S60 Open to new features

After two weeks here are our CA S60 Ambassador Leaders:

Alexander Huf
Jivan Kulkarni
Amir Allatabakh
James Robillos
Pablo Jimenez

I met lots more Ambassadors last night at the LA Mansion event. Many of them promised to be more active as Ambassadors, looking forward to getting more reports next week and seeing the leaderboard shaken up a bit. Competition is good! :-)

Remember, all you have to do is send me an e-mail with "S60 Ambassador" in the subject heading, and a description of when you talked about S60, what you said, and what the reaction was to what you said. A paragraph is all you need for a report. Of course, the more detail the better in terms of earning quality points.

More on my take on the Mansion event coming soon, gotta catch a flight back to Boston now....

Hello San Francisco!

Please join us at Element Lounge on Tuesday, Oct 23rd to for food, drink, and plenty of geeky conversations about all things S60.

At past "Evenings" our guests have had good times mingling with fellow mobile enthusiasts, getting their hands on the latest and greatest S60-based devices, seeing first-hand demonstrations of new S60-based technologies and services, giving feedback to Nokia sales and marketing types, hearing about life at Nokia from architects, and best of all (?) talking to real, live Finns about living among the technorati in Helsinki.

To register for the event click here. To see pics of past events, click here.

Phil tagged me way back in August, it is my duty to finally post 8 random things about me. Here goes:

1) I worked for about 9 months at the United Nations in New York City. At the time ('93) I was just out of school and penniless. First post-college pay check was from the UN, but it didn't come until I'd been there for two weeks. I had to walk to work (40 blocks) before it came in cuz I had no car and could not afford bus fare. Had to sleep on my friend's couch. Hard times.

2) I speak Mandarin Chinese. I studied it for 3 years as an undergrad, and spent 18 months in Nanjing at Nanjing University. It's been awhile since I've spoken regularly, but on a recent trip to China I realized the language comes back after a few days.

3) I've played in a few bands over the years, most recently (until about 2005) the "Loud Clappers" (http://www.loudclappers.com)

3) My band in China was called the "The Patriots" ("Aiguozhe yuedui" -- i didn't choose the name and *no* there was no relation to the New England Patriots). We played gigs to 2000+ people in Nanjing, and were written up in the "Teen" mags at the time. Good, clean fun. But sometimes the communist goverment wasn't amused...

4) My favorite bands currently are "Sigur Ros" and "Belle and Sebastian", I've seen both live in the Boston area...

5) My favorite bar in Helsinki is "Sling Bar" but I've only been there once. (I'd like to take a vacation in Helsinki sometime.)

6) I once did the NYC "century" ride on a mountain bike. It sucked -- big mistake.

7) I love to eat food. Just about all kinds. Except cilantro. But especially Chinese, Thai, Hungarian, Italian, and Mexican foods.

8) Jesus built my car. It's a love affair, mainly jesus.

I was reading a very long article about Rick Rubin (the guy absolutely fascinates me) in NYT this weekend. Lots of repetition about how the music companies are dying because of MP3s, file sharing, the usual stuff. Then right smack in the middle of it, I come across a quote that I loved. The reporter is saying how Rubin formed a focus group of college students to try to take the pulse of the "elusive music audience". They confirmed what he knew:

MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."

If "everything" includes mobile phones, I'd like to tap into that through the Ambassador program.

I thought this report was fun for a few reasons.
1) I received it at 4:57 pm, less than two hours after I posted the announcement that the campaign was "live".
2) I like the level of detail that was shared (where, when, how received).
3) I like that it was "one to many" WoM
4) I like that Alex was not afraid to offer some constructive criticism (no brand recognition for Symbian/S60, poor battery life)

Anyhow here's our very first S60 Ambassador report, from Alex in Cali:

Hi there, I was sitting in a month long marketing research group this summer. We were trying to flesh out the latest trends and how best the company could play into those emerging trends. We talked about the net, you tube (most), social networking, social news distribution and most of all the tech we use to get to it.

