A few months roll by and you’ve already gotten over the initial wow effect. At around one year later, you’re probably already cursing at the same computer for taking such long pauses in between tasks. “God, this thing is soooo sloooow. Should I start looking for a new computer already, even though this one is like, what, only a year old?” Many of us have gone through this cycle already so many times that we’ve come to expect it to be the norm. Some bite the bullet, completely wipe their existing hard drive and re-install Windows on their old machines once a year. Others try to clean up things on their registry, remove installed apps, defragment their hard drives and so on, until they give up and just buy a new computer. Which, initially, will again give the huge rush of “Wow! Fast!”, for that brief moment in time.

Everyday agony at the office

I had been using a Fujitsu Lifebook S760 at work for 1.5 years and was starting to feel desperate. My ability to perform everyday tasks with the tools I had were severely hindered by the piss poor performance that my PC was delivering. Not only was the time needed for booting up the machine growing beyond 15 minutes, but normal operations like opening, saving and closing Office documents simply seemed too challenging for the Lifebook to handle in a smooth enough manner. I was constantly reminded of the performance issues while working on the computer, paying attention to the machine’s struggle, which had an adverse effect on my own performance as a knowledge worker who needs to juggle multiple pieces of information on the screen to get the job done.

I’ll be the first to admit that I had installed & removed a high number of applications during the course of the past year, which had inevitably left a mark on the system. However, I had also performed every trick I know in order to make sure the operating system and the hardware were optimized for their job. I had of course regularly run apps like CCleaner & JetClean, removed unnecessary services from system start-up, re-arranged my hard drive, disabled Aero etc. Still, my 20 years of experience with PC’s were of little use in making the situation any better.

Old PC vs. “new” PC

Luckily I got hold of a spare laptop at our office that was identical to the one I had, but it had a lot less mileage on it. I created a user profile for myself, configured the basic Microsoft apps & Online Services login and installed the latest updates. Although it was far from a brand spanking new device with that “Wow!” factor, the difference was huge. Since you rarely have two identical pieces of hardware available side by side, I decided to do a little speed test. The challenge was this: from a cold boot, log in to Windows, launch Microsoft Outlook, write an email to yourself (single character subject & body) and receive the same email in your inbox.

First, let’s compare the time from pressing the power button to getting a Windows domain login screen (over corporate WiFi): old PC 2:12 / new PC 0:57. Alright, we’ve already saved over 50% of our time so far. Now comes the more challenging part of loading all Windows services, authenticating to Exchange Online and getting the Outlook UI into a responsive state that allows us to write and read emails. The final results (time from the power button): old PC 12:00 / new PC 5:40. The same difference held through until the end, I was able to perform the same simple task in less than half the time it would have taken on my old laptop. Meaning, in theory, I could get twice as much done while at the office.

Is that the best we can do?

The fact that a PC with less clutter in its user profile and registry was faster in such a test is no surprise, of course. I was personally surprised that the performance of a semi-new work laptop was still so poor when you measure every second. Granted I had not exactly optimized the spare machine much before clocking the times, but still. Waiting for five minutes to accomplish a computing related task feels absurd. In this day and age, who’s got an attention span that long anymore?

I decided to try the same challenge on my 4 month old home PC, equipped with a solid state drive. Hard drives have now long been the most influential component in terms of improving the performance of your computer, assuming you’ve got a decent level of CPU power and memory available. To make the scenario even more interesting, I skipped launching a desktop app like Outlook and just used Chrome to access Gmail (since who runs Outlook at home anyway?). With the help of an SSD and cloud based apps, the time from boot to login was 0:20, with the email was sent & received by the time the clock hit 0:50. That’s one sixth (1/6) of what the newer office laptop was able to perform with its old fashioned spinning HDD and a desktop email client app. Compared to the older laptop setup, the process at home took only 7% of the time. Talk about a productivity boost! And on my free time, too!

Go faster, leave it on

Ok, so you may be questioning why I’m so keen on measuring the time it takes from a cold boot to running an app. Couldn’t I just put the PC on sleep mode instead? I could, but the reality is that both the old and the new work laptop give me an error 4 times out of 5 when trying to resume operation after the sleep mode, so in fact that would be even slower than a cold boot. Hibernation is of course an option and that’s what I use whenever I need to move from point A to point B with the laptop. However, getting into hibernation always takes at least 2 minutes and resuming from it results in an agonizing period of lousy app response times when the Lifebook is trying to regain consciousness after it has been woken up. Therefore, sleep or hibernation on a Windows laptop is not the solution, it’s just a new type of problem.

The only answer to the curse of slow tech seems to be to never turn off your devices. Now, what’s particularly great about this answer is that we’re already surrounded by computers that are always on & always connected. The only thing is that we don’t call them computers, instead we label them as “smartphones” or “tablets”. In many ways, they are far better computers than any of my actual computers.

If I perform the same speed test of sending an email to myself on my iPad, Windows Phone 7 or Anrdoid device, I won’t start from a powered-off mode since that simply isn’t how I ever interact with them. They’re always on, so I simply click a button and enter an unlock code, swipe a pattern, or even just let the phone recognize my face with its front facing camera, and voilà, it’s ready! The mail app will be exactly as responsive no matter when I click its icon, and the data connection will be ready for transmission, as these things are designed to keep hold of the WiFi or cellular network as hard as they can with their tiny internal antennas.

From slow tech to invisible tech

There’s a reason why corporations are starting to equip their employees with iPads. It’s not because they look cool or have the nicest user interfaces for Facebook & Twitter. It’s because they really, truly make information accessible to knowledge workers anywhere, anytime, with the least possible amount of friction. Instead of being a barrier between the user and the information, like traditional office technology, they are almost entirely transparent gateways to the information that get out of the way and give space for the user to think. Not they other way around, which is when the user is waiting for the computer to think.

Sure, we pay a price for the luxury of having our mobile devices work this way. We must sacrifice old benefits like proper multitasking, freely arranged application windows, the freedom to install any software bits, compatibility with legacy software, large screen estate, even the physical feedback from a keyboard & mouse. By spending €600 on a tablet instead of a laptop we ultimately get less computer for the same money. But at the end of the day, that is nothing compared to the price we pay for the curse of slow PC technology. Absolutely nothing. The difference between having the required information and the manipulation tools for it at your disposal whenever you need, compared to the fear of trying to undock a Windows laptop and keep it from not crashing and rebooting while you move from your desk to the meeting room – that is the biggest price difference of all.

The time may not be ready for the whole of humanity to abandon their old computer gear and start celebrating a pure post-PC era. After all, you can’t program a smartphone with a smartphone. There’s a wealth of use cases where you don’t want to replace the sophisticated and accurate input devices we have with a flat piece of touch enabled glass. Sometimes all the CPU, memory and storage capacity is needed locally, as is the number of pixels provided by a multi-monitor setup. Mobility is not everything, every time.

We still need trucks to deliver raw material to the factories and goods to the retail outlets. The thing is, we don’t need trucks for driving to the supermarket to pick up the end product and take it home with us. For that we can use family sedans, sports cars, motorcycles, even public clouds transportation. The information super highway, as it was once called back in the prehistoric era of personal computing, is only now starting to see the type of vehicles that allow us to really make use of its long straight roads and the abundance of lanes. It was never meant to be driven on by the same heavy machinery that were used during its construction phase.

It’s time to replace our trucks with something a bit more fit for the task, don’t you think?

Our industry is redefining “mobile”.  No longer limited only to communications, mobile is now a force transforming our world in an unprecedented way. Mobile connects, entertains, informs and inspires us, ultimately changing how we live and who we are.

Redefining, as in “boring”, by chance? Because that’s how I’ve found myself reacting to all the mobile phone announcements recently.

