It's end of September, and time to select the most valuable contributor of Nokia Beta Labs. This time, I asked directly from Nokia Beta Labs application owners, who has been the most valuable contributor for their projects during September - or if they wanted to give somebody a "life-time award".

And the winner is.... Ed from e-series.org.

Hooray!!! Hooray!!! Hooray!!!

Justification: Nokia Sports Tracker team recommended me to give this life-time award to Ed for his superbly insightful feedback, and for spreading good word about the application. Other Nokia Beta Labs application teams also warmly supported the nomination.

Prize: custom-made Nokia Beta Labs t-shirt, designed by yours truly. Ed: please send me (tommi dot vilkamo at gmail dot com) your t-shirt size (M, L, or XL), and the address where we should send it!

Please join us in congratulating Ed!!!

Please note that the t-shirt is still in beta. It has some rough edges, and we can't give any guarantees or customer care. Anyway, please tell us what you think about the design, and how to improve it - we'll do our best to incorporate your feedback to the final release.

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Previous Nokia Beta Labs awards:
August 2007: Stefan Constantinescu

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

The feedback thread about Nokia Beta Labs website renewal has calmed down ahead of schedule. Thank you all for your feedback! In general, you seemed to like the new concept.

Here's a recap about the improvement suggestions I found most relevant.

Three days later: 66 comments, 81 referring blog posts, 182 feedback emails, and doubled traffic to Nokia Beta Labs.

Wow.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Beloved beta users,

Let me introduce the latest gem of Nokia Beta Labs: Conversation, a neat little messaging app that allows you to follow your conversations, organized by individual contacts. In short, the app provides the long-awaited threaded SMS functionality for S60 - see requests here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.

Try it out, and give your feedback to the development team!

Download here.

After installation, the application will appear in two places:
1) in application grid
2) as a new tab in your Contacts application

How do you like it? Will you take it into daily use? Would you recommend it to a friend? What did you like, and what did you hate? How could we improve it?

Write your thoughts either (a) to the feedback form or (b) to the comments section of this post. Everything goes directly and unfiltered to the R&D team.

Note: this is a standalone application, and therefore won't be integrated into S60 platform in its current form. However, your feedback goes also directly to the team who is working to improve the overall S60 messaging experience - including the actual messaging app. Any improvement suggestions welcome!

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Seth Godin just proposed that companies should try nominating a Customer of the Month.

Heck, let's try this.

Hereby, I nominate the Nokia Beta Labs Innovator of the Month, August 2007: Stefan Constantinescu.

Hooray!!! Hooray!!! Hooray!!!

Justification: extraordinarily insightful feedback for improving Nokia Beta Labs concept and website. The first version of our new concept was drafted in our 1h brainstorming session.

Prize: my warm recommendations for Nokia to finally hire him (I can send a good word about you when you apply to some position). And a beer of your choice, with yours truly, at beer house Kaisla, Helsinki. Just say when.

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Seth says:

The hardest part is getting over the fear that you'll alienate all your other great customers. Give it a try, it's probably worth the risk.

I hope recognizing "top contributors" doesn't alienate other beta users. Or what do you think, does it?

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

We are planning to do a major update to Nokia Beta Labs website during October or so. Here's the first draft 0.01, click the image: (special thanks to Stefan Constantinescu for his valuable feedback)

Let me explain the main points:

1. Name, punchline, and short explanation = top

The purpose of Nokia Beta Labs is to "engage Nokia users into co-creation of new applications and services". That is, Nokia wants to create the future together with the users. We need to indicate this clearly. In addition, we need to ensure that everyone - both users and lawyers - understand what to expect. In practice, this means some kind of disclaimer like "Please note that the stuff here has some rough edges, yadda-yadda-yadda", just like in Google Labs, Yahoo! Next and Windows Live Betas.

This part is not ready yet, but you'll get the point.

2. Long list of beta applications = left side bar

At this section, all items would be listed, with their name/link and short description (max 3-lines). Now, we are likely to have more than a dozen apps & services available by the end of this year - and even more next year. As the list is growing, there is pressure to categorize the items somehow, and to highlight the most important betas.

