S60 Open to new features

in 1 hour I will be out of office and enjoying sunny Helsinki. There won’t be blog updates for 5 weeks. I wish you all wonderful summer.

I think the best news of the week was this. Warren buffet is giving out 85% of his wealth. It means $30 billion capital injection to Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. Maybe it’s too early to say that capital nepotism is coming to its end but the richest men are showing the way. Hopefully others will follow. New trend is to give money for wise people rather than to inheritors.

In one earlier comment I already wrote about Microsoft, but I’ll repeat myself. I admire one thing in Microsoft, or to be exact in the ownership of Microsoft. Still significant part of ownership is on Bill Gates hands and when Microsoft creates profits and company value increases and it is good news for Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. This foundation will practically inherit all. Nokia’s ownership is more distributed and profits are not channeled such a way. Shareholders can’t be selected and their values, dreams and ethics can’t be influenced. So it’s extremely important to make things in a right way inside the company. I want to be part of the company which is handling well corporate social responsibility and taking environmental issues seriously. I’m totally convinced that most of Nokia’s customers want to feel good (also on ethical side) when they make purchasing decision. There is also a business potential, but personally I’m more interested about doing the right thing.

What could be the role of S60 in this? When we are talking about S60 and potential buyers, we are talking about people who actually belong to the highest 5% income segment in the world. Look at your pocket. If you have S60 device there, you are likely be in this group. Buying decisions in this group are not just economical but has to be also ethical. On the other hand many S60 potential buyer are kind of techie and this they values can be even opposite. This was the counter argument what I got when raised this issue.

I would split people to 3 groups. People who prefer ethical products (“greens”), people who are neutral (don’t care about this aspect) and people who don’t want to buy ethical products (“anti greens”). The middle group is the biggest. But is the third group so big and powerful that you don’t dare to change way of working and image of your product? You know my answer. Maybe it’s possible to find better “organic product” than S60 which could be used as spearhead product. S60 is close to my heart and I want to start a visible change from it.

Emarketer has published a study about business blogging. Blogs have a long way to go before becoming widely accepted corporate marketing tools. It seems that average marketing executives are more concerned about moderating/limiting what is being said on blogs, than listening and learning from the consumers.

Moderating and limiting hasn’t been our company’s approach to blogging. I must say that our experiences about business blogging has been only positive. It started from S60, Forum Nokia joined and others will follow.

I feel that corporate blogs have to be more honest than "oldfashioned marketing" and if too much old type of marketing techniques are used in the blogs, nobody will finally read them. Utilizing the feedback is a tough part. This is excellent way to take feedback directly from S60 users, but I must say that overwhelming amount of requirements is coming from sales companies, operators, developers etc. and it's a real challenge to find valuable ideas and get priorities right. After that it is “just” execution.

I haven’t endorsed any blog so far but area of this one sounds too interesting to be left out without publicity. Name of the blog is Telco 2.0. The blog supports the 'Telco 2.0 Initiative', which is an industry programme figuring out how telcos, handset manufacturers, VNOs, NEPs, etc make money in a very different IP-based world?

Finland used to be number one in the mobile phone penetration. Then we used to be on the top of SMS usage statistics. Then one essential part of the industry made some unnecessary foreign investments, technology was not developing as fast as expected, some ownership changes of key player(s) and puff, few years later, this market is so different.

End of March European Union’s Regulators Group proposed that a single Europe-wide cap on wholesale roaming charges to be applied. EU suggested that this would lead to reductions in average wholesale roaming charges of around 60 percent. A month later Vodafone came out and said: "Average European roaming costs for Vodafone customers will be cut by at least 40 per cent by April 2007, when compared to last summer." Yesterday Orange ,T-Mobile, Wind, Telecom Italia, Telenor SA and TeliaSonera announced that they have agreed to slash mobile phone roaming charges. They plan to reduce the cap to 36 euro cents a minute from October 2007 - a cut of almost half from the current wholesale prices.