I was doing a comparison between Nokia Lumia 800 and the new Nokia Lumia 900, to figure out if I wanted to ask my employer to get me one or the other. I opened the specs side by side on my monitor in an attempt to analyse the finer engineering details and come up with a winner. I didn’t. It’s the same phone, the same operating system, the same apps. The only clear difference between the two devices is the size of the screen: 3.7″ vs. 4.3″. And even that little detail is kind of a false victory, as the resolution is the same on both of them, because of Windows Phone. The very same OS I already run on my current Samsung Omnia 7, released over a year ago, but of course updated to the latest Mango version.

Yes, a significant factor in why the device releases nowadays have become so boring is that hardware makes so little difference anymore. The operating system and the applications continue to marginalize the importance of their host devices. Sure, the build quality of a mobile phone still has to be decent, the screen needs to be good enough and the battery life should be at least one day (well, it is never enough on modern smartphones). Beyond that, I’m having a hard time getting excited about physical attributes in mobile devices anymore.

There was a time when each and every round of releases in the world of mobile phones introduced new features that got me thinking “oh yes, that’s something my next phone needs to have”. Now I feel just as much excitement towards the new round of Nokia/Samsung/HTC devices as the sneak preview of the Dell/HP/Lenovo spring line-up of laptops. The manufacturers are now in the role of just a hygiene factor, rather than the driver. The experience on any Windows 7 laptop is going to be fairly identical (for the first few months, until your PC grinds to a halt like they always do). The real differentiator is not a new model from HP with a shinier display – it’s Windows 8. Similarly, in the world of Microsoft-based mobile devices, we’re unlikely to get much surprises or deviation from the release roadmap pointing towards Windows Phone 8. Predictable, reliable, compatible and oh so boring.

Yet that doesn’t stop people from buying smartphones. By the looks of these numbers, people hardly make babies anymore, but they sure like to shop around for mobile devices. Everyone and their dog has an iPhone these days. Granted, most of them don’t do much else non-phone use with it but read their Facebook newsfeed, but a global smartphone population in the hundreds of millions will ensure that even niche apps and social networks can carve out a decent market for themselves in the long tail.

In MWC 2012 we saw Samsung release a mobile phone with a built-in projector. Nokia, on the other hand, released a phone with a ridiculous 41 megapixel camera, just so they could do away with having a physical zoom. Isn’t that the kind of innovation to really get excited about? Well – not really. If you buy a Samsung Galaxy Beam, you can expect a battery life of 10 minutes for projecting your slides in the meeting, after that you’ve got a brick in your hand where your phone used to be. If you go for a Nokia 808 PureView, you’ll be stuck with a burning platform inside your smartphone, also known as the Symbian OS, which is known for making simple things as sharing photos without cables a nightmare. How many would be comfortable with compromises like these?

Neither of these revolutionary devices are able to challenge for the nr. 1 position in your pocket. You wouldn’t replace your iPhone 4S with them, now would you? That’s OK, because they’re not meant to do that anyway. You see, you don’t get to 4.8 billion handsets in the world without selling a few second devices to the 4.0 billion mobile phone owners.

Remember when you only had one TV in your house? Or just a single computer for the whole family to use? While there’s a significant population out there who’s already been carrying more than one cell phone in their pockets for years, the main driver behind this has always been telecommunication. Cheap calls to specific networks, optimizing your SMS plans etc. Well, that particular driver is about to go southbound as the whole telco business may have well peaked. As Microsoft continues to bake in services like Skype and GroupMe (both which it owns, btw) into its mobile platform, and as Apple engineers keep dreaming of the SIM-less iPhone, it’s certainly looking like software is about to eat the world of mobile business, like it’s already done elsewhere.

What this means is that mobile phones will become capable of everything and everything will be able to perform many of the tasks we use mobile phones for today. Do we really care if it’s a pico projector running on Android OS, or an Android mobile phone carrying a pico projector? If you want your camera to have better connectivity for sharing images onto your other devices and into social networks, why not just start building the solution from a platform that already does the sharing part and just add a killer camera? Why build a universal remote control for home entertainment devices on the old infrared concept, when your smartphone gives you a great touch UI, has WiFi connectivity and so do many of the other gadgets you want to control with it.

Perhaps the industry is being “redefined” after all. It simply doesn’t take the same old form of an upgrade cycle for your one and only phone. As Tomi Ahonen puts it, the mantra of the perfect device is over. With tablets, e-readers, ultrabooks and smartphones surrounding our everyday lives, now its time for us to optimize for the perfect device for the particular occasion. Which means we’ll get to do much more casual gadget shopping and spend less time waiting for the next Jesusphone to be announced.

Anyway, back in the late 90′s when we all were buying those beige boxes and living the golden era of Wintel, would you have ever thought that Apple could make a comeback and overthrow the PC market? Well, they have now done just that. iPads are outselling desktop PCs and are now equal to 17% of the PC market.

Of course there are still more Windows based computers sold than Macs or iPads combined. The thing is, Wintel was never really the king of the mobile computing era, which started when we replaced desktop PCs with laptops. Sure, you could carry around an XP equipped machine in your backpack and boot it up whenever you had some half an hour to invest in nursing your PC on and off, connect it to the network, balance with the battery life and all that.

At the end of the day, what you had was a portable desktop PC, not a true mobile computer. We had to wait for the iPad to reach a point where computers are just like magazines in our bags or on the kitchen table. You don’t manage a magazine, and similarly you don’t have to think about the iPad when you pick it up. It’s ready for you, it stays in the background as much as it can, and 90% of the time it delivers you all the computing power you need for the occasion.

It’s not just the hardware, of course, but the whole Wintel^3 experience that Apple can deliver because it can design everything but the last mile of UX (the app). Why is it that when you buy a laptop PC from Acer, Sony or whoever, the first thing you want to do is get rid of all the crapware applications that came bundled with the machine? How can it be that when a single company gets to choose what to include in the end product, the result in the PC world is pure garbage? Seriously, no one ever chose the Sony laptop over the Acer one because of the software that came with the Vaio. In a Wintel world the only true difference the manufacture was able to promote was the physical design of their physical product, since all the software available for PC’s was the same anyway.

Hmm, come to think of it, didn’t Nokia just release their first quarterly results as a Windows Phone device manufacturer? Yes, they did, and reports indicate that they’ve sold over 1 million Windows Phone devices. That’s not a bad start, considering the phones are not even available in their home market Finland yet, let alone many other significant markets, like the US. Sure, the smartphone sales are dramatically down from one year ago, but that’s not really relevant, since Symbian always was a burning platform anyway.

I’m sure the numbers will improve as a result of Nokia+Microsoft joint effort in pushing their 3rd ecosystem to the market, especially the enterprise market. It’s not as significant anymore as it used to be, thanks to the BYO trend of employees choosing their own iPhones over corporate RIM’s or whatever. It may not be the market that sets any trends, but it’s a world where no one can really challenge Microsoft when it comes to luring in the IT departments. No one loves Microsoft there either, but it’s better the devil you know, and the devil that knows you.

Where does that leave Nokia then? Isn’t this the Wintel story playing all over again on mobile phones? Well, yes, it is. Sorry. The best Nokia can hope to achieve is that the Lumias become the Vaios of the new mobile computing era. Given how Windows 8 is heading towards the Windows Phone 7 model in terms of UI and app distribution, it’s actually not very outlandish at all to assume that Nokia will soon be competing head on with Vaio laptops. Give me one reason why they wouldn’t? Of course we won’t be calling them laptops anymore, since that’s the label for portable desktop PC’s. They will be called tablets, slates or whatever combination of letters the biggest marketing departments in the world can come up with.