About categorization, I'm not sure. Current categorization into mobile SW, PC SW, and services doesn't cut it, because some of the items are likely to have all of these aspects. Another possible way to categorize would be to divide the items according to maturity: into experimental research concepts, previews of mainstream SW, and new versions of existing SW. What do you think, what would be the best way?

About highlighting the most important betas, it could be done based on:
- what is new
- number of visitors
- number of comments
- voting/rating system
- combination of the above (some kind of mathematical formula)
- editor selection (my professional judgment)

What would be the best approach? Or do we need to provide multiple views?

3. Beta Labs Graduates = right side bar

At some point, beta labs items will either graduate into an officially supported version, or withdraw quietly into an archive (some of the items at Nokia Beta Labs will be experiments that are not intended to graduate as such).

4. Beta Labs blog = middle

Here we could announce all new items, reply to public feedback about Nokia beta stuff, and get engaged in 2-way discussions about Nokia Beta Labs applications and about the whole concept. In short, this section will replace blogs.s60.com/tommi.

5. RSS

We'll have an RSS feed for blog entries, and for the comments. In addition, I'm planning to tag each entry with the name of the app, so that we can get application specific RSS feeds. This enables the respective Nokia R&D teams to subscribe to application specific comment feeds.

6. What else?

I'm planning to ditch the discussion forums, mainly because we don't have currently enough resources to moderate the discussion and to reply to people's questions with any level of decency. This decision is not final, but let's first try to manage without one.

What else should we have? You tell me. I promise to listen all suggestions, and then, make the final decision about what to implement at this stage. Some of your suggestions, of course, might be implemented later in future website upgrades.

Please send your comments by 26 September, as I need to freeze the concept pretty soon.

Heh. Let's see how this works.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Oh boy. Seems that we released Nokia Nseries PC Suite 2.0 for public beta testing too early in the development. The initial feedback was quite devastating: for highlights, see comments at my blog, All About Symbian, Symbian Guru, IntoMobile, and Antony’s Mobile Blog.

We heard you.

I just had a chat with the Nseries PC Suite team, and we decided to withdraw the software from Nokia Beta Labs for the time being. We are grateful for everybody who sent us feedback, and deeply sorry for inconvenience.

Let's continue the beta testing after a month or so, when the software is more mature.

More comments related to your feedback here.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Nokia Beta Labs proudly presents: Nokia Nseries PC Suite 2.0

Nokia Nseries PC Suite is a collection of Nokia Nseries and third-party PC applications that seamlessly tie together your Nokia Nseries multimedia device and your PC. Use the applications to transfer photos or videos from your device to your PC, to copy your favorite music from your PC to your device or to synchronize you calendar and contact information. And much more.

Supported models: all Nokia Nseries devices. Works but not tested on other Nokia S60 devices.

Try it out, and tell us what you think!

Write your thoughts either (a) to the feedback form or (b) to the comments section of this post. Everything goes directly and unfiltered to the R&D team.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Symbian-Freak was quick to notice that we (almost) launched Nokia Nseries PC Suite 2.0 in Nokia Beta Labs.

Just as we had published it, however, I got a call from the R&D team, and they recommended postponing the launch until later this week, when they get a better version ready. So I decided to take the page down. There's a delay before the main page gets updated, so there'll be a dead link for a while.

Oh well. I hope this kind of hassle is acceptable in Beta Labs context. We'll deliver a better beta package as soon as possible.

Sorry for inconvenience.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Quick note: I find myself intrigued by Eric von Hippel's thoughts about lead-user driven innovation. In case you are interested, here's a good summary of his latest book and here two of his books as free pdf downloads.

Very relevant stuff for our Nokia Beta Labs.

I wonder how we should:
a) identify the lead users / top contributors of Beta Labs
b) give credit to them (public recognition? rewards?)
c) offer an opportunity for them to get more closely involved in Nokia R&D process

Note to self: figure it out.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.