New version 1.1.008 available. Minor tweaks here and there.

Happy news from Nokia Sports Tracker team:

Hello all,

Sneak preview for you. Now you can share your latest track and images in real time in your Facebook profile by adding this pretty cool Sports Tracker Facebook add-on application:

You can see this in real in my profile.

Steps to follow:
1) Add Nokia Sports Tracker Facebook application by following this link.
2) Start recording and sharing with Nokia Sports Tracker mobile application
3) You will see your publicly shared workouts on your Facebook profile

Cheers, Ykä & Jussi

Update: picture updated from “girl with a Mac” to “guy with a PC”. The earlier pic was indefensibly misleading, as PC Phone doesn’t support Mac. My fault. Sorry for confusion. - Tommi.

As Nokia PC Phone is currently the hottest (= most-downloaded) application under Beta Labs, I wanted to highlight this comment from the development team:

Thank you for all your input.

We have received quite a lot of personal feedback to our email address and we have tried to reply to all of you who have sent some comments, incident reports or proposals.

What we would like to hear from you is the following :

Now that you have experienced using your Nokia from your PC, and you understand what can be done with this kind of approach - what are the top 3 things in your Nokia that you want to get done from your PC?

Thanks for your encouraging feedback !

Best wishes to you all for 2008!

- The Nokia PC Phone Team -

You can share your thoughts either publicly by commenting to this blog, or privately through the feedback form.

Note: if you want to follow the debate, you can subscribe to all PC Phone related blog comments from http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog/comments/feed?tag=pc-phone (learn to use RSS). The same URL structure works for all other applications too.

During the first 9 months of Nokia Beta Labs existence, there’s one thing we have learned the hard way: beta testing in the web age is not what it used to be. Nowadays, everything in the web gets labeled as “beta”, and stays such seemingly forever - despite being technically very mature from the users’ point of view. Consequently, people’s expectation level has been raised significantly: they tend to expect - and demand - public betas to be technically reasonably mature = stable and not-too-many-bugs.

This has left quite a many people scratching their heads, or bitterly proclaiming that the word “beta” has become meaningless. I tend to disagree. I believe the meaning has just changed, due to the fundamental changes underway in the software industry and the web.

Let me tell you a simplified story of what I think has happened and why.

The origin of “beta”

According to Wikipedia, it all started in IBM hardware development:

“The term beta test applied to software comes from an early IBM hardware product test convention dating back to punched card tabulating and sorting machines. Hardware first went through an alpha test for preliminary functionality and small scale manufacturing feasibility. Then came a beta test to verify that it actually correctly performed the functions it was supposed to and could be manufactured at scales necessary for the market, and then a c test to verify safety.”

Now, if you think about the beta testing of clunky punch-card machines, life probably wasn’t easy. The marginal costs of adding beta testers must have been unbearable (material costs, shipping&logistics, etc).

The economic curve must have looked something like this:

I believe beta testing wasn’t too popular back then, and if you did it, you didn’t invite too many beta testers to the loop.

Golden age of shrink-wrapped software

Eventually, PC software became unbundled from the hardware, and so began the golden age of “shrink-wrapped software”. Companies wrote software, wrapped them into convenient boxes, and sold them in retail stores to the masses. Beta testing such stuff became much more feasible:

• reasonable fixed costs
• reasonably low marginal costs (shipping CDs, etc)
• relatively high lost-opportunity costs (if beta testers didn’t pay for the final software)

I believe the economics looked something like this:

And so beta testing became mainstream, as a widely accepted part of software development cycle. But as your business depended on charging hard cash for the final release, you had to manage the software distribution carefully, and limit the number of beta testers. And it was probably no accident that the typical size of a beta test was about 100 active testers.

Side note: if you are interested in doing beta testing for shrink-wrapped software, personally I found these sources useful:

• Joel Spolsky: Top Twelve Tips for Running a Beta Test
• Michael Fine: Beta Testing for Better Software (Michael is founder of the interesting beta testing company Centercode)

Beta testing in the web era

With the advent of the web (supported by the open source movement), something big happened: software and web stuff started becoming “free”. The users didn’t pay directly for the software anymore, as it was funded by indirect business models, such as:

• advertising (e.g. Google)
• selling hardware (e.g. Nokia)
• selling services (e.g. Red Hat)
• selling your company and user base (Web 2.0 startups)
• + non-monetary incentives (e.g. the “free software” ideology)

Suddenly, the marginal costs (and lost-opportunity costs) of adding beta testers dropped close to zero.

