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Your Nokia in 2015 – video

JBC — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:03:26 +0000

GLOBAL – Get a picture of what life will be like five years from now with this look into the future video. Based on Nokia’s research and development, the video paints a picture of life in 2015. We mentioned in our earlier post some of the things you might expect to see when we expect the processing power of mobile devices to increase dramatically and always on super-fast internet access to make creating and sharing so much quicker and easier. Video after the jump.

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The opportunities for the future

JBC — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:41:01 +0000

ESPOO, Finland – Trend research plays a key role in understanding what’s going to happen in the future. Creating an understanding of how people’s needs are changing and evolving helps create a clearer idea of where the opportunity for next generation products and services. Oskar Korkman is head of opportunity identification in consumer insights at Nokia and today he shared some of his thoughts for how we’re going to evolve. For Oskar, it’s all about relationships, with everything from strangers to plants firmly in his sights.

Oskar can see a point in the future where people will develop relationships with objects. No, this isn’t about the lady who married a wall, this is about everyday objects interacting with our devices. Using sensors, things like plants will be able to tell us what it needs (food, water etc), sending information to our device which in turn will relay it to us.

If we visit a famous landmark, it can establish its own digital identity. Through our devices, we can see who has visited it today, what they did and even check out images and reviews of the place. This all exists right now, but with an ecosystem that brings all that information together we get a useful digital profile of the landmark.

Nokia is looking at the bond that binds relationships. Right now people tend to leave technology out of their close relationships. In the future though, the information we share over the Internet will change and evolve that, placing technology at the centre of the bonding process. Not in an intrusive way, but as an enabler. I can see this evolution beginning now. We’re already doing it with friendships, and as we share more digitally, it’s an inevitable next step.

Take relationships further out where people are joined together through a common purpose or goal. Think about mass participation events. The mobile ecosystem can add a completely new dimension to these gatherings, enabling complete strangers to share experiences and digital aspects of the common bond. This potentially brings complete strangers together in a way they’d never have had before.

The key for me in all of this is where technology is an enabler, rather than being the focus of what’s happening. I like the ideas, and can see how it can happen and more importantly how it can be useful (yes, I’d love my phone to remind me that the plants need to be watering!). The question is, can it happen without taking over?

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Nokia – life in 2015

JBC — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:13:59 +0000

ESPOO, Finland – Smart ecosystems sits at the centre of our mobile life five years from now. That’s what Nokia’s head of corporate strategy Heikki Norta outlined this morning when he talked about what life will be like in 2015. During a short video, we saw how a combination of devices and services worked together to de-clutter life. This comes from a background that’s seeing the relationship between consumers and brands evolve from a monologue right now through a conversation and into a continuos relationship. The idea is simply to help users manage their lives better and enable them to create, share and get the most out of life.

Heikki believes the processing power we’ll see in devices in the coming years will be way ahead of what we have now. This will enable devices to process a lot more data and, together with a substantial increase in bandwidth, help them work seamlessly with the cloud. This will enable users to live a “more spontaneous life”, helping to snatch opportunities easily where the device and the service are doing all the heavy lifting, sorting through the masses of information and anticipating the user’s needs.

Although clearly just concepts at this point, the devices shown in the animated video (we’ll try and get a copy for Convesations) paint a picture of how we’ll be using devices and services. Connecting to TV, so we can share TV watching experiences with people on the other side of the world, or even using the mobile device as a projector. Contextual awareness plays a big part too, with the device working together with the cloud, both pulling information down to the device, and also sending information back.

Take the fisherman in India. Not only is he using his device to get the best prices for his fish, but he’s making extra money by selling his data to overseas universities who can tap into his and other fishermen’s information for their research.

It might not be a single device either. We saw an example of the user who’s main device is his mobile computer, acts as a satnav and a multimedia centre – much as our devices do today. However Mr 2015 also has a smaller, sub device which he can use for sport. With the same interface as his main device, and the addition of the cloud, means he can move seamlessly between the two.

Of course, this is all still conceptual, but we can see easily how the services and strategy being laid down today form the backbone of the lives we’ll be living tomorrow. No, Ovi services aren’t perfect right now. But we’re at the very beginning. The pace of evolution, both of devices and services will see us all living in a very different world. And you know, it isn’t that far away!

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Nokia and open innovation

JBC — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:02:05 +0000

ESPOO, Finland – Henri Tirri heads up a global team of over 500 researchers at Nokia Research Centre and together they’re responsible for driving long term innovation at Nokia. Over the last three years though, the team have been building a network of labs around the world to create an Open Innovation network. Like the rest of the company, research and the resulting innovations are taking a more open approach, where expertise and specialities outside the company can be tapped into to speed up progress.

It isn’t just about speed. Henri, who reckons he has one of the coolest jobs on earth, sites a range of benefits behind open innovation. The opportunity to work with the world’s leading institutions is a major boon. Nokia works with established research establishments including Univesity of Cambridge and MIT. Alongside this, the access to global intellectual vision and insight is key. But it isn’t just about taking, it’s the opportunity to give as well, and being part of a community that helps to drive global vision and innovation. These strategic collaborations with intellectuals and institutions form the backbone of Nokia’s open innovation network.

