Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

What a day. First Nokia bought Plazes (Congrats!) and now they offer to buy the remaining 52% of Symbian and have launched the Symbian Foundation, which will drive the open sourcing of Symbian over the next 2 years. Of course the Symbian Foundation has wide adoption, same as the Open Handset Alliance around Android, but we might want to dig a bit deeper to see if this is a lost cause by Nokia as Google will simply win with Android, or not.

First to start of with one thing. Nokia sells as many phones in a few days as Apple has sold iPhones in total. So there is a bit of a market power there. Of course, Apple might be able to scale down, and Android might be nice, but there is power behind the Symbian Foundation, real power.

Another question is who is now building mobile phones. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Lg, Ericsson, Motorola … all members of Symbian and many of them missing from Google’s Alliance. One also has to say that these companies have real relations to carriers and real experience to get phones through testing with the FCC and others.

Also, Google lists China Mobile as part of the Open Handset Alliance, but they seem to have problems getting chinese working on Android, and Chinese does work on Symbian obviously, and with Open Sourcing the platform, there are no longer any real licensing fees and China Mobile might have an easier access route with Symbian to get their own Smartphones.

So yes, Nokia needs to build up their developer relations work to get some serious buzz around new apps for Symbian, but this is something that can be done because it is a really good base. I still want an iPhone but I will keep my N95 and I will likely get a Nokia phone again in the future. It’s just that I want back to T-Mobile anyway (reception at Base sucks some times) and the iPhone is nice indeed. It has the buzz factor at the moment. Android is too far away. And possibly Nokia will have some really compelling items out at the end of the year. And hey, just imagine them adding Plazes to a few of their phones. Give it a month and there will be more Plazes installations on phones than iPhones out there. So long Loopt. Nice to have met you.

Scoble posts about Kyte.tv on Techcrunch and how Kyte.tv will kill Qik and others in the live video streaming arena. I have been testing the new Kyte.tv S60 app on my Nokia N95 for some time, and it is very powerful.  I am not yet sure if I want all those features within on applications but it does lend itself to not only quickly sending a video onto kyte.tv but rather as a full channel management application, something Robert needs for his work. I am watching Kyte closely, as one of the video start-ups to watch.

Their winning items are the good channel systems with a feedback loop (they had video responses way before seesmic was here if I remember correctly) and their mobile focus, because that is where this video stuff is going. Yes, it is taking longer than anticipated, but you will mostly post video from your phone, simply because there are now already more phone cameras than digital cameras out there and there are way less video cameras than digital cameras and all mobile phone cameras are moving to be able to record video.

The only thing we need are mobile phone internet flatrates and I hope that the carriers are seeing in the iPhone that a flatrate helps. I don’t believe the increased usage comes form the iPhone only, but for a large part from not having to think about being online or not. When you have to think in terms of MB used or something, you do start to think and you use stuff less.

Anyway, I do believe Kyte.tv will rule them all and will be one of the big video players to watch in the next 10 years. They have the backing, they have the right focus, and they are developing the right tools. They are just a service that provides a service. They are not focussing on becoming a destination, because the destination is always the player, and the TV of the future is distributed and re-aggregated. There will not be one controlling system.

Back at home after a great day back at work, I am starting to reflect about Wednesday and Thursday at the Nokia Idea Generation Workshop. What an amazing two days. Nokia made sure that all our needs were cared for, to be able to fully concentrate on the work shop. The St. Martin’s Lane Hotel was amazing and a challenge to the senses, and this was followed by a very good dinner in the beautiful setting of the Sketch Restaurant. With some great wine, and Mojitos later at the St. Martin Lane’s bar, the evening was full of great conversations on and off-topic.

The thing is that the crowd was wonderful and everybody wanted to stay in contact afterwards. We were fortunate to have some amazing people from Nokia but also from very diverse fields in the location that helped having a free spirit and open discussions: 14 Henrietta Street.

Sadly there is not a lot more I can rave about as I can’t talk about the content, even though it wouldn’t be too interesting for all of you out there if you weren’t part of the talks to get there. Thanks go especially to Scott Hirsh who was a great facilitator, always being in the background and nudging us back on track if the excitement of one special subject got the better of us

I do not want to single out any one person from the gang that was there, so I will leave it at that, other that I have to post about my new Nokia N810 soon, thanks, which is an amazing step forward from the Nokia N770 that I already have. I am really seeing myself using it, already have stuff like a last.fm clients, media system, ssh, skype, and others installed. But more on that in another post.

Thanks for challenging discussions, great insight, and listening to the world around you! Looking forward to the next meeting.

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.

Amazon has a press release out with some interesting numbers for 2007, for those interested in them. It’s already been going around the web, but here are some I really like and a few further links at the end. (Data seems to include .com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp, .ca)

1. Busiest Day December 10th: 5.4 million items ordered, 62,5 per second!
2. On peek day their fulfillment network shipped 3.9 million units!
3. COMMENT: Kind of means that the average person buys something like 2 items per order right? Roughly. Interesting.
4. They shipped something to Borrow, Alaska

Following are some amazon.com numbers (with hotsellers being nov 15th until dec 19th):

1. When in stock, Wiis sold at 17/sec … but they are rarely in stock I think
2. In video games top seller was the Wii!
3. In DVDs Harry Potter and “Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series” among others
4. In consumer electronics Garmin GPS, Canon Powershop and Samsung LCDs
5. In PCs MacBook, Nokia Internet Tablet! (two shares I hold and items I have ;))

Gizmodo has a further list with mosted wished for and the like. Very nice.