Suddenly, adding beta testers started creating direct value, as your business was dependent on the usage, not on paying customers.

Suddenly, it started making sense of offering your stuff as perpetual beta.

Changing definition of “Beta”

Before diving into the new definition, let’s take a look at the traditional ones:

Wikipedia:

“A beta version is the first version released outside the organization or community that develops the software, for the purpose of evaluation or real-world black/grey-box testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release. Beta level software generally includes all features, but may also include known issues and bugs of a less serious variety.”

Not quite. In the web age, you don’t need to have all the features, but you should try to minimize the bugs.

ZDNet / Computer Desktop Encyclopedia:

“A pre-shipping release of hardware or software that has gone through alpha test. A beta version of software is supposed to be very close to the final product, but, in practice, it is more a way of getting users to test the software in the first place under real conditions.”

Almost, but doesn’t fully cut it… What is the “final product” in the world of perpetual betas and continuous improvement?

Michael Fine: Beta Testing for Better Software, page 11:

“Beta testing is the managed distribution of a product to its target market; the gathering of feedback from the market; the evaluation of the feedback into manageable data forms; and the integration of the data into the organization it affect”

Getting closer. However, in the web age, it’s less managed. And it’s about co-creation, not about 1-way feedback.

Let me try to define it myself:

Beta testing in the web age is distributing not-guaranteed work-in-progress stuff to your target market, and co-creating further improvements. - Tommi Vilkamo

Hmm. Something like that.

What do you make out of this all?

Quite a many of you have asked me to show some numbers and trends about Beta Labs. Here you go…

Application portfolio

Most popular applications of 2007: (measured by traffic & downloads)

• Conversation
• Device Status
• Nseries PC Suite 2.0
• Gizmo
• Sports Tracker

Web traffic

• Year 2007 in total: 1 754 079 page views and 545 006 visits.
• December 2007: 460 748 page views and 144 204 visits.

Downloads


EMEA = Europe, Middle-East and Africa; APAC = Asia and Pacific; AMER = Americas

• Year 2007 in total: 319 123 downloads.
• December 2007: 87 022 downloads.

Note: only files that are hosted under www.nokia.com/betalabs website are included in the statistics above. Some of our projects have used different download infrastructure, therefore not included in the statistics.

Feedback
Unfortunately, we don’t have history data about your feedback, as we didn’t start counting it systematically until 5 December. Anyway, the amount of feedback has skyrocketed. So far there have been 867 Beta Labs blog comments, hundreds of application review blog posts linking back to us, and thousands of private feedback items through feedback forms etc. Now, as all of this goes directly to the development teams (everything gets read), increasingly they don’t have time to reply to you. Consequently, some of you have grumbled about us not listening, but that’s not the case. We love you, and we live on your feedback. Not-replying is just the unfortunate cost of cutting out all the middlemen between you and the developers. Hope you understand.

To sum up, 2007 was the year when Nokia Beta Labs was born and got ramped up. There are lots of things that we still need to do, but already now, things look really good. Thanks everybody for your attention and contribution!!

Update: the name of the winner added = Umberto Martini.

Image: Phil Schwarzmann jogging at Nokia headquarters with Nokia Wrist Band CP-218.

Howdy-ho folks. The Christmas holidays are over, and we are back in business. And it’s time to announce the Nokia Beta Labs Contributor of the Month, December 2007.

As I’m a big fan of the cult classic Dice Man, let’s have the dice make the call this time. During 5…31 December, we received 1927 feedback items from 924 unique email addresses (+ 788 anonymous comments) in total from Nokia Beta Labs feedback forms. I just arranged an excel-lottery among all valid email addresses, and the lucky winner is … *drumroll* … the commenter #851, Umberto Martini.

Hooray!!!

Prize: since the feedback happened to be encouragement and constructive ideas about Sports Tracker, let the prize be the jogger’s best friend, Nokia Wrist Band CP-218, famously reviewed by Phil here. And heck, I’m still having some Christmas spirit, let’s put a box of Finnish assorted chocolates as a bonus.

I’ll contact commenter #851 Umberto Martini personally, and ask if he/she wants his/her name published here among the other Nokia Beta Labs Contributors of the Month.

Congrats!!