S60 Open to new features

We asked our Ambassadors to tag anything and everything Random13. Lots and lots of great photos were posted. And we got kinda of sad at the prospect of not having anything to rate in the future. Looking back at the themes over the weeks-- place3, sneaker4, food5, animal6, transport7, print8, door9, hand10, sign11, water12. A lot of great stuff.
So we wanted to give out as many props as possible. So: Instead of just one pic of the week, here's a smattering of some of our favorites, the best Random13 posts from last week:

Nikhil Chawla -

Gomcoite -

Maksim -

mcpezza -

Thanks to everybody who contributed and we look forward to starting a new "Share on Ovi" campaign in the coming months.

OK party people and S60 Ambassadors. The 'Share on Ovi' campaign officially ends on June 30th. If you wanna win your swag, this is your last chance to submit a report. And there is LOTS of room at the bottom of the 75 top 'Share' Ambassadors. We are talking serious rankings mobility. Heck you could even still join the campaign, submit a couple reports, and get yourself some swag.

And if you submit a really really good report, you can even impress your friends and neighbors with the super-sleek GPS-sporting-5 MP-rocking N82 for 2 months. Like ProfessorSmashy did with this week's RoTW:

Last week I met up with my friend Lisa. I was just finishing up a conversation and as I hung up the phone, Lisa asked me so what type of phone I had now. I told her that this was the Nokia N82 and it was my favorite one so far. When she asked what was so special, I started the long list: 5 Mega Pixel Camera, the Camera Flash options, Music Player, Loud Speakers, and because it runs on S60 I explained it was smarter than a regular phone and kind of like my little mini computer. As we walked around Dundas Square, I took some pictures and played some of our favorite tunes....just to prove the volume was that much louder than some of my old phones. When we passed by a fountain I told her I would take a picture for my husband's weekly Ovi contest. I told her all about the different themes he had entered pictures for and that I hoped one day the theme would be trees because of all the great pics we have been getting when we did our weekend hikes. I explained that after each hike my husband would show me how he was able to go online and post the pics and using GPS, actually tag them onto a map. She asked me why didnt I enter the Ovi contest and I said .....thats a good question. Now that I am an S60 ambassador, I hope to prove to be some serious competition to my husband and maybe the student will become the teacher.

(Thanks Professor and pls contact Kristina for details on how to get your hands on the N82 loaner.)

So...get your WoM on, head over to the S60 Ambassador site, sign up for the "Share on Ovi" campaign (you have to do that step, don't forget!) and start submitting your reports!!

This week's report comes from karishmasingh:

I've been addicted to Facebook since the time I joined it but its now,after the s60 widsets pets campaign that I have added the application there on Facebook.When I read about the campaign,the first look of it seemed extremely cute.After adding it in my profile,I created my pet which is named as "Mini Karishma" now and I immediately sent an application request to all my friends and the very next day,I had my inbox full of messages asking what I was upto and why a pet lover like me crossed all limits of crazyness. I explained to them that how I am an S60 ambassador and it's a part of the s60 campaign as widsets pet application can also be enjoyed using the s60 devices.I asked them to try it once as I knew that it would be enough for them to fall in love with the whole idea just like me. What we all really loved about it is that the look of the pets depends on how they are being taken care of. Like one of my friend has not been given a bath since his mini version is born and I could see flies in his avatar(p.s.-Mini Karishma has none around her lol).I hope thats not true in reality brother as its been really long.! Another thing that makes me smile is the automatic statements attached with every action that shows in the mini feed of the widsets pets application. They are not the boring usual feeds saying what has been done rather add to the next. For example whenever I am offered a hamburger the message says - Mini Karishma wished there was more ketchup on it! Gosh these guys know me so well ! But I just fell in love with this message- "Somebody has held Mini Karishma's hand. Mini Karishma is looking at him with puppy dog eyes".Which was powered by widsets mobile.*blush blush* I never knew s60 could be this romantic lol, thanks widsets mobile ;-) So somehow it does get the truth out.So know we know why I was so sure that with just one try they'll get addicted to Facebook which even helps me now days as I am not the only one who is online all day long.But theres one slight problem,my inbox is again full of messages but this time to thank me for offering them with something like this and my reply is short and sweet which says "What are s60 ambassadors for and could you please help us join it :-)".

Thanks karishmasingh. Please contact Kristina so that we can get your loaner N82 out to you!

OK, so our most active "Widset Pets" Ambassador seems to be better at this thing than we are. Kukalubo has a non-broken heart, is well-groomed and fed, and has a high intellect score. Meanwhile, I keep feeding steaks to Kristina but mini-Kristina never gets more than 40% full. What gives? Are we corporate types just not cut out for this kind of thing?