The iPhone was the buzz word of the month, everyone loved the word so much they forgot about the functions beyond marketing.

I made sure my Nokia N95 and Symbian had their time to shine. We had show and tell for the devices most precious to us. I went first.

I whipped out a 5 megapixel autofocus digital camera, took my image e-mailed it with the GPS coordinates tucked away in a Google Earth friendly file. I talked about the amount of movie and songs on the 4gb transflash card (the size of my thumbnail). Then started to surf the web and pull youtube videos into the media center.

The phone was seamlessly replacing an ipod, a GPS navigator, a basic internet browsing device, a video camera, a digital megapixel camera, and I didn't even get to show them TV out.

After about 15 minutes of me showing, we spent another hour discussing the features of my phone.

The surprise and the pity of it all was that most people had never heard of the N95, let alone Symbian Series 60. I did my best to speak the virtues of S60. But in the end the sheer volume of features in such a small device was more than enough to convince everyone to ditch the notions of the iphone.

Series 60 was the backbone on which all these functions integrated. After 15 minutes everyone in the room switched from lusting over an iPhone to the much cooler N95. (I just wish i could have shown them HSDPA, oh well... thats what you get for spending $800 as an early adopter.)

I'll most likely be picking up an N95-3 US edition to enjoy Att's HSDPA on my N95 and then truly have no gripes (except for the battery life!).

Thanks Alex, keep the reports coming! And oh yeah, remember it is "S60" not Series 60...

We are up and running. If you live in California and you want to be an S60 Ambassador, visit this link.

The S60 Agent: New York pilot is now over. We've awarded our top agents with S60-based devices. We got lots of people involved, gave away lots of swag, and generated hundreds of offline conversations about S60 and S60-based products. We ended up getting more Agents than we had first anticipated, and some of the Agents were far more active than we anticipated. Overall, the program was a success. As a result of the success, two new projects are ongoing: First our licensees have asked that we expand the program to California in the fall. We'll begin officially recruiting agents on Sept 10th or 11th. The program will run from mid-September to the beginning of December. More details to come in the next few days.
Second, we've begun scoping a national rollout of the Agent campaign, with introduction scheduled for Q1 '08.

There were also many many lessons learned, listed here in no particular order:
1) Many agents (in fact the majority of Agents) signed up but were not heard from again. We need to work harder to keep those with initial interest "engaged". One possible issue was that we started the program during peak vacation season, both for people on the S60 Marketing team and for Agents in NYC.
2) We need a much better e-mail tool to manage the slew of e-mails that came in from the more active agents. In the pilot, I ended having to handle e-mail communications almost single-handedly from my Nokia e-mail address, which was daunting. We're working on a solution to this as part of the scoping for the national campaign.
3) A variety of internal forces within Nokia have conspired against using the term "Agents" going forward. For that reason, as of next week, you'll only hear me speak about S60 "Ambassadors". I'm interested in people's feedback on this point. Does the word "Ambassador" suck the fun out of the program? Or is it actually a more accurate way of describing what we're asking our enthusiastic fan community of S60 users to do?
4) A variety of internal forces will prevent from awarding Agent rewards that were as cool as they were this time around (we gave aways S60-based devices). So, the pilot was truly a one-time deal from a reward perspective. No more S60-based devices will be given out! Those of you who were brave enough to sign up for the first pilot got yourselves a once-in-a-lifetime deal. For the CA campaign, we'll give away more and better swag to all the Agents at the get-go, and tone down the rewards for the best Agents a little bit. Cool stuff will still be available, just not full blown device. I'll have more details about specific rewards once the CA sign up pages are up.

Click here to see more details on what we are trying to achieve through these campaigns. Send in your feedback on the naming, processes, swag, what-have-you. Over the next two months we'll be defining the national campaign, now's the time to submit your feedback on the S60 Agent/Ambassador program.