Resources are the biggest challenge Henri and his team face. Internal-only innovation can be expensive and limiting, so using this open network the team can achieve a lot more, a lot faster. The spread too, is impressive. Everything from nano-science to radio research is happening and the team are rapidly increasing their software expertise (already pretty extensive) and working towards more embedded software and technologies.

So where does that impact products? Henri says technology transfer is one of the biggest challenges he faces but he believes Nokia has in place a good support network to take innovation and turn it into real products. That’s a relief, though it isn’t simple. The process has a series of steps before a new technology can escape NRC and make it’s way into the world. Working its way through Advanced Systems Engineering, the business validation unit, before passing strategy and operational excellence and forming part of Nokia’s corporate development unit means new tech has to be spot on before it sees the light of day in a product. Easy to see then why the process keeps Henri awake at night.

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Nokia N900 and Maemo

JBC — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:58:56 +0000

ESPOO, Finland – Maemo might seem like a new branch for Nokia, but it’s easy to forget it’s actually a project the company has been involved in for the last four years. Peter Schneider, head of technology marketing for Maemo devices at Nokia, underlined the point (several times) when he talked us through the latest happenings on Maemo this morning. Much of Peter’s talk was on the open source nature at the core of project and how the community of developers offers rapid and powerful solutions to common problems.

Hermes is a little app which, though still in development, takes all your Friends’ avatars from Facebook and Twitter and uses them to populate your address book. I use something similar on my Mac (AddressbookSync) and it works a treat, though only covers off Facebook. Getting both right onto your device is a neat touch. It didn’t take a software powerhouse to come up with it either. It’s just one guy (props to Andrew Flegg), working alone, but as part of a bigger community.

Peter also showed us Friends Status, which pulls your friends’ status updates from Facebook and Twitter and stores and organises them so you can easily flick back to something someone said earlier. And then there’s the €500 flashlight, as Peter calls it. A simple app that uses the N900’s camera flash as a flashlight. Simple, but quite brilliant. I’ll be getting my hands on that as soon as I get my hands on an N900. Which, won’t be long at all now! It doesn’t actually cost €500. That’s the device cost, the app is free.

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Symbian Foundation – the future of mobile

JBC — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:29:36 +0000

ESPOO, Finland – Things are moving on apace at The Symbian Foundation, as Shaun Puckrin, head of developer services at the Foundation told us this morning. The first handsets running S^2 should be appearing in the first half of 2010, but it’ll be the second half when we’ll see a big leap through the release of the first S^3 based devices. Right now there are 466 features being developed for S^3 and S^4 and we’ve had a little insight into what kind of things we can expect to see.

Open source is the foundation of The Symbian Foundation and industry collaboration is helping to rapidly develop a new generation of mobile operating system. As Shaun says, “it’s about the community building the ideas”. He highlights Swype as an example of this in practice. The company’s finger-tracing text entry is innovative on its own, but as part of a wider project it can become a key part of the new operating system.

NFC (Near Field Communications) plays a key part of the next generation of Symbian. Expected to first appear in S^3 and S^4 handsets NFC will be fully integrated and have an API for developers to integrate it in other products. This would make it easier for devices to pair with stereos at home, your car or as we’ve seen, as a payment device. The social web, too, plays a part. Rather than viewing it in silos as tends to happen now, The Symbian Foundation folks are working on a social web API that’ll enable manufacturers and developers to easily integrate key social sites right into the device. Facebook friends in your contacts list anyone?

Thanks to a new graphics engine, we can expect to see a big jump in the user interface too. “Surfaces” enable users to quickly and easily get access to the information they want and in the demo, which isn’t a working example, it certainly looks pretty cool.

Overall, not only does everything at The Symbain Foundation look to be on track, but it’s gathering some serious momentum.

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It’s not all in the cloud

JBC — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:18:01 +0000

ESPOO, Finland – You’d have to be hiding under a very large rock not to have heard about something “the cloud” recently. But it isn’t all about the cloud. Mary McDowell has kicked things off today by shining a light on how devices play an important part of bringing the cloud to life, and that not everything has to live in the cloud. Peer to peer activity is important too, specially when it comes to things like Nokia money, which will enable those without a bank account to send money to each other. Context is also important, getting information based on where you are, which helps filter through the myriad information we can be bombarded with.

There are more than 4 billion mobile users in the world, but only 1.6 billion bank accounts. Nokia Money is a good example of how the cloud and the device come together. Designed to bring banking to countries where it simply doesn’t exist, it relies on having a solid, cloud-based, backbone, combined with true integration on the device. This will enable person to person transfers and the ability for users to pay merchants online and in the physical world.

Bridging the gap between the physical and digital world is the centre point for Nokia devices. Researchers in Nokia’s Tampere lab are working hard on the concept of mixed reality, where location, the device, the cloud and the person all combine to bring a new experience. Point and Find is the first example of this, but Mary hints at more to come.