As an experiment, we're running a contest for one week: Who can get the most attention - a corporate "suit" (Kristina :-) or a real-live S60 Ambassador (Kukalubo)? Over the course of the week, we'll see who gets the most attention. Kristina or Kukalubo. Winner gets bragging rights.

If you want to feed either one of them, sign up for widset pets on Facebook and create your own pet,(use the link below), then adopt one or both of them.

Kukalubo:

Kristina:

Hello Current and Future S60 Ambassadors

Mini Kristina needs a home! We in the Consumer Engagement team can no longer take care of poor Kristina. She is hungry, heartbroken, and in need of a good bubble bath. Please click the image and adopt this poor creature.

We are winding down the 'Share on Ovi' campaign....next week is the last week to submit reports. On June 30th at 12 pm EST we'll be taking a snapsot of the Top 75 Ambassadors and sending out various rewards.

This week's picture of the week comes from Shuvo13 in Bangladesh. The theme was Water12, here's his winning submission:

As usual we also had some great entries from Nikhil Chawla, Jamaalism and Gomcoite, check out all of the entries here.

Next week's final "Share on Ovi" theme is random13--send us your best pix, send us your random pix, maybe even send us some pix of yourselves. We'll take 'em all in and post our favorite next week.

As for your report of the week, this week's winner is pablopoo and he has the right idea in the first sentence -- if you're promoting S60 and Share on Ovi, you may as well tell us about it and earn some points!

I´m promoting OVI without using it in my reports? no more, I´m trying to write the first report including OVI media on it.

On Sunday was the birthday of my friend Esteban, we were at his home in Temuco, Chile. I told him I was a s60 ambassador and what it mean.
I told him how easy it is share pictures and videos at OVI only usign my phone. He was impressed because needs a Laptop,GPS and a Camera to share Geotagged pictures (I'm trying to convince him to buy a n95 instead of carrying all that stuff).
He uses Google´s Picasa to share photos, but quickly runs out of space.
I told him the differences with OVI and how he can use it. OVI has unlimited storage space and many ways to share, critical points for him.
Here is Esteban.

Later,in the birthday party, someone talked about the new iPhone and the new features that it have. Then was my turn to talk about S60 powered devices (like my N95 8GB),the S60 Ambassadors, and the things that they can do with s60 (a lot more than a iPhone) like Sharing on OVI. Was fun.

Here blowing out his birthday candles.

Thanks Pablopoo! Kristina will be in contact with you regarding sending out your loaner N82.

Til next time, Happy WoMing!

The S60 Ambassador campaign for Widset Pets is now underway. Our first 'Report of the Week' comes from old friend kukalubo. Kukalubo is finding a gender preference for the widset pet but that hasn't stopped me and Ricky from creating our own.

Anyway here's the word from Kukalubo:

As I am not very much into the whole facebook thing, I added a person just a few weeks back. Since then every morning I receive e-mails that someone wants to add me as a friend. Really annoying, but the people really are friends. So now I have more than just one facebook contact.

And naturally I started sending Widset Pets invitation to everyone. I often received comments like 'what's this?' and I started explaining. But yesterday I found the perfect way to promote the Pets project. It works great on girls, by the way. Maybe that's because they see pets as something only a girl would do, I don't know. Back to the point - I previously explained only the idea of widset pets. But since the other day I started sending the cute little captions that you get after doing an action to an adopted pet. I received much more positive feedback. Seems like girls really love the captions. Some of them they found a bit too sweet, others not so smart, but the majority of captions I sent they loved. A smashing hit became the following - "Mini Bistra believes that if she can't see Lubomir, Lubomir can't see her either." All those captions were commented and laughed at. Seems like I was in the center of that whole thing, because I was the one that introduced widset pets to everyone. I told my friends that as a s60 ambassador I know that a whole bunch of great guys are behind that project and that they shouldn't be surprised by the fact that the captions are hilarious.

When I went to school yesterday, one of the girls in the class (Ivon, girls are two times less than the boys in our class) came and thanked me for telling her about Pets. My reaction was to tell her that it's my duty to tell people about it, because I'm a s60 ambassador. She asked what does widset pets have to do with s60. I told her that there is a widget that you can download and do the things you do from your computer even from your mobile phone and that's why it's a s60 ambassador campaign. We commented another caption ("Mini Bistra refuses to believe that 'shenanigan' is a word") and the giggle seemed to have attracted one more of the girls - Vessy, who apparently had sent me a request to be acknowledges as friend that morning. So Ivon told her about widset pets and Vessy seemed really enthusiastic about it.

