was supposed to be something beyond email, but even emails could be printed on paper. How about some backward compatibility, eh?

Google Wave did not solve a specific problem

Most people just couldn’t quite figure out what exactly they were supposed to use Wave for. Pretty much everybody saw the potential of it for something useful, but were they able to picture themselves as a user in a specific use case where Wave was a natural fit? Let’s face it: there’s no point in releasing a technology demo and expect people to start using it straight away. What in fact was missing was the real product. Wave gave us the tools, but it would have probably taken an ecosystem around it to turn these tools into products that people could utilise for solving a specific problem (which Google did try to encourage through it’s API and federation protocol offering). Yes, collaboration challenges tend to be universal, but that doesn’t mean you could simply throw technology at them and expect people to take it from there.

Google Wave was not social

Given that the beta program with its invitation only approach initially stirred up quite a lot of interest towards the service, with invitations sold on eBay for $70, the approach quickly turned on its head. Let’s say that there were several groups of people in your company that were experimenting with Wave. How could you identify these particular people that were potential co-wavers and collaborators? Not through the service you wouldn’t. It happened on the corridors and water coolers, or in long email threads (sigh) circulating around the office. Come to think of it, for a company revolving around the concept of search, Google’s products can be incredibly hard to find. Just compare the findability of users and information on Twitter vs. Google Buzz.

Google Wave was developed by… Google

Huh? Why is that a bad thing? Well, let me explain. Google knows us all, but we still have no effective way of knowing each other through Google. This lack of the social dimension is perhaps the most significant barrier currently limiting Google’s growth beyond “just” indexing all the world’s data. 10 years ago that must have seemed like the ultimate goal you could have within the scope of Internet. Ever since the ‘net has evolved from a collection of documents to a platform for human interaction, that goal no longer sounds like the Holy Grail. Wave, just like Buzz or Orkut, relies on tapping into the social behaviour between people, not just a lone swordsman searching for a piece of information in the sea of data. Designing services to this new breed of customers requires a new way of thinking, which Google is only in the process of learning. Read this excellent post for further analysis on why Google cannot build social applications.

Just because the “surf’s up” for Wave, doesn’t mean the game’s over for Google’s initiative to change how people collaborate on information online. On the contrary: because they keep on trying, they can eventually succeed. Obviously there’s no other path for the corporation that’s built its product success on the concept of perpetual beta. I’ll hold up my board and wait for the next big wave.

Having said that, hosting your own WordPress site does require you to perform regular maintenance. For many of us this is not exactly the most rewarding part of runnign a website, but if you want to go beyond what hosted services offer you, then it’s just the price to be paid. I had been skipping payments for a while, so now when I finally had some well deserved time off in my hands, I knew the time had come for a summer cleaning effort.

WordPress 3.0 upgrade

With any application’s major version release, you may not want to be the very first user to install it. I certainly took a while to jump on version three and actually waited until 3.0.1 was out. The main reason was not the fear of native WP bugs as such but rather the plugin compatibility.

Before working on any plugin upgrades and installation, the natural first step is of course to patch up the core WordPress installation to the latest version. Before the upgrades, we are always instructed to take full backups of our precious data and other files, but let’s face it: how many of us really go through the trouble? Well, this time I thought I’d download a new full snapshot of my domain (0.5 GB of data), just to be on the safe side. I do have scheduled backup jobs running on the server, but there’s nothing quite like having the bits sitting on a local drive right next to you.

Luckily everything worked like a charm and WordPress 3.0.1 installed itself without any hick-ups. Had I actually needed to roll back to a previous version, things might have gotten interesting, since I’ve not once performed such an operation. I bet the 90-9-1 principle could be applied here: 90% never bother with backups, 9% take them and 1% know what to do with them.

Sharing links

Next in line was doing something visible for the sites. It has become pretty obvious that our methods of consuming web content have been transformed by the social media revolution, which in turn has an effect on how people reach your site. Search engines are still cool and SEO does matter, but referrals are what’s truly worth gold in the new social online economy. Therefore, you certainly want to make sharing content from your sites as simple as possible.

I’ve noticed myself being far more likely to retweet or share links if there was a convenient button available right there on the website to do so. This is one of those cases where your initial reaction from a developer perspective (“who needs these annoying external scripts and pop-ups, when copy-pasting text is trivial”) is quite different from your behaviour when acting as a user (“can I quickly get this link out there so I can move on to the next site I already have in mind? Hmm, can’t see a button, so I’ll rather skip it”). At the end of the day, it’s a usability improvement that’s difficult to argue against.

Looking at what WP content sharing plugins there were available, AddToAny seemed to be the most up to date offering. However, it turned out to have someundesireable tracking features built in. After trying out some smaller, less commercial options like Sociable, I came to the conclusion that it’s just better to bite the bullet. AddThis ended up being my weapon of choice, as it seemed to provide a good selection of services and customizability(not too fond of the header.php modification for Twitter message configuration, though) with an acceptable level of privacy breach (for example, flash cookies). Pre-selecting what sharing services to support would be a futile attempt, so it’s much better to outsource this burden to a development team rather than worrying about service links and icons myself.