In the 80′s we had Nokia PC’s, called MikroMikko, being a clone of the IBM PC, running Microsoft DOS. In the 2010′s we’ll see Nokia mobile computers, called Lumia, being a clone of the Apple iPad, running Microsoft Windows 8 / Windows Phone 8, depending on the form factor. History comes full circle, only to repeat again.

Perhaps these have been the same people who’ve declared Google+ a failure over and over again. Even the fastest growing social network is not enough in a world that has Facebook. And even if there would be tens of millions of registered users for the service already after a few months, at least they weren’t using this “ghost town” of a network (see the discussion around #aavekaupunki in Finnish). Yeah, it can only be a failed attempt from the Mountain View engineers to build a Facebook clone, since that is the gold standard of social networking that every other contender must be evaluated against.

To all those people surprised about the launch of Google “Search Plus Your World” with integration to Google+ profiles, circles and posts, I’d like to present the following question: did you think for a moment that Google was not going to leverage it’s core competence (search) in the social network it was building? Vice versa, was it not blatantly obvious right from the start that the company would utilize this new social data source it has unlimited access to (G+) for improving the relevancy of search results?

Ok, enough of the “my network is better than your network” wars. For the end user there’s precious little significance in which US based company is luring in the biggest number of status updates per second. What we ultimately want is for the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of relevant information to be as convenient as possible, so the question is: what can I get out of a social search engine that wasn’t possible before?

Yesterday I came across a brilliant presentation from Jeff Atwood (behind Coding Horror and more notably Stack Overflow), which contained this quote from Clay Shirky:

Work is when your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid.

work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid.

It was late Sunday evening and I had happily spent a good number of hours reading work related articles on my free time and loving every moment of it. The though of the looming Monday morning and returning back to mundane Work tasks made the concept strike a nerve and I decided I wanted to post it on a social network, as people generally do nowadays in such situations. I went googling for the source of the quote, to get a link that would be shareable (yes, it is a word). This is what I received:

It turns out I had actually already posted an article referencing the very same speech 11 months ago, only I didn’t have any recollection of it. It was on my Posterous “blog” that I’ve used mainly as a public noteboard of interesting articles I come across regarding knowledge work. Due to the ultimate simplicity of Posterous, it’s very quick to compose an email with quotes, images & links, send it to the Posterous email address  and see it turn into a blog post, which is why you don’t need to spend much time thinking about the topic itself. A noteboard is only useful if you know to go and read its content, which is what I didn’t know. But Google did.

Ok, the result in the example is most likely taken from a tweet rather than a Google+ post, since that didn’t exist last February yet. The point is not really about Google+ itself, rather it serves as yet another reminder that the web knows you better than you do. Instead of being frightened of the privacy implications, what I would recommend everyone to do is to make the most of it – exploit the intelligence of the machine that we’ve all helped to build.

Related artists. Who to follow. Recommendations based on your browsing history. The Web has to be working for us, not the other way around.

— Jukka Niiranen (@jukkan) January 5, 2012

For example: in a world of personalized search, is there any longer a need for social bookmarking á la Delicious? Why should I bother saving links into my own list on a separate point solution like Delicious, when I might as well share the link to my followers/circles/friends/whatever and trust that the system will bring it up if I ever need it again? Trying to come up with descriptive tags for links all on my own seems like a futile attempt compared to the power that the networked online society can have on building relevancy for the shared content.

To continue on the thoughts expressed by Shirky, sharing is work, but not Work, as it feels inherently like the right thing to do and requires effort, yet you don’t get paid for it. “Big Work drives the economy, little work drives the Internet.” It took around 100 million hours to create all of the content on Wikipedia, but thanks to the evolutionary nature of social technology and the network effect, the next Wikipedia will most likely take only a fraction of those hours. It has to, and we really shouldn’t settle for anything less. It is therefore imperative that the tools being built by companies operating in the realm of IT, be it the Google Goliaths or the start-up Davids, strive to make the most of what the collective little work of the online population has already built, because that is the best way to foster motivation of workers (with a lowercase w). This motivation, in turn, will be more and more in demand as the human civilization is facing problems that its capitalist system is not very good at solving. The little work can go a long way.

As what comes to the search engine business that built Google / Google built (any which way you want to look at it), we’ve already seen signs that indexed search has peaked. The way we used to search for content is on the decline, and if Google would be sticking to what they do best now, fighting against the next big thing, they would be standing on the deck of a sinking ship. You could well blame them of being hopelessly late to the game of social, but based on what I’ve seen from them during the past year, I wouldn’t count them out just yet. The reason is, I believe we don’t yet have nearly enough tools for social technology to make us as smart as we could be.

Right now we have the infrastructure  in place for networking with people and sharing content. That’s a good start and it’s been a big enough revolution on its own to fuel the stellar rise of services like Facebook and Twitter. However, if we’d just continue on the same path of ever increasing tweet counts, would we end up becoming increasingly smart or rather end up in the lunatic asylum? If we look at the content search functionality offered by Twitter (basic keyword search on less than a week’s worth of data) or Facebook (absolutely none!), it’s easy to see that the game has only just begun on developing content relevance and discovery algorithms that deliver real added value over simply consuming an ever growing feed of data. While social media has brought us new strategies to overcome information overload through relying on recommendations and content sharing  by people we know/trust, this won’t scale indefinitely, and it is in fact quickly contributing to the very problem it once promised to solve.

In order for us to keep getting smarter through social networks, the filters available to us will need to get smarter first. The question is: can Google produce the missing UI needed for harnessing the true power of social networks? And if not Google, then who?

Don’t get me wrong, these are all wonderful toys and I love having shiny gadgets as much as the next geek. However, as their capabilities increase, so does they time I spend maintaining the gadgets and their applications. Configuring settings, hard resets, custom ROMs, googling for answers to problems that also other users have. Back in the days of hardware centric consumer electronics it used to be possible fix problems with spare parts, but when the value of the electronics is increasingly built out of bits, there’s often precious little that a repair shop could do to fix that bit for you.

With more joy comes more pain. You gain new ways to be connected with people, yet you loose something that you used to take for granted, such as phone calls and text messaging reliability. The devices get cheaper every day, which means there’s more features for the buck, like it or not. Very quickly even the entry level mobiles will have the features that a top of the line iPhone introduced a couple of years ago. The feature list will extend infinitely, but the user experience can degrade just as fast. Our future handheld devices will do a million things, cost next to zero euros, yet they may still leave the user less satisfied.

Life used to be so good

Never thought I’d say this out loud, but I’ve actually started to consider if I should grab a Symbian phone while Nokia is still manufacturing those. You know, in a “one more for the road”, “here’s to the good times” kind of way. Then again, we all know what Symbian has become, so if I really would want to have a simple, working mobile phone for oldskool communication like phone calls and SMS (even the occasional MMS, heaven forbid), I’d need to aim for an S40 feature phone instead. Something that hasn’t been destroyed by Nokia’s futile attempts to catch the iPhone wave. The wave, which, you could say, is one reason behing the troubles that more and more people are facing with their “devices previously known as mobile phones”.

And that’s where the troubles begin. I’ve lost my ability to be a feature phone user. Here’s a few reasons that come to my mind:

Input method. I haven’t used a non-QWERTY keypad for typing messages since 2005. Looking back at my handset history, using the numeric keypad was a period of roughly 9 years, and it’s now been 6 years since the end of it. I’m not getting any younger, so I’m assuming I have already lost the capability of typing with the traditional feature phone keypad. I also never adopted T9 for real, so it would be just as ackward for me.

