BARCELONA, Spain – I just want to remind everyone that Nokia World 2008 is coming, 2-3 December, next week. James and I will be there to bring you stories from the show floor. Carita and Mike will be back home making sure everything runs smoothly.
Monthly Archives: November 2008
LONDON, England – Rushing out the door yesterday morning to catch a train (after my phone ran out of juice in the middle of the night, and the alarm failed to go off) I grabbed the nearest device I could find – my N95 – on the basis that when I last looked, it had some juice. Turned out it didn’t (I’d actually previously switched it off because the battery alarm was going off). But I’d been to a party the night before and so not of sound mind. Still, I managed to get a charge for the N95 so it became my phone for the day. In fact, I’ve not yet switched back.
BANGALORE, India – Building a social network so you could then create a job website on the back of it smacks of the tail wagging the dog. But this is exactly what the team behind Babajob.com and Babalife.com did. Realising that the way employers liked to hire people was through recommendation, they came up with a pretty innovative way to take what was essentially a real world social phenomenon and take it online.
LONDON, England – We got our first snow of the winter at the weekend, despite the fact that technically we’re still in Autumn (cue annual debate about seasons). This is interesting only because of what happened to me when I got into my car. Early on Sunday morning, it was 1 degree centigrade. Not cold by Finnish standards, but chilly enough for the middle of November in London. What happened next surprised me, and also made me think.
COULD BE ANYWHERE - The Nokia Maps guys commissioned a really smart study into navigation and maps, where 12,500 people in 13 countries were asked about their sense of direction and navigation habits. In one finding, they saw that one in ten people find it impossible to navigate around London. Plus, to make it worse, one in three Londoners admit to deliberately giving people the wrong directions.
EINDHOVEN, The Netherlands – I stopped by the Beta Labs blog this morning, and it was great to see the team actively supporting and encouraging its community to engage in a new cross-industry study about co-creation. The research is being performed at the Eindhoven University of Technology and a Dutch research institute, and is being led by a lady called Kim op den Kamp. She’ll be interviewing active participants on the Beta Labs site (so if you’re one head over), asking interesting simple questions such as “what are the benefits of participating?”. I’m intrigued to find out what findings the study uncovers. Doubly so because with Beta Labs users engaging in the study (already a bunch have come forward to help), it’s clear that the investigation into co-creation is helping to be fuelled by what I believe to be one of the most engaged and progressive online environments currently active in co-creation.
SOUTHWOOD, England – Breaking phones is all well and good, but it’s finding out where, and how, faults occur as a result that builds reliability. Obvious physical breakages are easy to spot – a chipped casing here, a furled keypad there, but what happens when those cracks appear on one of the gates in a silicon chip? Or one of the myriad components on the numerous circuit boards inside a phone comes apart? That’s where the reliability labs analysis department comes into play. Resembling a science lab the place is packed with microscopes, and xray machine and a scanning electron microscope, which uses liquid nitrogen to clear the air before scanning, so no unwanted particles get scanned.