How about the Facebook like button then? Well, let’s  just say that I haven’t yet fully figured out how what specific problem the Likes on FB are solving. Therefore I’ll rather stick to well known sharing methods and reduce the amount of clutter on my sites. Enabling it through AddThis can be done quickly if I change my mind.

Caching

One thing the information overload is definitely doing to our brains is shortening the attention span for any single piece of content. At worst, our attention may already be diverted elsewhere before we even get to the content, if the delivery channel is not responding fast enough. Also Google knows this, which is why the page load times are now a factor used in determining PageRank.

I know, the web traffic to my sites will surely never have such peaks that I’d need to be worried about them. What I am concerned about is the basic ability of my web hosting providerto serve the dynamic content from the WordPress application fast enough. With a site that has only a limited amount of visitors per week, chances are there’s not going to be much data cached anywhere, resulting in expensive PHP calls made to compile all the details you see here on this page.

This is where WP Super Cachesteps in. It creates static HTML versions of the otherwise dynamic pages, which are then served to all users who are not logged in (meaning almost everyone). The benefits are obvious and caveats fairly limited. However, there are plenty of settings needed to configure the cache, so you’ll want to spend a few moments making sure the caching really works before forgetting about the plugin.

Keep in mind that content caching is not the only setting that affects page loading times, so when choosing to include functionality on your site that calls external Javascripts (such as the social link sharing services), it’s important to keep an eye on what their performance impact will be.

Mobile version

I used to think that there were only selected few sites in the world with a real need for providing a mobile optimized version. Useful everyday sites like news portals, TV listings, public transport timetables etc. would certainly have a market for on the road browsing, but who in their right mind would try to access a blog site through their mobile device?

Enter social networks and Twitter apps in your smartphone – suddenly the scenario of a visit from a mobile device becomes much more likely. If you’ve gone through the trouble of making your content easy to share across different networks, chances are that the links may spread to people who are consuming the network content through their mobile phone. Such a big share of tweets consist of short links to web content that running a site which is not accessible on a modern smartphone really doesn’t make much sense. Short attention span + ubiquitous social apps = content must adapt.

The nice thing about hosted WordPress.com is that you get the mobile themes by default, but in your own installation you’ll need to take care of the theme configuration yourself. There are naturally plugins readily available for handling the task of identifying how the user is accessing the content and providing an alternative mobile optimized theme for those who need it. My choice was WordPress Mobile Pack, which offers an attractive set of features for mobile-enabling your blog. Removing Flash, shrinking images, limiting page size and specifying mobile widgets can all be achieved from plugin settings, while the package contains a set of mobile themes courtesy of Forum Nokia.

You’ll want to ensure that also the caching solution is compatible with your mobile site (see settings for WP Super Cache). This was one thing I struggled with while testing the sites on my mobile devices. Speaking of which, content testing in the mobile environment can be a much bigger pain than your usual multi-browser setup on a PC. Proper emulators tend to be either parts of an SDK or then commercial solutions aimed at professional developers. You can try out a few sites like the Opera Mini simulator, or face the really inconvenient truth and have mobiReadyshow you how bad the site will look like on a Motorola Razr, how long it will take to load on a GPRS connection and what the end user data cost will approximately be. All I can say is: yuck! Thank god those kind of handsets are gradually becoming a part of our mobile history.

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:

Now here’s the piece of news that originally inspired my own blog post: Symbian-Guru.com is over. I strongly encourage you to read through what Ricky and Rita have written down as the epitaph of their site, as this reads much like an epitaph of Nokia and Symbian that wouldn’t of course be published like this. Some key points from their writing could be summarized as follows:

• The gap between promises/expectations and product reality has grown unacceptable
• Developers have abandoned the Nokia platform long ago and now all hope lies on Nokia’s internal software development efforts
• Nokia’s own services are all hype and no content, as not even the company’s employees are committed to using them
• “Open source” in the context of Symbian is a meaningless buzzword, when no one is interested in the source in the first place
• Waving the Nokia/Symbian flag has become too embarrassing in the US market due to lack of visible marketing support from Nokia

As a sort of a CRM practioneer with some little insight on what customer relationships mean to a company, I would now like to produce the following quote from my very own words:

When you betray your most loyal customers and they call it a day, the game is over.

The emotions described in the Symbian-Guru.com post are the cornerstones of a successful company, except that now the stones have been turned and there is nothing to build on anymore. It is no longer a case of doing minor adjustments to product offering or shifting the focus of marking communication – we’re far beyond that by now. Of course the biggest mobile device manufacturer in the world could never publicly admit such a deep crisis, but the most important customers know it already. From observing the market reactions of the early adopter crowd, everyone who is seriously looking for proper smartphone functionality from the handset that they carry around with themselves is going either for iPhone or Android. It’s hardly a secret to anyone, rather it’s plain and obvious. That’s what I’ve done and I’m sure many others will follow.