Contacts. All my contact information on friends, co-workers, customers and online acquaintances lives in the cloud. When I install a new device, the data flows from Gmail, Facebook, Exchange Online, Twitter etc. The days of moving data around on a SIM card have truly passed. A feature phone without a cloud connection would be a silo that simply couldn’t be maintained. No way do I plan to install any more crapware like PC/Ovi Suite, Kies or something like that for data synchronization. No cables, please, these are wirelessly networked devices.

Operators. I’ve got in total 4 SIM cards at my disposal that each have unlimited mobile data plans. 2 from my employer, 2 of my own. If I would transfer my primary phone number to a feature phone, I’d be effectively closing down one 3G data pipe that is being paid for.

The legacy of the GSM revolution

The fact that certain communication methods we still use in our modern society are tied into physical SIM cards is in a way one root cause for these dilemmas. If you try to call me and one of my devices just happens to be unavailable at that time (battery is out, network is down, device is rebooting, forgot it in the other room etc.), why couldn’t I pick up the call from some other device? If you send an SMS to me and pay a few eurocents for the privilege, why am I more limited in the choice of how and where I can receive the message and reply back to you? Emails, tweets or even FB messages are available to me anywhere I am 24/7, and their cost per transaction is zero cents. Which leads me to ask the question: is the problem really the lack of GSM like reliability with today’s mobile devices, or are we again trying to solve a problem that we should no longer have?

Nostalgia can be a fun pastime and it also serves as a tool to give us human beings perspective on where we’ve come from and where we are right now. When used in the right way, it also enables us to analyse where we will be in the future. Use it the wrong way and you’ll just end up living in the past, hoping and waiting for the train to turn on its tracks, all the while it’s getting further and further away from you. Instead of just sitting at the train station, cursing the way how the world is these days, maybe I’ll need to focus on picturing in my mind where the train is heading right now.

You see, there will become a day when you can’t reach me from a phone number any longer. In fact, the technology surrounding me today is already doing its fair share to make sure the day is getting closer and closer, even if I’m not personally asking for it to do that. It presents me a compelling, alternative method of communication and asks me with its calm voice “would you like to try this instead, or should we go back to the old way and forget about these new possibilities? It’s you’re choice, I’m here to serve you either way.” And of course we won’t stick to the old, because our curiosity will always eventually trump our resistance to change. It was a tough call for many folks to give up their land line telephones, but still it was only a matter of time. I expect we’ll see similar phenomena also in the future.

We’ll move on from “connecting people” to “connected people”. In the “connecting people” era, it used to be the technology between two people that allowed them to reach out their hands and establish the connection and communicate with one another. In the world of “connected people”, the technology has already drawn people to gather around its virtual bonfire, which is where all the communication takes place. You don’t have to be online all the time, but the connection doesn’t disappear even when someone steps offline – the flame keeps on burning. Our devices enable us to be present at the bonfire whenever we want, at different levels of intensity (active speaker, casual attendee, passive consumer) that suit our current status in the physical world. Whereas the GSM technology included text based communication only as a side product (almost an accidental invention), the “connected people” will use text as the primary and persistent for of communication, supplemented by voice and video when appropriate. Finally, the transformation will not take place as a result of the new communication services and products that the major telecom industry players have been trying to design and sell to big corporations for use in their operative business. Just like with GSM, it will ultimately be the consumer adoption of new social networks and communication tools that makes the transition from old to new a reality.

So, I’m sorry to break this to you, but there is no way back to the golden days of GSM. Having said that, I still wouldn’t mind if the product engineers and FOSS fighters working on smartphone platforms would still reserve a decent fraction of their time on providing reliable applications for supporting legacy protocols such as telephone calls and SMS. As we can learn from the story of Microsoft Windows (1.0 to 7), there’s still a tangible business value in being able to support your own legacy. And most importantly: it can be done.

Yes – in the sense that we will finally see the chord being cut on iOS device activation and operating system updates. Over The Air (OTA) updates will finally arrive, three years after the feature was available on Android. Well, at least they’re on the right track, making the 5th generation iPhone purchase experience more in line with the overall UX that Apple traditionally excels in. Wi-Fi sync of iTunes library content to iOS devices will certainly be helpful for people who are actually managing content with iTunes.

No – because the biggest announcement from WWDC was aimed at solving the wrong problem: synchronizing files between devices. I’m of course talking about the seemingly wonderful service that iCloud will provide to millions of Apple customers living in the content management hell brought to them by previous Apple innovations. When acquiring digital content from iTunes store is made so convenient, you can easily end up in possession of a lot more digital content than you had before. Now, to make sure you continue to purchase content from iTunes store, it’s only natural that the store keeper will feel the need to make managing this content easier. Enter Apple iCloud, priced at $25 per year, which promises to remove the burden of moving files back and forth between different storage locations. iCloud will match your iTunes library content and make it downloadable (notice: not streamable) to any device registered to your Apple ID. Hurrah, problem solved! Or is it?

Here’s the thing: we don’t need a better way to synchronize music files, we need a way to remove files altogether. I don’t want to own bits if I don’t have to. Ever since I signed up for a Spotify subscription, the real need for me to manage digital music files locally on my gadgets has in practice already been removed. That’s because Spotify is not a store like iTunes, it’s a service. Anyone familiar with the cloud computing concept will probably know the term SaaS, software as a service. What this means is that you no longer purchase a copy of the installation media or bits for a software application, rather you subscribe to a service that delivers the application to you (most often through a browser). Subscription based services for music delivery, such as Rdio and Spotify, have already brought the SaaS revolution into our PC’s, smartphones and iPods. Why purchase music as bits if you can get them as a service?

In the business IT lingo people are talking about public cloud, hybrid cloud and private cloud. Basically the first one is a “real” cloud service like Gmail or a private business application built on a publicly available cloud platform like Windows Azure. The last one is used when trying to operate with many of the principles of the cloud, while still remaining in possession of your own servers and application instances, perhaps located in an external data center. Hybrid… well, let’s not go there. A label that some people have cast on the private cloud option is “false cloud“. I think this also fits with what Apple has introduced to the world as their version of the cloud. It initially looks like a cloud service for music (“all your music available anywhere!”), but in reality it’s a cloud service for files (“…just the music you already had somewhere”). Blah.

iCloud will no doubt become a success. Knowing Apple’s track record in delivering excellent usability, it may well turn out to be a killer product for cloud adoption among consumers. I can imagine it becoming “Dropbox^2″ in its ability to solve day-to-day file synchronization problems, which is surely great news. What the iCloud will not do is make the iTunes paradigm relevant again, for those customers who’ve already left their bits behind. In my eyes, Apple has become a victim of its past success in selling both the hardware for media consumption as well as the content. Evolution over revolution is a safe bet to make when you’re riding on the top of the evolution wave. iCloud could have been Apple’s revolution, but now it looks like the revolution may take place elsewhere.

Why is it then that we’re still required to plug in a variety of USB cables into some of these devices? Not for charging it with electricity, but for loading it up with bits. If I’m able to consume much of the bits already through the wireless network connection that hooks me up with the great big data cloud of the Internet, then how can there be another category of bits that must still travel through the cable?

Let me illustrate the issue through two recent experiences I’ve had, one sponsored by Apple and the other by Nokia.

Case iPad 2 and iTunes

I recently decided it was finally time for me to give up on trying to steer clear from Apple products. The tablets are not just a new revision of the mini-PC/netbook boom from three years ago, I believe there’s much more to them. If the netbooks were about squeezing the familiar PC experience into a more portable form factor with a lower price tag, the tablets are aiming to bring us the smartphone experience of iOS and Android on a not-so-miniature device that gives better room for content presentation and user interface design. You could say it’s a case of less vs. more, which tends to trigger the primitive human reaction of “more is better”. I was so impressed with what my 4.3″ Android smartphone was capable of delivering compared to my previous 3.2″ gadget with the same OS + applications that I wanted to see what happens when you keep adding up more hardware goodness in a similar environment.