Thanks kukalubo. We have N82s to loan for the Widset Pets campaign as well. Kristina will hook you up, contact her for details!

We had a record-breaking week for report submissions....thanks to all the S60 Ambassadors who logged in and told us about the offline conversations they had about Share on Ovi, S60, and Widset Pets.

We also had many candidates for "Report of the Week". In the end we couldn't decide between our two finalists, so we are choosing two reports of the week. The first is from ritesh:

Just recently, on March 15, me and my wife were blessed with a new
born baby girl. Due to some constraints, my wife and baby needs to be
at her mothers place (same city) for atleast 2 months, till both can
come back to our house. Initially, I would go to see and play with my
newborn on a daily basis, but due to the monsoon and resultant heavy
traffic, it became a troublesome task to visit them everyday.
Naturally, I wanted to see her everyday, how she developed and changed
on a daily basis, what she would be doing from time to time and would
feel sad on missing out on all the fun.
That?s when I read about OVI from other S60 ambassadors reports.
Since, my wife is quite busy with the baby, I asked my sister-in-law
whether she could help me in uploading the pictures on OVI. She is on
her vacations before her new job starts and is at her mothers place
and very much idle to do anything.
I took my wife?s Nokia E51 and had to begin from scratch, since she is
not a nokia user. I briefly explained to her about my new part time
job of being an S60 ambassador , then about S60 OS , showed her
various features of the phone, how to click pictures, how to view them
from the 3rd party file explorer, how to connect to GPRS and browse on
Opera. She was so blown by Opera browsing, that she told me that she
would only help me only if I got her a new E51. I told her that I was
tight on budget due to the entire baby shopping, but could partly fund
her purchase. I told her to consider the N82/N95 if she was more
interested in multimedia. She has decided on the n82, but will wait
till she starts her new job next month onwards and gets her salary.
Anyways ,coming back to OVI, I created a new account and both of us
,walked through the instructions ,which were quite simple, uploaded
the pictures we had clicked earlier. Now ,on a daily basis , my sister
in law or my wife will upload pictures & videos of my baby girl and
share it with me.
Moreover, we can also send links to friends and relatives, who can
view it without any issues.
What better utility could we find from OVI.?

The second is from anwar79:

Today I'm meeting up with a friend of mine at the car wash. He's already got an N70. At the car wash a sales person claimed he selling an N95 for about 500 (about USD 130) brand new.

He was pitching it to the customers there but me and my friend was skeptical. We walked up to group of people and inquired about it. At a glance it looked like an N95. The the sales person talk some nonsense about stylus and I new instantly it was imitation.

I told the the crowd that it was a chinese imitation. The sales person got on the offensive saying it's a special version that Nokia hasn't sold yet and some other stuff and I told him I'm no fool. I asked him to pull the back and look at the battery and obviously visible was the word Nokaa N95.

I told him we (me and my buddy) are S60 Ambassadors and we were trying to set the ball straight. He got all defensive and I re iterated I don't work for Nokia and I don't really know the legality of that product. What I did know is that it isn't a genuine N95. First off it doesn't have 5Mpixel. Second it doesn't use S60 or have any of the tools available. Nor does it have wifi, gps or an accelerometer. It certainly can't use the funky software that I demoed on my E90.

I told them you get what you pay for... And something thats too good to be true usually isn't. I told the salesperson I'm not trying to cut his livelyhood (as he was claiming) but if he's selling an imitation, at least have the honesty to admit it. He said them people won't buy... At which point I said don't sell something people wont buy. If you sell imitation without the person knowing then you are cheating and can be considered stealing to a degree. He deviantly walked off and I told the crowd that prices for the real N95 has dropped quite a bit.

Even better get an N82 I told them. Either case you'll end up with a real S60 smartphone that's really smart and usefull.

-Written on my E90 while waiting for and after Lunch

Cool stuff anwar79 and ritesh, and both for entirely different reasons....Kristina will be sending out your loaner N82s shortly.

Finally, our Pic of the Week. This week our pic comes from Pablopoo with outdoor signage in Chile. Like gomcoite, I want to go!

Honorable mention to Mr Ricky Cadden for some of the funniest pix we've seen in some time....

Next week's theme is Water12. Any body of water, tap water, bottled water, you name it....