There will certainly be a big enough market outside the world of smartphones and “smart” (geek) users to ensure that Nokia can keep generating billions of € worth of sales, which the stock market analysts can delve into and speculate future revenue trends by analysing how much more the company can squeeze out of it’s superior supply chain. However, it will not be the market that will attract the interest of those people who are building the new application ecosystems on top of the device manufacturer’s offering. They will be following the iPhone crowd, where all the action is. Where new markets emerge.

If the old world of mobile phones was all about radio technology and hardware manufacturing, then the new world of mobile devices is focused around the services enabled by the hardware. This is of course not a surprise for Nokia, who have been continuously declaring their internal transformation to a service oriented company. Nokia have been making bold moves on the services front, by offering free navigation (after acquiring Navteq for $ 8 billion) and low cost packages for Comes With Music subscriptions to a semi-endless music catalog (something Spotify currently charges € 10 / month for mobile users) on their mid category products. Sure, these offerings do have lots of potential value to the customer, but upon a closer look they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ability of building attractive mobile solutions that the users would like to use (as many Ovi users would probably agree). It is just built on external content, which Nokia is presumably using as a heavy loss leader product to get people hooked on buying the familiar hardware that the company actually physically develops and manufacures. There is basically nothing in this strategy that Microsoft, Google or Apple could not imitate if they wanted to. The difference is that neither Apple nor Google need to imitate it due to the success of their own unique strategies, and Microsoft can afford not to compete immediately but can rather attack a maturing market later on, since that is where they’ve always excelled at (and Windows Phone 7 looks to support this strategy).

Was N95 perhaps the last real flagship from Nokia? While there were many people willing to use it as the yardstick to play down the signifigance of Apple’s first iPhone offering, I think the underlying problems in the Nokia/Symbian camp were already building up at that time, regardless of the fact that N95 was a commercial success. A high number of complaints on software bugs and general lack of the kind of high-end feel expected from a flagship product could retrospectively be interpreted as signals that Nokia’s existing method of developing new high-end products was reaching the end of its lifecycle; a point where optimising the existing process no longer delivers significant improvements, but where you need to invent a whole new process instead.

How far do you then have to go to find a big flagship product from Nokia’s product catalog? Something that packed a true punch, like the iPhone did? Nokia 7650 from 2002 perhaps? The setting is of course completely different from Apple, who entered a new market, but the question still has to be valid. If you only deliver lots of good products but no single great one, then why should I buy from you? The picture below is a beautiful collage from the Nokia product catalog, featuring each and every mobile phone they have ever made between the years of 1982 and 2006. The number of new product innovations and dominant mobile phones of their time included in this serving is just awesome. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a system in place that would keep producing the same kind of “wow” results in the new world we are living. Nokia has become a victim of its past success.

Acknowledging that all the market share you’ve achieved and the great products you’ve delivered over the years is now worthless might surely feel like an act of pure insanity at first. But if you could get yourself to admit it, wouldn’t that be the exact moment when the climb back up starts? If the game is over, just reboot (heck, remove the battery if you must) and start all over. If you can’t do that, then you might as well consider it the end of your world. We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

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.

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?

Ok, here’s the story. Bantam Live is a hosted CRM service, which is nothing like the traditional Enterprise Software that CRM used to be like in the 90′s and early 00′s. It’s in fact more like the social network services that people like you and me are actively using when not in the office. I tried the service, loved the concept and decided to show some respect by writing a tweet about it.

So what, there’s a million tweets every minute, right? Well, it just so happens that smart companies nowadays are listening to the conversation that takes place in Twitter. So was John Rourke, the CEO of Bantam Networks. Not only did he retweet it, but the company decided to quote the tweet on their own site’s front page. Nothing much I can or should do about that, since it’s a piece of text I have intentionally broadcasted to the world to see.

The end result is that now Google thinks I have something to do with the service. But is that actually such a big mistake at all? Isn’t it rather a lucky shot that the search engine has managed to surface such a connection, instead of blindly following hyperlinks and counting words? Sure, there’s absolutely nothing dynamic about the tweet text ending up on the page in this case, but it gives a glimpse of what could be possible with the data that’s already out there in the social network sites. Without having to build a proper semantic web to replace the web we have right now, the mere association of Twitter identities to people and companies could already have a huge impact on how the search engines might begin to understand the online content in a whole new way.

The real revolution of course is already taking place. Whether you call it Social CRM or something else, the fact that the customers now have a voice to speak with is creating a big demand for solutions and strategies that allow the companies to listen to the conversation that is taking place out there, and most importantly to be able to react to it. It might be a topic that I should rather write about in my CRM blog, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw the line between fun web apps and serious business platforms. Which is exactly the whole point of the revolution.