In an ideal world I would have preferred to purchase an Android tablet, as there are several reasons why I believe it will eventually become the leading platform for tablet computers and applications. However, the future is not here yet, as we’re pretty much lacking both the Android tablet computers and applications right now. Devices like the Samsung Galaxy Tab with pre-Honeycomb/3.0 version of the Android OS are not true tablets in my opinion. Also the current Android applications designed for a typical 3.5″ smartphone screen probably wouldn’t deliver the “more” effect I’m after. There’s no way around it, iPad rules for the time being. With the recent launch of v2 it was also easier to justify why now is a convenient time to invest in new hardware.

I won’t bore you with a general iPad 2 review here, I’ll just state that it totally rocks your socks off. Now, the one thing that doesn’t rock one single chord is the fact that you need to plug the device into a PC/Mac equipped with iTunes just to turn it on. In a way I understand the need for the iPad activation as a part of the bigger picture that includes the App Store, credit card billing, DRM and all that jazz. A necessary evil if you are stepping into the light /dark side (depending on one’s point of view) of the Apple empire. However, there’s some big irony in the whole post-PC era gospel preached by Steve Jobs when the product that should lead us into this era starts its life with a navel cord attached to a PC.

It’s no secret that I hate the iTunes application and what it has become. If I only had to use it as an occasional maintenance dock for the iPad OS updates and user identity verification, I might be able to live with this handicap. Unfortunately that’s not quite the end of the story. After having hooked up my iPad into all the usual web services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader etc. (which inspired this tweet), I wanted to see how this thing works on consuming some less dynamics content, meaning books. I have a Kindle 3 and love the experience when used in conjuction with Amazon’s book store account, but not all of my eBooks are Kindle optimized. Some things just work better in PDF and especially in color, so the beautiful iPad screen should really shine with this type of content.

What I would like to see for the iPad is a similar service as Amazon has, where you can email PDF’s to Amazon and they’ll optimize it for you and deliver the book into your Kindle, wirelessly through a WiFi connection. Ok, email may not be an elegant choice of technology, but the process flows very smoothly for the user. When I wanted to achieve the same end result for the iPad, I was initially completely lost on what I should do. I had downloaded the iBooks application from the App Store and it did have a Store button allowing for book purchases (but of course not for us Finns, as there’s nothing on sale in the local iTunes book store, except freely available books). How was I supposed to get my own content into the library?

I hooked up the iPad into its navel cord again and launched iTunes. Since you can’t just copy files on an iPad, like you would for any other USB-enabled device with internal memory, there had to be a way here to get the PDFs flowing into the iPad. I didn’t see any menu item related to books or PDFs, the only synchronizable content appeared to be the usual iTunes bits for music, video etc. Finally after rubbing my head for a while and clicking around the menus, I figured it out: I had to perform the “add files to a library” process on my PC’s iTunes instance. Selecting PDF’s brough up a new category called “books” in the library, which also then became available as a syncrhonizable category for the iPad when the device is plugged in with the cable. A few more clicks, then performing a synchronization operation for the very first time (since my music and photos are already online in Spotify or Picasa Web Albums) and eventually the content appeared inside the iBooks app.

Does this process make sense on a device that has both WiFi and 3G always-on internet connection (which often doesn’t work, by the way)? Like hell it does. The tablet computers are essentially big windows into the cloud of content that the web has to offer for us. They are not media players like the early iPods, where you transfer bits from your home media banks into a mobile device. That was the world ten years ago, why must the shadow of iPod and iTunes still haunt the iPad? At a bare minimum, the content synchronization should be something you can perform wirelessly instead through the USB port, but ultimately iTunes as we know it has to be removed from the process completely.

When we look at the competition ahead, Google doesn’t have any legacy comparable to iTunes, which is why the Android devices are much better prepared for the post-PC era with no strings (cables) attached. For the average tech consumer it may not feel like such a huge drag, and I’m sure Mac/iPod users don’t pay much attention to it at all. Nevertheless, the behaviour patterns everyone is learning from more recent services like Dropbox or Spotify will make Apple’s inconvenient truth gradually ever more visible to their customers.

Case Nokia C7, Symbian^3 and Ovi Suite

Speaking of Dropbox, after initial scepticism of the service’s alleged greatness, I’ve grown to love its beauty of simplicity and ubiquity. The service runs on my home PC, work PC, Android phone and iOS tablet, quietly taking care of small but important tasks such as making sure my KeePass database of usernames and passwords is always available wherever I go. The ability of Dropbox to deliver a dead simple way for masking the file transfer and synchronization complexity into a simple folder that’s available across devices makes it the perfect service for “normal” people who are not interested in the geeky side of technology and gadgets. It just works.

My dad recently bought a new mobile phone, a Nokia C7. I didn’t have the heart to try and convert him into an Android user, as the leap from traditional “dumbphones” built for phone calls, into a full-blown portable computer like the modern smartphones, might have been too long. If SMS is only just becoming a routine for you, it’s maybe best that your first smartphone resembles a mobile phone that’s familiar to you. That’s pretty much what Nokia offers. The C7 has a decent touch screen and a Symbian^3 OS with a few bits and pieces of what iOS, Android and WP7 (why not start including it in the list now) are made of, but at the end of the day an average user might easily mistake it for an S40 mobile. Sometimes this is not such a bad thing at all, we must keep this in mind.

The big screen and the capable camera make the C7 a nice gadget for shooting photos. Nokia has always been great at hardware and if I’d have to find a way to regularly get high quality photos captured with an Internet enabled device, I’d probably turn to Nokia’s product catalog, just due to their reputation on camera performance compared to the many lame efforts of Asian smartphone manufacturers. Based on this reputation, I had assumed that the process of taking photos and performing actions on them in Symbian^3 would at least be on par with Android. Surely many members of the product marketing team must have been faced with the situation of having to demonstrate the camera functionality of Nokia products, just to draw the attention away from anything related to browsing web content or other weak spots of Symbian. Well, from my experience with C7, I now think they’ve never bothered to proceed beyond snapping a photo with the device. You know, like, sharing it with some other device or application.

On an Android device, I can click on any picture to bring up the Share menu, which presents all the applications installed on the device that have the ability to integrate with the camera/gallery. Dropbox is my favorite method for moving pictures into an archive, but Facebook sharing and all other social applications are also very potential candidates for the next action I have in mind after taking a photo. If I install new apps, the menu gets appended with them. No need to spend any time wondering what to do, it all just works right in the context.

What are the options on a C7? Well, you can of course 1) send an MMS (do people still use those?), 2) attach it to an email or 3) send it via Bluetooth. All of these options probably would have felt useful five years ago, but as of today they all just scream legacy to me. Ok, perhaps the problem is just that the stock C7 doesn’t come with all the necessary apps, so lets go and login to Ovi Store. I’d imagine a search term like “photo sharing” would shed some light on the best way to proceed. No, nothing useful here. Since none of the top mobile app brands from the world of iOS and Android are available on the Symbian platform, even a geek like me finds himself having another one of those “iTunes moments” where the familiar logic of solving a problem doesn’t seem to work.

