Folks,

I'm enjoying my four-week summer holidays until 22 July, traveling around Italian and Finnish countryside. I'm off the grid, so don't expect me to act on your emails or blog comments before 23 July, when I'll get back to office.

Have a great summer, everyone!!

- tommi

It was nice to meet many of you at "Evening with S60" in Helsinki yesterday.

Things that I promised to do:
- 1. Ask from our Voice UI team to add a possibility to switch off Voice Commands. Otherwise, Bluetooth headsets that don't have keylock sometimes make unwanted "pocket calls". Done.
- 2. Ask from PC Suite team about the SMS backup: when you copy-paste messages from PC Suite => File Manager => Messages folder to your PC, how could you preserve the message dates in file properties? Done.
- 3. Tell to the team behind Data Transfer application about two volunteers who were willing to give direct feedback about the app, when using it in daily synching between multiple devices. Done.

Did I forget something?

Note: by "done", I mean that I passed on the message to the right Nokia people. No promises about implementation etc.

Quick note: got tired with our awful webmail system for myfirstname.mylastname@s60.com.

In the future, please use myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com (= Tommi Vilkamo) to contact me privately.

My official corporate email is naturally myfirstname.mylastname@nokia.com, but please don't use it or I will consider you as an evil spammer.

Wow. Our viral network is starting to work magnificently. Nokia didn't do any official announcements about the beta version of Nokia Media Transfer for Mac. Just a small mention by me, Charlie, and Dameon was more than enough to get the snowball rolling. There are already hundreds of blog mentions and dozens of (online) mainstream media stories.

Interesting.

I can think of three explanations:
1. Me, Charlie, and Dameon have become omnipotent influencers
2. The story was genuinely interesting (i.e. the app was good and/or in tremendous demand)
3. Collectively, our blog network works magnificently.

As much as I would like to believe in theory #1, research shows that the truth is a combination of #2 and #3.

Duncan Watts wrote in February 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review:

...we found that in certain circumstances, highly influential people have a significantly greater chance of triggering a critical mass – and hence a global cascade – than ordinary people. Mostly, however, cascade size and frequency depend on the availability and connectedness of easily influenced people, not on the characteristics of the initiators – just as the size of a forest fire often has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest.

If the network permits global cascades because it has the right concentration and configuration of adopters, virtually anyone can start one. If it doesn’t permit cascades, nobody can.

Our network is starting to approach the state that permits global cascades, started by virtually anyone. And I like it.

Heh. Perfect timing for Johanna MacDonald to start a new S60 blog:

Warm welcome, Johanna!

Quote:

Imagine if you're kinda new to S60 and went to Tommi's S60 Application Blog, you'd probably be like WTF!? His blog, and most other S60 blogs assume you already know alot about S60.

Yup. As I just wrote, I will increasingly focus my blog to the 1% most informed, most passionate and most influential people.

Sorry folks for being so quiet in the blog world lately, and for being so slow to reply to your emails. I've been ultra-busy working with an important assignment, and now it's finally ready. Life is good.

Anyway, it's time (again) to reconsider what to do with this blog. I started the whole thing on November 2005, when I was working in a Nokia unit developing built-in S60 applications. I wrote mostly about our own apps and interesting 3rd party apps, listened to your feedback, and redirected the best comments directly to the developers. It felt natural, and it worked great.

Now, I work in a high-level strategy/planning team of the whole Nokia Software Platforms organization. Increasingly, writing about S60 apps feels a bit too niche as a topic. If you want to be successful in blogging, you need passion and authority over your topic area. As it happens, my passion and authority area is increasingly moving from S60 applications to the blast furnace of Nokia software offering and the Internet.

Here's what I have decided:

1. I'm going to keep this blog and URL

There are hundreds of incoming links, hundreds (thousands?) of RSS subscribers, and Google rankings are great. And since my name hasn't changed, the URL blogs.s60.com/tommi feels natural.

2. The focus of this blog will evolve

I have no aspirations anymore to be the #1 Nokia blogger, measured by the number of readers. Instead, I'll target the most passionate 1% of Nokia/S60 users, industry insiders, application / Internet service developers, online journalists, bloggers, and other influencers. You are the ones that I want to talk to, and to learn from.

The focus of this blog will evolve from S60 applications to the intersection of Nokia software offering and the Internet forces.

3. This blog might get a new name

Considering the evolving focus, any suggestions for the new name or punch line?

See you there.

Folks, please go and say hello to our new S60 bloggers Kevin Korpi and Carol Chen. Both of them just started as contributors in S60 Multimedia blog, along with our old friend Jukka Eklund.

First posts:
- Kevin: Animated Gif Screensaver on S60 3rd Edition FP1
- Carol: S60 (Multimedia) handset usage tips

Warm welcome!!

Sami Lempinen has just started a really interesting blog Mac.sis | making macs and S60 handsets talk.

Quote:

Mac.sis is a resource dedicated to making most of Apple Macs coupled with S60 (née Series 60) based smartphones. While not always a marriage made in heaven, these two technological marvels do indeed get along, for better or for worse.

Now, that's a good niche to write about.

Sami is a colleague of mine from Nokia, but he runs the site as a private person in his free time. Sami seems to have lots of insights about using Mac and S60 together, but more importantly, he hopes to establish a community to help each other around this topic.

Subscribed.

Now, I just need to go buy a Mac...

Via Digg I just learned that:

Dell, oddly enough, is listening to the many thousands of direct requests its customers made during its big public brainstorm (aka IdeaStorm) not so far back. The result of nearly 70% of participants requesting Linux on Dell machines...

Linux market share in the PC world is something like 2%. You do the math: what kind of bias you get from online feedback?

Note to myself: I must be extra careful when asking and consolidating your feedback to S60 developers around here.