There’s a competition that some of you might be interested:

Sign up for the Mobile Web Server Challenge and get a chance to win one of several prizes and an opportunity to show your winning contribution on the Mobile Web Server forums!

In nutshell:

• Your contribution: knowledge articles and/or software development
• Deadline: May 30, 2008
• Eligibility: some requirements, read the details carefully
• Prizes: Nokia Nseries devices and Ovi service vouchers

Good stuff. Details here.

If this works, it might make sense to arrange similar competitions in other areas too…

Two quick notes, my friends:

I’ll be traveling until 30 March, with very limited time for following and participating Beta Labs related online debate (the actual development teams will still be there).

Also, I have some good news. We just hired a brilliant young student to do a Master’s Thesis about Nokia Beta Labs. And we posed him a big and hairy research question: “How should Nokia run beta trials and co-creation in the Internet age?”. Fascinating topic, huh? Anyway, I’ll let him introduce himself properly later on, as soon as he starts the actual work on April. Let’s all help him make a great study!!

Yay! There’s a story about Nokia Beta Labs in the front pages of Digitoday and Taloussanomat (Finnish tech & business magazines).

Thanks Aleksi!! As you wrote such a good piece, you are forgiven for publishing that dorky picture…

Anyway, there was only one thing that I and a couple of other commentators were not fully comfortable with: using the word “geek” in the title. Of course, geeks - using the particular Merriam-Webster definition “an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity” - represent one large and important segment of Beta Labs users. They tend to push the technological limits, and set the highest technological demands for Nokia R&D guys. But they are not the only tip of the lead-user iceberg, as we like to call the user community around Beta Labs. There are several peaks. We hope to attract athletes to shape the sports apps, traveling salesmen to shape the navigation apps, and visually impaired people to shape apps like audiobooks. Or artists. Or race drivers. Or priests. Or war correspondents. People at the edges. People pushing the boundaries.

That’s a great place for certain kind of innovation to happen, I believe.

Time for a question from the audience:

Q: Doesn’t Nokia listen to normal people anymore?
A: Well, yes. Obviously, lead-user innovation à la Nokia Beta Labs is not suitable for everything. Usability studies, for example, are better conducted with more regular folks. And Nokia does.

After the rocky start last September (the Beta Labs audience was a tough crowd), the Nseries PC Suite team digested your feedback, released a couple of significant updates, and now, it’s time to declare Nokia Nseries PC Suite 2.0 as graduated. Thanks everybody for your feedback, and a hats off to the team for the persistence!!

You can download the final version from Nokia Nseries Support site*. In addition, I understood that the app would be included in the sales package of many new Nokia Nseries devices.

Scoreboard: Graduates 3 - 2 Archive.

* = technically, it’s the same version as we have had at Beta Labs since 23 January.

Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi from My Mobile Site Widgets team

Sorry for the late post. I’m a typical developer who Tommi wrote about. I need to train/educate myself to treat public discussion with higher priority.

So what were the conclusions of My Mobile Site widgets trial?

• It seems that you like the concept of lightweight PC-Phone applications and this is a great platform to experiment with it.
• User feedbacks are very versatile. For example most of the feedbacks said that Signal widget is almost useless. But then someone wrote that he lives in the country side, and signal quality is a big problem there. So Signal widget is very useful for him.
• SMS widget was rated as most useful by far. The attention around the Text messenger Vista gadget proves this also.
• Tiny features around messaging like search capability was highly valued.
• Several feedbacks requested enhancements in UI, usability and more customization opportunities. We will try to do our best to correct them.

What’s next?

• The 1.1 release is under development. Basically we keep the 1.0 architecture with a little bit better protocol (JSON-RPC).
• We correct and enhance the existing widgets and add some more features like Calendar and MMS sending. To show what the potential is in the remote access through Mobile Web Server we will show information about other mymobilesite.net users also.

I raised the question about the ultimate desktop widget platform, but it seems that this is a hard issue currently. Honestly I don’t now the solution yet, but I will write down some thoughts in the Forum Nokia wiki. (Soon, I promise!)

As you might have noticed, we have set up a new section called Nokia Beta Labs Archive:

This is the archive of past Nokia Beta Labs initiatives that are not under active beta testing anymore. While some of the items have been removed, some are left available “as is”. You are free to use them as you see fit, but don’t expect bug fixes or new releases under this website.

As the first archived items, you can find Ad-powered Download Client (removed) and Device Status (left available “as is”).

In most cases, we are not allowed to comment the exact reasoning behind the archival. Anyway, the rule of thumb is that when the beta pilot has served its purpose, and the development team doesn’t really need the Beta Labs feedback anymore, we move the project from the active beta list to the archive. We don’t want to abuse your precious time by having inactive beta projects and dead feedback channels out there (some companies do that).

My guess is that about 50% of all Beta Labs applications will eventually graduate (= get productized), and 50% will be archived.

Any guesses about which app goes which route?

Quite a many of you have asked us to indicate the technical maturity of the apps and services available here at Beta Labs. We liked the idea. When people have the right expectation level, everybody wins:

• diehard-users can play around with early releases
• others can wait until the app is “mature enough”
• feedback becomes much more constructive

Here’s the technical maturity scale we came up with:

How do you like it?

Gizmo for S60 was updated to version 1.1.012. The concept seems to be decisively approaching maturity…

As Nokia Maps 2.0 beta launch was the obvious highlight of Feb 2008 here in Beta Labs, I asked the Nokia Maps development team to nominate the Contributor of the Month. Seems that it was an easy task:

“Geoff seems to be the frontrunner in the quality of the comments.”
- one manager from Nokia Maps team

“Geoff! Definitely. I don’t even need to check, I remember his name by heart.”
- another manager from Nokia Maps team

Therefore, I’m honored to nominate Geoff as Nokia Beta Labs Contributor of the Month / February 2008.

Congratulations Geoff!!! I’m glad that the Maps team chose you, as you have been an amazing contributor in other threads too. I will contact you personally and ask your physical address, so that we can deliver our humble Secret Nokia Maps Gift Pack to you.

Max Waterman just wrote a comment about our Ad-powered Download! client beta trial that ended in December 2007:

I’d still like to know what the results of this trial were. The silence is deafening and, frankly, not encouraging.

Apologies Max for the delay. Here’s the wrap-up email that the development team had asked me to share:

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Advertising-Powered Download! client beta trial. In the end, 312 people took the time to complete the online survey and provide us with great guidance to develop this concept further. More than 3 quarters of all participants told us they’d be happy to download advertising-sponsored applications, and the concept overall received a ‘Good’ rating. It was a contentious topic with some participants, however, and it shows that the ability to opt-out of receiving advertisements is important. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most popular type of ads were those that related to the content that was being browsed in Download!, although a relatively big group of respondents didn’t mind what kind of ads were displayed as long as they still received the benefit of more free application downloads. The trial was completed at the end of December and one lucky participant in the UK was awarded the Nokia E65 prize. Thanks again to everyone who took part.

In addition, here are my personal recommendations from the study:

• Relevancy. Two reasons: (1) better user experience, and (2) more money via higher click-through rates.
• Privacy and sense of privacy. Don’t be creepy.
• Don’t inconvenience people. Usability & user experience first.
• Search advertising or permission advertising over interruption advertising.