Sugarsync is the closest thing to Dropbox on Symbian, so let’s install that one. I get the PC application installed, even though the folder configuration is not nearly as intuitive as Dropbox. I manage to download the mobile app from Ovi Store and seemingly also connect the C7 to the same user account as the PC. The folder structure looks different from this angle, there’s some bizarre “briefcase” concept blocking my view etc. but it looks like this could in theory work for photo sharing. Except that when I start the process from capturing a new photo and wanting to move it to Sugarsync’s folder, I cannot figure out any sensible way to complete this task. The share menu is of course not updated as it would be on an Android. There is no easy navigation path between the photo gallery, the file system and the sharing application. Unless you want to work with memorizing and moving cryptic Pic123456.jpg files inside file explorer, there’s no solution. It just doesn’t work.

I refuse to give up and try another cloud based content syncrhonization application (forgot the name already). Usability is even worse on this one and I’m actually not even able to complete the pairing process of the PC and the phone, because I started by creating the user accoung in a different device than what the online registration wizard assumes. Well, I’m 100% sure that this is not a big loss. At the end of the day, I register a Gmail account for my father and just instruct him to email the photos from his brand new smartphone as attachments to his own address. I feel completely defeated for having to suggest such a lame process. My foolish cloud dreams have been shattered once again.

Of course there is a way to perform content transfer between the Nokia C7 and a PC. The answer is Ovi Suite. You need to install this Nokia’s equivalent of iTunes onto your computer, then plug in your shiny new mobile device with a USB navel ch… cable into your computer and perform a synchronization of the gallery items. To add insult to injury, the micro-USB cable supplied with C7 is about 10cm long. Sure, you could start playing with Bluetooth device paring and all that, but that’s another experience I want to spare my old man from. Also, unlike with Apple hardware, you’re actually allowed to mount the phone directly as a USB drive (well, I assume you are, didn’t try it with C7), but that is all still cable games.

Nokia even offers an advanced USB On-the-go feature, which lets you connect other devices or mass media directly on the Nokia phone which acts as the master device. Great, but what’s really your fetish with those cables? You’ve already given up on producing rubber boots, isn’t it time to give up the rubber cables next?

“Quit whining and plug it in!”

You may consider me a spoilt geek who has nothing better to do with his time and gadgets than to complain about what features they are lacking. Fine, maybe that’s also true, but here’s the underlying motivation why I write posts like this: when I observe how the world is changing slowly but surely towards a particular direction, it allows me to also spot those little pieces of the world that are standing still, i.e. getting left behind. Those little things represent potential disruptions to traditional businesses and business models, which to me are a very intriquing topic. As they say, shift happens.

Here’s how the world looks from my eyes today:

See? It’s all in the cloud already – today. The devices are connected to the cloud, the content is mostly in the cloud, also the people have arrived in there thanks to the social media breakthrough. What’s the one thing that doesn’t belong there? Yep, correctomundo, you guessed it right.

Nowhere else is mobility more central than when travelling abroad, away from your familiar services and surroundings. It would therefore be perfectly natural to assume that the traveller segment would be the one that mobile service providers would be actively looking to cater for. Yet the reality is completely the opposite: mobile operators are making sure that no sane person uses mobile data while travelling abroad, thanks to the ridiculous prices of data roaming.

Going on the road? Let’s burn the books & switch off

Last week I was travelling in Macedonia, a potential candidate for becoming an EU member. An exotic location to some extent, as I hadn’t been to any of the former Yugoslavia countries, but at the same time not too distant from the average central European culture. Skopje, their capital city, is not exactly on the top 20 list of cities for tourists to visit, so there wasn’t any paper guidebooks available to take with me. I did download the Skopje In Your Pocket guidebook into my Kindle, but the painful rendering of PDF magazines on the small black & white ePaper screen meant I hardly opened the document. Instead I decided to try and rely on content that I could use on my HTC Desire HD.

The price for mobile data use in Macedonia was according to my Finnish operator’s (DNA) pages a bit over 10 euros per megabyte. Ok, so the first thing to do before boarding the plane was to disable all APN information to make sure that zero bytes would be transferred over the mobile operators’ networks. Hey, what else is new?

A key criteria in selecting our hotel in Skopje had been the availability and visitor ratings on free WiFi connectivity. Even if there was to be no hotspots discovered while out on the town, at least the hotel would serve as a home base for downloading information on sights to see and pubs to visit. In preparation for the times without a network, I had installed the Maps(-) app from Androind Market and downloaded offline Google maps data of the city.

Fortunately it was not too difficult to discover open, free WiFi networks while walking in the center of Skopje. Cafes and shopping centers tended to frequently have a network of decent quality. Outdoor signs of a free T-Mobile hotspot being available to the customers made selecting the restaurants quite a bit easier.

(Non-)Economics of data roaming

During the 3 day visit I ranked up in total 300 MB of data transfer over WiFi. While I did frequently perform Google searches, check into Foursquare (and of course Untappd while going round the pubs!), browse FB/Twitter streams etc., none of the use was particularly data intensive. No video or audio transmitter, just your everyday transactions with applications that have become a part of my daily routine.

How much would have all this mobile data connectivity cost if I had stayed APN enabled and used the 3G network provided by the local telecom operator? Over 3000 euros. Wow. That’s ten times more than what I paid for the flights and hotel altogether. I could have travelled around the world with that money.

How much did I end up paying for the mobile data connectivity while travelling in Macedonia? Zero euros. That’s right, the local economy received more of my money through bubblegum purchases than through offering me telecommunications services.

How much value did I receive from having a mobile device with Internet connection available to me during my travels? Quite a lot, and I expect that value only to increase in the future when the apps and databases available become even more useful. Would I have been willing to pay something for the convenience of not having to hunt for hotspots and just rely on an always-on 3G data connection. Of course I would have!

So, what was your business again?

Call it what you want and reason it how ever which way you like, but in my eyes the continuing state of data roaming pricing in Europe (and of course globally in most places) deserves to be labeled as pure insanity. Insanity particularly therefore that the operators are continuing to do the same thing (preserving an ancient “per MB” pricing model) and expect different results (more revenue from mobile application users).

When debating over the right price point for mobile data plans, the operators all around the world are nowadays trying to claim they can’t offer “all you can eat” pricing anymore due to the increase of smartphones and the lack of 3G/4G network capacity. While there may be a hint of truth in that, it’s important to remember this doesn’t in any way justify the exorbitant pricing of data roaming. Foreign users are at any given time and location going to represent only a fraction of the total user volume for an operator. All the investments needed are in the billing systems and agreements between operators.

The real leasson from this sad situation is that in order to make money through service innovations you don’t necessarily need any new technology. The technology for providing effortless mobile Internet connectivity to tourists has already been built and paid for. Nothing is missing, except offering the service in the form of a feasible product. At the same time, the Internet (as a conscious entity, in the vain of Skynet, Google et al) is working its way around this lack of operator products by making it increasingly easy for local entrepreneurs to punch holes into this firewall by setting up open WiFi hotspots. These holes provide connections to the backbone network of mostly the very same operators and allow the tasty app juice of our post-PC era cloud applications to flow into the mobile devices of vigilant vistors.

Everywhere you go, the cloud follows

Ok, so you may not always have high quality connection to the web, meaning you can’t rely on it to be always there to answer your questions, but the same goes for 3G connections as well. GPRS is in many ways equal to “no connection”, at least when you consume on average 100 MB of data per day. Once you do have a working connection, the big clouds are all there for you to reach into, with their unlimited and ever evolving means of communication and information discovery.

It’s good to note that not even the ancient technology of SMS was reliable enough to be transmitted between Finland and Macedonia, as many messages were delayed or remained missing. At the same time, whenever I had access to Gmail or Facebook I was able to utilize their full feature set as if I had been sitting at home, typing on my laptop. In short, there wasn’t anything that I wanted to do but was unable to do when equipped with my Android smartphone instead of lugging around a mini-PC.