Finally, a reminder: We'll be closing the Share on Ovi campaign on June 30th....top 75 Ambys at that time will get the BT goodie. We did order some extra stuff in response to the "Rewards" entry. So if you've been hoarding reports write them up and post them so that we can give you the credit/points you deserve.

Til next time-- Happy WoM'ing!

Calling all S60 Ambassadors! We have a new campaign set up promoting Widset Pets. To sign up, go to the S60 Ambassador site, select "Campaigns" from the menu on the left, and then select the "Widset Pets" icon. We are accepting only 250 S60 Ambassadors, so first come, first serve.

Format will be similar to the "Share" campaign -- i.e. we'll be looking for reports submitted through the Ambassador page that describe how/when/where you talked about your Widset Pet with friends, family, strangers at the bus stop, or other interested parties. (Remember to select "Widset Pets" from the campaign drop downbox each time you submit a report -- that way you'll get points for the Widset Pet campaign). We'll be awarding loaner devices each week for the "Report of the Week". Check the "Consumed" blog each Wednesday for your WidSet RoTW winner. At the end of the campaign we'll select the 10 Ambassadors who have accumulated the most points and send them a new bluetooth headset.

Looking forward to reading your Widset Reports!!

What are Widset Pets? Check out the Facebook app and explanation here.

Oh and one last thing: Don't forget to remind the people you talked to that you learned about Widset Pets through the S60 Ambassador program.

Please leave any questions in the comments field. Happy WoM'ing!

The Evening with S60: Boston was a hit. Being Bostonians, we had a special interest in making this one a success, and if we measure by number of attendees, number of connections made between customers, overall atmosphere, and of course most importantly our Net Promoter score, the Evening in Boston was indeed a success.

Of course, we had our challenges: For one, we were going up against the 1st game of the NBA Finals, and the Boston Celtics were representing for the 1st time in 21 years (hard to believe but true). So we knew attendance would be a challenge. A couple of my own friends bagged out on me in order to watch the game. The other wild card was the venue: In NY and Chicago we were able to hold the "Evening" in the Flagship stores, but there is no Flagship in Boston so we had to rent a room. The Living Room in Boston was OK, but a lack of VGA in on their TV, and some other hiccups made the venue a challenge.

Like David St. Hubbins, we are professionals tho, and we rise above.

Two things we try to enable at these events:
1) Connect our fans to the people who make, market, and sell S60 software and S60 based devices. On that front we were good. Lots of folks from the S60 Browser team came to the event: Chris Ramos was there to show some of his homemade widgets, and newbie Michael Daitzman (new head of S60 Browser Product Planning) was there to get to know our customers and hear their concerns. We also had Oren Levine in the house showing off some of the accelerometer-based apps that are now coming to market, and his now-famous S60 truck. Dean Andrews, Line Manager in S&S was also in the house talking up various innovation initiatives.

2) Show S60 enthusiasts what's coming down the pike
We were good on this front as well, with more than 4 different S60-powered Samsung devices in the house, plus the LG KT-610, plus the N78, N96, 6210. Our fans got to see, hold, touch and feel the latest and greatest we have to offer.

The other thing that's fun about these events for me is the chance to meet people in the industry who are creating things for the S60 Platform or are using S60-based devices in ways I hadn't thought of using them before. For example, David Pitkin from HP gave me this tip: When you are using your S60 browser and that annoying "Web: Connection Timeout" message comes up (happens more often with my N95 8GB than it did with my N82 for some reason) just go to Options:Tool:Disconnect and then reconnect the browser. You won't lose your page or even the info you were typing into it. Nice!
3rd party developers also showed off there wares. The guys from Zeemote showed off a cool bt game controller. KeyNetik were especially impressive with an accelerometer-based application that basically allows you to answer the phone just by picking it up, and silence the ring tone by turning it over. Early returns from Oren are good as well....he's installed it already and tells me it works as advertised.
Also in the house were S60 Ambassador Extraordinaires Erick Macapagal and Alan Chu. Alan has been at 4 of the 5 S60 events we've held in the USA, quite an impressive showing.
Most fun of all for me tho are the somewhat random connections I make at these events. Jeff Ziegler is not involved in the mobile industry at all, he works at Wheelworks, a bicycle shop that happens to be my favorite in the Boston area. Why was he there? He used to live in Europe and has been a fan of Symbian phones since. He keeps up on the technology through the internet and heard about the Evening through one of the forums. Without putting ourselves out there in the real world, Jeff is one of those fans I never would have known was out there. Looking forward to meeting more of you at the next Evening with S60.

