S60 Open to new features

Have a look to the right column of this page. There is a new box which shows my presence information. The info comes from Jaiku.  S60 3rd Edition version of Jaiku beta is now available. It offers phonebook with the presence service which allows you to share availability, location and calendar status (subjects or busy data only) data with your friends.

Presence information is visible naturally in Jaiku phone client, but you can see it on Jaiku web pages or add it to your own blog, like I did. You can post short notes, called Jaikus, and have them immediately appear on web page or contact list of mobile phone.

The S60 Jaiku has excellent integration to the phone applications and very good setup wizard. It checks when the phone is set to a silent mode and info is automatically shared. So when you see red tab on my Jaiku box, my phone is on silent. Yellow colour means that I'm in a meeting and green indicates general mode. There is a small Jaiku icon on S60 active idle showing when application is on. You can set it to open on phone startup as well. Phone contacts are linked to Jaiku. Those ones having also Jaiku contact are displayed in the beginning of the list. The original S60 calendar is linked to app as well. The S60 Jaiku also monitors via bluetooth how many people and friends are around.

The location information is very clever indeed. It's based on Cell ID, no GPS needed and works well with existing devices. I have tagged home and office cells and couple of other locations and location info is automatically updated when I move around.

I don't remember when it was a last time when I was exited like this about a new app. Good work!!! 

So this was my engineer approach to this nice application. How it changes life and privacy topic is interesting too. I will touch that later on.

I took part to the first ever Telco 2.0 conference in last October. I have already given my endorsements and I do it again. It seems that big conference organizers are just repeating same format every year and pulling together people to make advertising speeches of own products and solutions. Telco 2.0 was different. Truly interesting topics and great interactivity. It was easy to see the organizer's enthusiasm and the final outcome was awesome.

It's not possible for me to take part this time. CTIA Wireless 2007 exhibition in Orlando is held at the same time and I have to be in Florida then. (Florida hmmm. reminds me about some Bombay TV clips but I'm not going to post links to here:-).

The Telco 2.0 event takes 2 days and the first day about business models and strategies. The second day is divided to  4 streams: Digital Youth, Digital Home, Digital Town and Digital Worker. There are many familiar names on the confirmed speaker list. I'm sure that Tommi Ahonen and Norman Lewis will give you new perspective. Few weeks ago I had pleasure to see Rory Sutherland's mindblowing presentation about digital marketing, "open source brand" and "levitating virtual yaks". Rory is Creative Director of OgilvyOne and he is one of the Telco 2.0 speakers. I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Here is one interesting video podcast. Tommi Ahonen interviews Rory and they chat about customers and communities.