Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

The invitation to the Nokia Idea Generation Workshop came in some time ago and I have now full confirmation as well as a list of other attendees for the event. The general idea is to generate ideas for future mobile products with a timeframe of several years out. With the development of a new phone taking something like 3 years, it has to be a few years out of course.

Up till now I am wonderfully cared for and all things are settled for a wonderful two days with some really great people. Sadly I will not be able to blog about the contents but can blog about everything around and who is there. That list alone will tell you that it will be ahrd for the event not to turn out great.

Mika Röykkee is one of their Nokia senior usability people coming from the S60 team and moving to the next generation products. Udo Szabo is senior product manager on the Ovi team. Urpo (Upi) Nokkonen is hardware designer and I seem to have to thank him for the N95 :). Joeske Schellen is designer at Nokia focussing on wearable electronics. Damian Dinning seems to be the oversight man in concepting and planning and is largely focussing on the imaging part of it all. Sami Oinonen is in the innovation acceleration team and is responsible for co-creation activities so I seem to have to thank him for the event (and probably charlie for the invitation ;)). Laura Richards is one of their category and consumer understanding people (buy does Nokia have cool department names ;)) and Jarkko Kaislasaari is a product manager that worked on the N95. Of course we can’t leave out marketing, so Eri Kuwabara is there too. But actually we all do not need to be there because Timo Veikkola is there, and he is Senior Future Specialist, systematically analyzing the world to spot trends … Our facilitator is Scott Hirsch who seems to have worked on some interesting things.

All in all, this alone gives a great Nokia base to the meeting that will make sure that we have some very productive two days.

But who got invited? Interesting list to say the least. Dave Green is out gaming guy who also runs Snackspot, what a cool blog. Christopher Macintosh Morrison is one of the marketing people, having sold the first digital only marketing agency in London to WPP and now has a new one among others doing marketing for mobile social networks. And Mac, once you get the fire eagle beta login I’d love an invite Vilhelm Sjostrom was Strategic Director at Agency FWD in Helsinki and has turned pro Photographer. Matt Brown is interaction designer at last.fm, which means lots to learn on that front. Thayer Driver was developer at UpMyStreet, which might lead to interesting discussions to what we are doing, and is focussed on social media, gaming and web 2.0. Dietmar Müllser is part of the ISO digital photography committee, tests cameras and knows digital. Jim Griffin is the guy holding the talks about the future of music and entertainment delivery it seems. Sascha Pohflepp studying design interactions and is part of the people behind We Make Money Not Art. Rafe Blandford runs All About Symbian. Matt Hunter is Partner at IDEO and I found a fun video about where digital cameras are going. He is also a drummer, like I am, and not playing, because of a sun, like I am Sami Köykkä is a digital services consultant, speaker and author from what I could find, and Moritz Waldemeyer seems to be another interactions designer type of guy that actually seems to have an iPhone based on his blog.

I actually just posted a video on Seesmic to ask the question what you think the future phone should look like. Just to possibly get a bit of feedback.

Great video that Bob Stumpel posted on his Web 2.0 blog. You can view it here. It’s a panel moderated by Guy Kawasaki with lots of different entrepreneurs talking about how they started, what their business models were and are now, what the good and bad sides of founding a business are and why you just have to work yourself through the ups and downs.

Great stuff to listen too and a good mix of sites that partly didn’t or still don’t have a real business model.

First of all, thanks a lot to Hubert Burda and of course to the entire team organizing the event. I had a great time, I was inspired and I will surely come again. The event was a great mix of people leading to very good networking indeed and some very inspirational talks, for example from Brian Cox about the Large Hadron Collider at Cern seen here showing us the one formula that explains everything :). And now I am stuck, because there are too many recollections, like waterball at the party, Henning on the Segway, loads of different people including old and lots of new faces, a great panel on How to be Good, Where are the Editors, The Billion Dollar Bubble (with Marissa Mayer talking live about the problem of the google.de domain from the night before) , and more. I really have to agree with Martin that Arianna Huffington rocks and the panel with Tarik Krim from NetVibes, Craig Newmark from Craigslist (see Martin’s video), Jim Spanfeller from Forbes and David Sifry (see his great photos from DLD. He’s a prime lens freak by the way, which I learned at the party :)) from Technorati was very good indeed. Because mentioning NetVibes, I have to also say that meeting Christoph from Pageflakes (and finally talking to him a bit longer after having seen him at MediaTech and Le Web :)) as well as a new colleague that will become official on Monday, was great. But that’s it from me and it’s back to working on Ormigo and writing down all the great feedback we received.

You can watch many of the panels here. Check out Arianna’s post about DLD or simply follow DLD at Technorati.

Ok, from time to time the trashing is going a bit far, so I thought I’d highlight some of the good sides of the event, which for me still outweigh the bad sides. First of all, there were by far enough power plugs for laptops in the conference room itself, which was amazing. The event location was very good all in all and this time, I have to say that for dealing with 1000 people, food was very good indeed. Both of those were large complaints of the last events and they have been fixed.

The total group of people that was there was a very good mix, and in light of the basic idea having come from an un-conference, the networking was very good. And this is actually a large part of what an un-conference is about for me. There were also some real highlights in the talks like Hans or the second life panel. That there was a start-up room was great, and we got two VC contacts through that. The party was also good and and in total I had a great time!

As I said before, the biggest problem, and where all the else originate, of the event, is that it has outgrown the un-conference part and that makes it a hard to manage cross-bread. Thanks for the event Loic, keep your head up and decide on where you want to go with it.

(P.S. it is going to far anyway, with now Sam Sethi from Techcrunch UK being fired over it.)

I remember that when chatting with François Bayrou at le web 3, Loic appologized as he had previously thought that Mr. Bayrou would only be coming to such events for the press, but he now understood that he came for the bloggers. And I have to agree, that Mr. Bayrou was the guy that came to le web 3 for a conversation on stage and with the audience. Mr. Nikolas Sarkozy however, who is the candidate that Loic is supporting in this years elections, and while I do not want to talk about political opinions, Mr. Sarkozy has clearly not understood the bloggers! So if understanding what blogging changes is something that influences Loic’s decision, then I would say that Sarkozy is out of the race. Mr. Bayrou was clearly more in tune with the audience.

And beyond that, just read David Weinbergers summary of the monologue of Mr. Sarkozy. As David says, he is contradicting himself every step of the way. I love this bit.

Let us make the new Internet continent the continent of new liberties, that includes rather than excludes. Let us make the Internet continent of the transmission of knowledge, and not the transmission of lies. The continent of sharing of cultures, not of the leveling of values. [Wow. Does he know he’s contradicting himself sentence after sentence?]

Wow. All very strange.