Feel free to disagree, but to me that is a sure sign of the coming post-PC era where both the traditional telecom operator services such as phone calls & text messages as well as traditional keyboard + mouse + monitor + CD-ROM computing paradigms are in danger of slowly becoming extinct. I won’t be living without a “PC” or leave home without a “phone”, but I’ll care less and less about services built specifically around those old conceptual silos. I will just replace them with “everything”, which means anyone can provide services for them.

Waisting more of our time while connected

As a final note, during the trip I was once again reminded of the fact that Google couldn’t make social applications if its life depended on it (and pretty soon it does). Mr. Scobleizer wrote a great post on the topic of how the best applications are the ones that enable us to waste our time more efficiently. That’s exactly the kinds of mobile apps that you need while travelling in a foreign country.

Google Places turned out to be in practice almost useless, while Foursquare actually provided quite satisfactory results most of the time. Particularly the new Explore tab in their mobile application provided a convenient stream of relevant information to a visitor in a foreign country. If only the Macedonian people would have submitted their comments in English, since the local cyrillic alphabet makes it impossible to even make guesses about what the text might mean…

We all knew it was coming, but someone had to say it

Last July I wrote a blog post on how the world will end for Nokia. At that time I was deeply frustrated with the mainstream media reporting on how the brand new Nokia N8 and the updated operating system Symbian^3 were going to start Nokia’s big fight to reclaim the position they had lost to Apple and all the Android manufacturers. Such claims were totally detached from the reality of what was happening in the mobile marketplace of 2010 and I’m sure not even most the Nokia personnel believed in them anymore.

A growing crowd of people were joining the cult of Apple, some of them skipping right to the end conclusion that iPhone was simply better and Nokia was therefore screwed – period. A much more telling sign was, however, that the ecosystem around Symbian application development was not only facing problems in growing its presence in the US markets – it was in fact dying altogether. Long time advocates of Symbian were throwing in the towel, because they couldn’t live with the huge gap between Nokia hype and lack of results delivered. Symbian and Nokia had become an embarrassment that no one wanted to associate themselves with anymore (in other words, an epic fail).

What I believed Nokia had to do was to admit their failure instead of trying to cover it up while attempting to build a replacement in the form of MeeGo. My concluding comment at that time was:

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.

That was what we have now finally received, first in the form of the burning platform memo from Stephen Elop and a few days later in the announcement of adopting Windows Phone as the primary smartphone platform for Nokia future devices. All of this had of course started already in September with the naming of a new Nokia CEO, when the Finnish Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (a long term member of Nokia’s former management “dream team”) was replaced not by another Finn like Vanjoki but with a man from Microsoft. Makes perfect sense, since it’s a lot easier to admit failure when you haven’t been the one causing it.

If you look at where Windows Phone 7 is coming from, you’ll see that also Microsoft went through a similar phase earlier on. They realized that the existing Windows Mobile platform foundation was simply not good enough to build on anymore, so Microsoft made a brave move to re-design WP7 from scratch, which meant they gave up on backward compatibility and a big catalogue of existing Windows Mobile apps while at it. Thanks to this earlier reset they were now able to get the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to commit to their platform. Think about that for a while: everyone fails sooner or later, but the winners will be those who are the quickest in admitting failure.

Symbian no longer exists (but would you like to buy one anyway?)

When I switched jobs in December (not related to mobile industry at all, BTW), I was presented with the dreaded question “which Nokia E-series phone would you like to have?“. Having lived without a Nokia phone for years, the thought of returning back to the non-touch S60 world was simply unbearable and literally made me feel sick in the stomach. There was absolutely nothing in the Nokia business phone catalogue that I wanted to carry in my pocket. To buy off some time, I asked if I could wait for the Nokia E7 release that was just around the corner. My employer agreed and I just continued using my personal Samsung device, powered by Android.

As it ever so often happens with Nokia product launches, E7 got delayed into Q1/2011. I ended up upgrading my personal Android device to HTC Desire HD (words cannot describe how much this thing rocks, but that’s another story). On Monday, February 7th, Nokia E7 finally started shipping in limited quantities to the Finnish resellers. The company representatives were calling it “the most important model this year” in terms of sales expectations. On friday, February 11th, the device was as good as dead. Why? Because Nokia pulled the plug on Symbian, as illustrated on the following slide.

Regardless of this fact, Nokia is still expecting to sell 150 million Symbian devices before the game is over. Hmmm… okay… and how exactly do you plan to trick people into buying them? If you’re shopping for cars, it’s perfectly justified to buy a 2011 model that you know is going to be soon superseded with a 2012 model. Typically you get a sweet deal with accessories, plus there’s unlikely to be too many “bugs” and product recalls for a proven model.

It’s not going to work quite like that in the mobile industry. Nokia E7 is surely a beautiful piece of hardware design and component engineering, built with the decades of expertise accumulated into Nokia’s organization for producing the best mobile phones out there, delivered through the most efficient logistics chain in the business. Unfortunately it is now merely an empty shell with a “burning platform” inside it. I wish there was a quick way to flash the operating system of E7 from Symbian^3 to Windows Phone 7. But as always, if it was easy, the Chinese would have already done it.

E7 may still be a viable option for the oldskool business crowd who just want a replacement for their existing Nokia Communicator, primarily for phone calls, calendar and email. But if that’s all you wanted, then why did any of the Symbian engineers bother coming to work in the morning for the past 5 years? I hate to be the one breaking this to you, but getting a touch screen device with built-in support for Facebook widgets will not be enough to show you what’s really going on in the ecosystem of today’s mobile applications. You still won’t understand what all the cool kids are doing with their mobiles. You won’t see the business opportunities until your iPhone using competitor shows them to you.

The end is the beginning

If you can’t be one of the cool kids at the school yard, then try and be one of the smart kids instead. You probably won’t gain overnight popularity, but you may end up making a nice living eventually and getting your revenge. While the iPhone is certainly no one hit wonder á la Razr, there is no proof yet that Apple (or Google) would have secured their position as the U2 of mobile phones, forever entitled to sold-out stadium gigs and undivided attention from the media.

Android is aimed almost exclusively at disrupting the dominance of iOS, which means Apple and Google are fighting for the same market position. Sure, their approach is different in many ways (closed system vs. open source, for example) and Android is reaching towards the lower end of the market where iPhones are not even intended to be an option (remember, that’s where Symbian was supposed to go and retire). Windows Phone 7 is in such early phases of its existence that the platform doesn’t yet have a clear identity of its own and it is therefore being typically described through comparison to iOS and Android. This approach is ignoring the key focus areas where WP7 does differ from the established players: business users and .NET developers.

Ask a corporate IT department about which platform they want to be supporting and it’s a case of choosing a lesser evil from iOS or Android. Both of them are prime examples of the consumerization of IT. People like me will no longer tolerate standardized hardware from our employers, we’ll just rather bring our own devices to work. The problem with the cool gadgets that are capturing the attention of geeks and consumers alike is that they have been designed specifically to YOU. You as a single person, who makes the single decision to buy. The needs of a group of people encapsulated inside an organization such as a corporate office are quite different. Security, administration, compatibility and all those boring aspects are actually quite crucial to delivering monetary results beyond personal satisfaction. The mobile platforms of the future will have to be a working compromise between usability and manageability. This is where Microsoft is ahead of Apple or Google, who don’t truly know how to operate in the business segment. Nokia also has some very relevant experience from trying to meet the needs of business users and should therefore be well positioned in formulating a winning strategy to get both the IT managers and the Outlook junkies to ask for  WP7 devices.