Happy Monday morning everybody! A slight change in plans on the "Share on Ovi" campaign. We were originally going to give out BT headsets to our Top 75 S60 Ambassadors in the "Share on Ovi" campaign. But we're hearing from various sources that some techies aren't huge fans of BT headsets, and among those that are fans, many already own one or two headsets. So....we are looking for suggestions regarding what else S60 Ambassadors might want as a reward. We're looking for something mobile tech related that has a value roughly analogous to a BT headset (has to fit in budget). Leave your ideas in the comments field. We'll be making some sort of decision on Friday morning.
Thanks!

PS If you are an S60 Ambassador in the Share on Ovi campaign, make sure you add yourself to the Share on Ovi canmpaign here (in the "Campaign" menu on the left). And when you submit a report, make sure you select that it is a "Share" report that you are submitting. There are still *many* people who joined as Ambassadors but didn't join the Share on Ovi campaign. You have to be in the campaign in order to be eligible for the campaign rewards.

Calling all S60 Ambassadors! We're in the process of planning events for next half (July - Dec). There will be at least one "Evening" in the Americas, one in Europe, and one in South East Asia.

We've been reading the forums and blogs to see where people want us to come. We hear these requests and we want to make sure that we aren't missing others. Figured it'd make sense to have a single place where we could collect feedback -- if you want an Evening in your area, let us know in the comments for this blog. Taking logistics/budget into consideration, we'll do our best to show up where there is the most demand.

Note: please be specific -- for example we hear lots of requests for India, but we don't know *where* in India we'd get the most turnout.

My goodness another very busy week in the S60 Consumer Engagement team. Stefan, Ricky and Raj were in town for team meetings + the Evening with S60 finally landed in Boston. The meetings were intense and productive, and the "Evening" was a success. Huge thanks to Kristina Ferrari for organizing everything and making the whole thing work -- again. I'll post a recap of the event at the latest Monday, for now check out the pix here and the jaiku here. (Most of the posts are from the anticipation, once the event started none of us had time to post ;-/).

For now, we've combed through our "Share on Ovi" photos. This week's theme was a bit esoteric, but we still got plenty of entries (thanks of course to the always prolific Nikhil Chawla). Our pic of the week came from mayhem_pl:

Honorable mention goes to Nikhil -- with extra credit for creativity:

This week's theme? Sign11. Let's see what kinds of street signs, storefronts, billboards, etc our Ambassadors are seeing around the world. Take your pic, tag it Sign11, and upload it to Share on Ovi.

We continue to get a steady stream of reports for the "Share on Ovi" program. This week's report of the week came from Crazysehaj, who has been sending in LOTS of material from his sick bed. I especially like Crazysehaj's unique approach to spelling, somehow makes the whole report seem more vernacular. Read on:

As u guys know i am currently unwell and not very mobile and am restricted to my house and few places outside. we'll recently i was allowed to attend college again. when i reached college it was the last day of our 4th year and we were finally promoted to 5th year. being the senior most class in our coll the college adminstration decided to adress us and let us know about our duties and responsibilitites. one of the responsibility which was laid on our shoulders was to help get our college get better ranking and also make sure that not only us but also da junour batches get jobs (campus placements). We'll thats when an idea came to my mind i gave the suggestion that y dont all of us come up with a presentation program or slide shows which make up a sort of a plan to reach our goals. this idea was completly hit with the adminstration so they made a group of 5 people each and told us to come up with slide shows and presentations. we'll me and a group of friends immeiatly got to work we decide we will make videos and click pics and make a very interactive presentation which is more easier to explain. over da next few days we worked individually and worked on areas were ou college needed improvemnet and da areas which we could use da good points of our alreasy existing infrastructure. As most of the people were living at diff places the problem of sharing da data came up... dats wen i told my friends about the share on ovi and the s60 ambassador program i made a private channel for our presentaion made my friends join it gave them the permissions to add material. and also make comments. the only thing thta they said was will others also be able to see our data i said no thats the diff b/w public and private channel and our being a private channel its completly secure. wen we finally met yesterday i even showed my friends how share on ovi could be used from the mobile with one click they were quite impressed with the cool share on ovi feature and a few of my friends even promised to join the s60 ambassador program

Thanks Crazysehaj! Your story reminded me of a feature that a product manager told me about awhile ago (sharing work files or PPT instead of pix). At the time I kind of glossed over it, but now hearing a real use-case from a real consumer brought the benefit of this feature home for me. Your brand-spanking new N82 loaner is on the way! Keep those reports coming, check out the S60 Ambassador site rankings for the week (Lenny Bons is still on top) and tune in Monday (latest) for our "Evening with S60: Boston" recap.