Telecoms is special kind of industry and succeeding there needs special set of skills. Disruption will definitely come some day and different skills are needed. How to nurture those skills inside the company in the transition phase? It's so interesting to see is any of the current telco players capable of playing it right finally. It's so hard to cannibalize own business and this applies for both vendors and operators. Then we have a newcomer in the industry and lot's of agile start ups and youngster internet companies. Is Apple capable of shaking telcostagnation? Only time will tell. Already now I can say that it has changed mindset in Nokia and iPhone is not even out yet. I hope iPhone is even better than in the advertisements. It just means that consumers will get better products from all the rest. Heja competition!

This is a great idea, but you might lose caller id of your most used contact, because most likely ICE is someone who you already have in phonebook. If you add ICE card and it has the same number than earlier entry, calling line identification is not working anymore. Phone is using few last numbers of phone number to match with names and when there are 2 names with the same number it won't show any name. On icecontact pages there is a hint to add * after the number and it will fix this problem. I think the idea is just to save ICE number to common place, but it would be nice that calling from this particular device to ICE calling also works without editing the contact or using separate phone. With my S60 phone and Sonera SIM card I just get number not in use message if there is * added after number.

What I'm thinking here is a new feature for the phonebook. When you open the phone for the first time, it should ask date, time, location and finally ICE contact. (Of course if should be possible to add ICE contact later on). This ICE contact should be separated from the others so that it doesn't mess up caller id display. This feature would promote ICE idea and maybe after 2 or 3 years almost everyone would have ICE in the contacts. One principle around ICE is that the person whose name and number you are giving has agreed to be your ICE partner. Phone could then send SMS to your ICE contact and inform that you have added he or she to this contact.

What do you think? Any comments? No promises about delivery schedule. Now finally some models are getting energy saving alerts and this could be also nice Corporate Social Responsibility act from Nokia.

100 million S60 phones landmark is now reached. Samsung announced a new device SGH-i400 and LG starts to ship JoY in Europe. Nice milestones.

In my opinion S60 should systematically announce shipment numbers like Symbian. Every quarter! Not every now and then, including sometimes Nokia numbers, sometimes all licensees. There was an announcement on 3GSM time about  S60 shipments. "Nokia alone has cumulatively shipped nearly 85 million S60 enabled devices by the end of 2006". Now it's 100 million all the licensees all together. Cumulatively. I like hard facts, exact terms, systematic approach, not marketing BS. If you know a card game called tuppi, one very basic principle is that cumulative points are never counted. It only matters what you have now.

FON works with S60 but when accessing FON connection could go more smoothly. For some reason my phone gives several times a message. "This site has sent an untrusted certificate. Continue anyway?". But yes, FON works with a wi-fi phone. Does anyone know how to get rid of the warning message?

Installing FON AP was easy. But having my access point displayed on FON maps in the right way wasn't that straight forward. I was waiting that my AP appears automatically on map. It never came. Then I found out that for some reason my access point on the map was initially located to South Korea and I had to correct it manually. AP range is not huge but coverage is available outdoors. Welcome Foneros to use it. No limitations for bandwidth:-)

Now as a smartphone user I'm interested to know what's going to happen for roaming data charges. If voice roaming is extortionately priced, roaming data is not from this planet. It's no surprise for me that EU politicians know well Graham Bell and mobile versions of his innovation. But I'm afraid they haven't heard about mobile data service yet.

Widget is an embodiment of S60 Web Run-Time. Web Run-Time allows Web developers to build new Widgets for mobile and even migrate existing widgets from other platforms to S60 with minimal effort.

Web Run-Time lowers the barrier to develop applications for mobile. No need for Symbian programming experience. No need for application signing. Do it fast and distribute on Web for everyone. Use common Web tools, documentation will be available. When bringing existing Widgets to S60, few things has to be taken into account. Screen is smaller, no mouse, two softkeys: options and exit. The core of the existing Widget can be utilized and migration is easy. We have worked with several companies to create demo Widges and usually migration took only few days. I'm impressed.

Ebays, Amazons etc. big Internet names are already on mobile but I believe this is a great step to make long tail available on mobile. We have had the best mobile browser which is making billions of Web pages available for S60 users. But now there is going to be easy way for every Internet company to make mobile user experience even better. Widgets make access to Web services fast and pleasant.

With Widgets smartphone users gain instant and easy access to commonly used Web services. In the first phase Widget functionality allows access to Web and displays information for user in mobile optimized way. Widget user experience on S60 is similar to any other application (Symbian or Java). Widgets can be downloaded and launched in similar way that other applications. Several Widgets can be run at the same time and be seen and switched from multitasker menu.

Open to new features. This has never been more true than today.

I have reported systematically Greenpeace's "Green Ranking" of electronics industry. This time bad news for me is that Nokia is not anymore the number one. Lenovo has raised to the leading position. On the other hand I'm very happy that overall companies are putting more and more effort to environmental issues and for the most direction is right.

Also Sony-Ericsson has improved while Apple, having made no progress since the launch of the Guide in August 2006.

I'd like to see that my employer, Nokia, works towards carbon neutrality. Employees in global company travel a lot. Carbon emissions created by aviation industry is not high if we look the global total numbers, but in my personal "sins" air traveling is clearly the number one and it's mainly business traveling. I have been thinking about buying  Carbon neutral flights from Carbonneutral.com with my own money. I know I should have done it already and not just think and write about it. For example neutralizing the effects I created last week when traveling to Orlando would cost less than 20€. It would be great to work in a company which does this automatically for every employee and flight. It also fits so well for a company and brand which wants to be the most admired in the world.

I didn't see any big announcements. We didn't do those and others were pretty quit as well. Of course vibe is different in US where S60 phone penetration is not that high but I was happy to meet so many people who were big fans of S60 and hoping to see S60 devices available in operator portfolios. And only one blogger came to say hello.  See you in Madrid on 25th, if you are coming to S60 community event called S60 Summit. 

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.