Some say Microsoft is a dying consumer brand. There’s a hint of truth in that, since the world of personal computing has been moving away from the traditional PC desktops, into cloud apps provided by the likes of Google, and more personal mobile devices like the iPhones and iPads. Microsoft is clearly a runner-up in both categories. At the same time, they do have an impressive record of charging against Nintendo and Sony with their Xbox 360, which shows they are not planning to become a purely business brand anytime soon. It would also be a mistake to assume that Microsoft is forever stuck on the desktop, as they are building a huge “platform in the cloud” offering as Windows Azure and all the related Online Services brands. Sure, Gmail beat Hotmail with ease, but it doesn’t look like Google Apps would be walking over Microsoft’s cloud-enabled Exchange/SharePoint offering quite yet. Microsoft’s “all in” cloud strategy is going to provide a highly credible portfolio of productivity apps to Nokia’s WP7 devices, certainly much more than they could have ever built on their own or acquired through weak partners like Yahoo.

Like Mr. Scoble put it in his blog post on the Nokia WP7 alliance, “apps are the ONLY thing that matters now”. If that statement holds true, then the producers of those apps are the ones whose interest you need to capture on day one. Yes, you know this one, so sing along with me: “Developers! Developers! Developers!” If Symbian was the most hostile development environment for mobile phones ever invented, then judging by the initial launch strategy of Windows Phone 7, it’s the complete opposite. Not only is Microsoft altogether making massive investments into its developer toolkits, the promise of easy application portability across mobile, desktop, console and browser environments must sound more tempting than learning to develop apps for yet another mobile platform that promises to be something big, one day, maybe. The world is full of .NET developers who Microsoft and Nokia can target to persuade them to extend their applications onto the closest possible mobile platform, which just happens to be WP7.

We all know the facts: Microsoft is not cool, Nokia is not cool. When put together, they will indeed look like a pair of turkeys initially. They will take a fair amount of beating after class from the tech blogger bullies and gangs of Android geeks from all over the globe. Nevertheless, once we get over this initial reaction and start seeing physical results from the partnership, there’s a very real chance that both Microsoft and Nokia will be stronger together than what they could have been on their own, without admitting their past failures.

There is a dark shadow looming behind the partnership, as Microsoft’s previous mobile partners have not really fared all too well after teaming up with Redmond. It may well turn out to be a similar bust for Nokia, only time will tell. Even though it’s clear that Nokia has a lot more at stake in the deal than Microsoft, it’s getting more and more embarrassing for Microsoft not to have a credible presence in mobile devices. While Microsoft has never been too great at new product innovation, they’ve proven time and again their ability to muscle into a maturing market. Let’s see if they mean business this time around.

Anyway, I though I’d highlight a few examples of a more recent trend that’s becoming visible in the world of social web. It’s always been about telling the apps what you are doing, thinking or liking, where about and how. Now, after feeding the networks with data about yourself, they are gradually becoming smart enough to tell you what you are like.

Where Do You Go?

Foursquare is not new, but here ‘s a very quick recap: you pull out your mobile phone, launch the app and see what venues are close to you (based on mobile network location data, or GPS for the hifi geeks). You click to check-in to the place you are currently. The end.

Ok, so of course you can also view where your friends have been checking in to. That is, if any of them would be similar gadget geeks like you. I’m pretty sure eventually the location information will become a natural part of the social fabric (waiting for FB Places to arrive here in Finland), but as of now, in reality it isn’t for everyone yet.

What can you get from the location data then? For example, this heatmap of where I’ve been checking in around the city of Helsinki. Sure, I don’t spend all my time with a finger on the check-in button, nor do the public venues available on the service give an accurate view of where I spend my time. Still, it would be foolish to say that the heatmap doesn’t give me insight on the locations that are a part of my ‘graph in the geographic sense. With enough data and the right presentation method, casual transactions can start to accumulate a whole new value added.

Take a trip down Memolane

Pretty much every social app has a timeline view of some kind, similar to the FB wall. It’s sort of a divider between generations of applications, as many of the oldskool software and business applicatios are perfectly happy with asking you the user to punch in more and more data without trying to present it back to the users in any aggregated “what’s been happening lately” view. Another common dilemma is that it’s hard if not impossible to automatically combine data from different applications. That’s how bad life used to be only a few years ago.

Integration in the cloud is as easy as OAuth (open authorization), so in a matter of a few clicks you can be connecting the various dots fragmented around your networks into a single stream of information about yourself. Now all there’s left to do is to put a nice timeline UI on top of the data and you’ve got Memolane. Your tweets, check-ins, FB posts, Last.fm scrobbles and everything else in a chronological order that allows you to travel back in time and reminisce about what you did last summer. Yes, again the web knows what you’ve long since forgotten in your selective human brain.

Get Glue’d to the media around you

Apps on top of apps – that’s the future we’re already living in. Why keep on re-inventing the wheel when you could be focusing on designing the rest of the vehicle instead?

Back when Last.fm launched their audioscrobbler app in 2003 the concept of sharing playlist data right from your WinAmp in real time to a web-based service was very novel. Keep in mind, this was waaaay before social networks made sharing and liking and retweeting something that’s considered an everyday activity. I kept on accumulating information their database on a regular basis, then stopped using them, then returned back to an active user thanks to their integration with Spotify.

The concept of scrobbling remains cool, but in this day & age there are people out there who cannot be satisfied by merely sharing what track they are listening to. Enter GetGlue. What they’ve built is an almost universal system for checking in to things. Books, movies,TV shows, games, gadgets, restaurants etc. By installing an add-on for your browser and browsing one of hundreds of supported sites that GetGlue recognizes as having content items that their database tracks, you’ll see a toolbar at the bottom of the window. The toolbar not only allow you to like/unlike/favorite/saveforlater or share to FB/Twitter, but it also shows who else has been liking the content in question + recommendations of what else you might like, based on the user data similarity.

Sitting home alone on your sofa and watching Dexter doesn’t have to be unsocial time anymore. Reach for your smartphone, launch the GetGlue app and do a check-in. You’ll see who else has checked into the same show, so you can go and spy their profile to see where their remote has taken them next. While at it, why not do a check-in to that bottle of wine you’ve been sipping? Come on, you’ll get badges as a reward as well!

OMG, where’s my privacy?!?

The first reaction from a casual web surfer on all of the new ways in which you can expose yourself to the world will surely be a cry for privacy. Isn’t this the kind of a surveilance society that George Orwell warned us about by writing the 1984? Only it’s worse, since the innocent web surfers have been brainwashed to report back to big brother seemingly on their own free will, just by giving them pictures of digital badges! Someone please stop this insanity!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret that explains why the situation is not quite that grim at all:

The web knows you because we are the web.

Back in the 90′s, the world wide web was born as a network of documents. Today it is a network of people. Small but profound difference. While it is still perfectly possible for anyone to choose to use the web as a big document management system and just passively consume content that is published there by large organizations and media entities, there is an increasing amount of benefits to be gained by being an active participant instead. Once you cross that line, you start to exist in the web. It may be behind a number of aliases and alter egos, or it may be with your real name and identity (probably both). You may exist in different forms and footprints to anonymous surfers, identified users and verified friends or co-workers. Nevertheless, your actions become a small but integrated part of the fabric of web. Just like you’re a tiny little piece of society, still making an impact all the same.

The web knows you’ve clicked. Google knows you’ve searched. Your ISP knows you’ve downloaded, so don’t waste too much energy on worrying about leaving a trail of what you do when using a networked system like the web. A more interesting question to focus on is how much more can you know about yourself with the help of the web and what value could be derived from the data that you and other fellow citizens of the web are capable of feeding into it. As long as the publishing of data is done through a conscious decision and you pay attention to where the line of privacy is set, it’s hardly any more reckless behaviour than using the web in the old document oriented way. Same old channel, just a very different application.