So, what’s next? Super sensing the world around us. Going beyond location, it looks like we could see a range of bio and nano sensors to help us observe and detect our environment. Some of these might appear in our devices, some might even end up in our clothes. Take this information, use the device as the bridge and the cloud suddenly starts to take on a whole new meaning. We’re already seeing the early fruits of this methodology in Nokia HealthRadar and Nokia Data Gathering where information is gathered at ground level, sent through the cloud for sorting and analysis. Add sensors to that which have an understanding of what’s happening to the people who are using them and keeping on top of contagious diseases starts to become a reality. The cloud on it’s own is smart. Plug in a large number of devices and it becomes much smarter.

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Nokia HealthRadar chasing disease down

JBC — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:26:47 +0000

NRC staff from Bangalore show off Healthradar

GLOBAL – Tracking disease in remote parts of the world is a major factor in managing and understanding the spread of infection. Nokia HealthRadar is designed to speed up the tracking of disease using mobile devices. Like Data Gathering, which helps people on the ground monitor the spread of infection using mobile devices, HealthRadar goes a step further by enabling near real time access to the information.

The first and most important step of the software’s ability is data collection. Rapid and precise collection of information, which is then sent instantly to a central server, speeds up what is currently a time-consuming paper-based activity. The second step is the actual aggregation of the data which helps to build a picture of what’s happening and where.

Getting the information back to local practitioners is the third and final step, as it then enables them to take appropriate action. What marks HealthRadar out further is the ability to consume the data either on a mobile device or a PC, so the gathered data is useful to people in the field and those based in medical centres.

The software also features a Dashboard which enables users to quickly access key information including a daily update, a GeoHealth Map which highlights disease intensity alongside local health centres, the ability to compare current patterns against historic ones and statistical graphs.

Mobile devices can make a real difference where it matters, when the right tools are put in place. Check out the screen grabs below.

The HealthRadar dashboard

HealthRadar disease reporting tool: Simple UI is used for input, the application sends the information to the server using SMS channel

Inbox: Daily disease reports from grassroots level arrive as a message

GeoHealth: Map based visualization of intensity of diseases in a geographic area

Patterns: Case meter visualization compares the present disease reports with the historic count, giving the stakeholders a clear view of the health situation

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Onedotzero – The story behind the behind the scenes story

JBC — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:48:34 +0000

LONDON, England – The folks behind the onedotzero Nokia N900 installation have put together yet another video to show us just how the onedotzero installation worked, including insight from the creators themselves. If you’re not familiar with it already, then the onedotzero festival played host to a special installation for visitors to enjoy. Powered by a Nokia N900, the installation was the brainchild of software architect Gary Birkett and Computational designer Karsten Schmidt, both of whom were brought together by the folks at Wieden + Kennedy. The installation itself saw a huge projection, controlled by an N900, which users could manipulate and play with and in the process managing to amaze gathered onlookers.

Birkett sums up the scale of the project quite succinctly in the video “we are using a three inch display, and trying to control a 70-foot display”. Using the device’s accelerometer, Birkett was able to create an interface which takes the key movement data from the N900 and send it to the projection application, created by Schmidt. Karsten in turn models his projection graphic around a sphere, which uses the data from the device to decide what direction it should go in. This enables it to follow a natural path when turning, flicking or zooming.

This is the first time we’ve seen exactly how this installation was created, and it certainly helps to understand how the two disparate elements worked together (the last behind the scenes video didn’t actually go very far behind the scenes – this one goes all the way). Check out the video below, and let us know what you think in the comments.

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Telltale contrails. Discuss

Charlie — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:32:35 +0000

BOSTON, USA – When a plane crosses high up in the clear sky, it sometimes leaves behind a trail of conensed vapor, called a contrail. Some days, you can look up and see contrails crisscrossing the sky, revealing patterns for those who know how to look for them.

For a long time now, our mobile devices have been watching us and, in some ways, leaving a contrail of our paths behind us. This contrail could be broadcast by the various radios the devices carry, or by some app communicating continuously (or even intermittently) to some box out in the Cloud.

A recent article (see below) got us wondering how far we want to take this permission we give devices to leave these trails.

Big Brother in your pocket
When Nokia released Nokia Lifeblog back in 2004, we used to say that the phone was watching everything we did, so why not make a piece of software that allowed us to easily lay out those activities in a visually appealing multimedia diary? While the focus was on a PC app, we all were busting our brains to think of this online. Indeed, the blogging component was a manual version of that.

But what would the world be like if we could just stream our life to the Cloud?

There’s no end to what the sensor-in-a-pocket model could bring, as exemplified by Jamais Cascio’s list [via experientia].

Sensors for everyone
And we’ve been seeing an expectation that a ubiquity of sensors will somehow make life simpler. Except, a comment by Adam Greenfield (who has written oodles on this) made us think twice. The issue is that, even in the aggregate, patterns can emerge that can help folks reveal specific patterns and relationships once thought of as anonymous.

And a recent article in the Boston Globe on guessing who is gay on Facebook, serves as proof-point for Adam’s comment.

Yes, we might not even see or understand the contrails we put out. In the let-it-hang-out world of the Web, we are indeed leaving patterns of contrails that those who know what they are looking for can read, understand, and then make apparent for whatever purpose they might have.

What do you think of this?

Image from kevindooley

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