This was my first Nokia sponsored event and I was very impressed. I have been an engineer for over 25 years and have been training young engineers for almost as long and I have to say how very impressed I was with all of the young engineers that I met in Helsinki last week. They were all enthusiastic, very intelligent, open minded and very responsible. Nokia obviously takes recruiting engineers very seriously because they have put together an outstanding group. I would also like to say how impressed with the people from Nokia and WOM World who organized this event and kept us on track. I have had to organize and lead groups of engineers in meetings and workshops before and understand how truly challenging it can be.
As far as OpenLabs is concerned, I have waited a week to post my thoughts because this workshop was one of the most intense workshops that I’ve ever intended and it has taken me a while to sort out everything in my own mind. First, Nokia clearly stated that the purpose of this workshop was to look 5 years into the future, an aggressive goal. There were actually 5 workshops: Neighborhood, Connected Life, Entertainment, Work (all identified in my previous post) and then on Saturday there was a workshop on the how all of the very cool mobile technology that we had discussed the day before can affect the Environment.
In the first workshop, Neighborhood, we discussed how social media has changed the advertizing and marketing. Companies can no longer tell you what they want you to believe because within a day the truth will be posted on a dozen blogs and forums around the Internet. This is great for the consumer but represents a fundamental paradigm shift for most businesses. I think that this is are area where Nokia is way out ahead of most other companies because they actively seek out regular bloggers, such as myself, and give us their products and ask us to tell them what we like and what we don’t like. Somewhat surprisingly, they actually seem more interested in what we don’t like and freely share this with the rest of the blogsphere.
The next workshop covered “Connected Life” and really opened my eyes to truly practically applications 6to the social media trend. We discussed targeted geospatial advertizing which I found to be not only a very cool idea but potentially really useful. An example of this would be as follows: I’m on a business trip in a city that I’m not familiar with and 4:00 PM rolls around and my stomach starts growling and I start to think about where to have dinner. My phone knows I’m in this city and starts to pick up ads from nearby restraints advertizing their menus and even offering electronic coupons. In addition, I have subscribed to another application, perhaps a new Facebook feature, which lets me automatically get restaurant reviews from my Facebook contacts. So no I not only know which restraints are near me and what they offer, I also know what my friends thought of them they last time they visited the same city. This is, of course, just one possible application.
The next workshop was Entertainment and because this is such a wide open area, we were broken into 4 groups and each assigned one task. The group I was with was assigned to come up with an idea for a new form of entertainment not available today. The idea we developed we called MeMedia and centered on the idea that we, the end user, will be creating our own games, music, movies, etc (media) in the future. Instead of just reading an eBook, we will be creating new stories based on the worlds and stories created by the whole of the user community. This will allow us to create not only new adventures for existing characters but new characters that will interact with existing characters and give us new perspectives on events already created. This could also be applied to games, where actual games are not created and sold but the tools to create a game universe are developed and sold. These user created worlds would be either entirely or partially subsidized by advertising. If, for example, one of the characters is using a new mobile phone that I think is cool, I could buy that phone. In addition, if I but a new device in the real world, I could also buy, for an extra cost, a virtual version of the same device to use in the game, movie, etc.; all in all, a very intriguing idea.
In the next workshop we discussed work and how social media could be used in a work context. One of the members of the group I was with made a statement that bordered on an epiphany. She said that meetings should be for collaborating, not to provide information updates. Existing social media applications such as blogs, Wikis, etc. can be used to more effectively provide information so that when less frequent meetings are held, everyone already knows the same information and the meeting time can be used for purposes of collaboration, brainstorming, etc. As an engineer I have wasted several years (years I’ll never get back) of my career in meetings where my participation in a 3 or 4 hour meeting was to provide a less than 5 minute update on some topic. I’m forced to wonder now what might I have been able to accomplish had I been able to spend those lost years in truly productive pursuits.
The last workshop was centered on the environment and how our mobile technology affects it and what could be changed to help the environment. The group I was with developed the idea of a LifePhone. Instead of disposing of a mobile phone every year or two, the individual components of the phone would be upgradeable. When a 5 megapixel camera becomes affordable, I can simply replace my 3.2 megapixel camera and “recycle” my 3.2 megapixel camera into my sons camera. Similarly, cpu, screen, etc would all be upgradable because common hardware protocols would be used universally. Replaced components would be “recycled” into lower grade phones until eventually they are recycled to make new components. Ideas from other groups included use of RFIDs on cans and bottles that automatically credit your account, through you phone, when placed in a recycle bin.
Finally, I would like to say thank you to Nokia and WOM World for inviting me to this event. It opened my eyes to possibilities I had not previously considered. I have already started applying some of the ideas we discussed during OpenLabs 2008 in my business.
I found Handy Shell both stable and functional, but not perfect. As I already stated, I would liked to have seen support Mail for Exchange. In addition, while I like the second row of icons, I would like to see more options for what can be displayed here, such as settings, connection manager, search, etc. The user should be able to select the 6 icons that they find most useful. Finally, although the top row can display the time of the next alarm, this is true only if you use the native alarm application. Even though Handy Shell gives you easy access to either Handy Clock or Handy Alarm Pro, alarms set in either of these applications are not displayed on the Today screen. While the last two of these faults are minor, the lack of support for any other email besides the native POP/IMAP is a more serious issue. A work around for this issue however is available in that you can toggle between the native Active Standby screen and Handy Shell’s Today screen by pressing the red end key. In effect, this provides a mode switching function similar to that found on the E66 and E71, giving you essentially two different “Desktops.” 
Posts
