A journalist asked me today, “is all software going to be done in the beta culture way?”

I replied that no - there need to be limits. A line that you should not cross.

Coincidentally, Ivan Kuznetsov had written decisively against such movement yesterday:

Beta culture seems to be spreading from internet startups to bank systems (although in this case I would be more inclined to say that this was a huge screw up on Danske Bank IT department’s part). I’m not sure I like it. Gmail beta, Flickr beta, but Sampo Bank beta? It’s definitely fun to participate in debugging of the new web service, but not when it deals with your real money.

I totally agree.

I would say that “beta culture” is irresponsible and unacceptable whenever:

1. You charge the users directly, or
2. The downside risk is more significant than the expected benefit of running a beta, like:
   • Losing your money or something you have paid for (say, software for Mars rover spacecraft)
   • Losing your precious data (say, software that screws up your lifetime photo collection)
   • Losing your life / health (say, software for your pacemaker)
   • Causing collateral damage to others (say, software for a nuclear power plant)
   • Breaching ultra-sensitive private data

At least this is how I see it. What do you think yourself, what should be the limits of beta culture?

Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi from My Mobile Site Widgets team

My Mobile Site widgets has been just updated to version 1.1. It has the same architecture as 1.0 enhanced with a little bit better protocol (JSON-RPC). We corrected and enhanced the existing widgets and added some more features like Calendar and MMS sending. We show also information about other mymobilesite.net users (Free/Busy information). This feature demonstrates the potential in the remote access provided by the Mobile Web Server.

New features and changes:

• Single Login, UI allignements, Windows installer for widgets,
• JSON-RPC between phone and PC
• Enhanced access rights handling
• New Calendar widget with Free/busy information
• SMS widget: New SMS information, delete SMS, drag and drop support
• Picture widget: Save, Rotate, Send image as MMS
• Small fixes in Call widget

What do you think?

Guest blogger: Tatu T, the owner of Nokia Channels media service

Dear Beta Enthusiasts,

We are now please to distribute the latest of the Channels service – namely the Beta5 – which incorporates some significant new features as well as a simplified user interface.

First of all, the experience takes you directly into the tab view where All headlines is the starting point. We have added for you the Editorial channel as default, but you may subscribe to more content by selecting Add content from the options menu or by navigating left to the My contents tab and clicking the Add content button.

Furthermore, we have added an intelligent mechanism that updates the subscribed contents automatically on the background. Without the Channels application running, installed WiFi Internet connections are tried first and when one is available and working full contents get updated. If WiFi is not available, only headline titles get updated using selected Internet connection. When Channels application is running selected Internet connection is always used for background updates. User may turn the background update off by selecting Options -> Settings -> Update content off.

What comes to YOU, our dear users, we have been very pleased to see you coming from all over the world. For the past three “beta” months about half of you have come from Europe, but other parts of the world such as India (about 13%), South-East Asia Pacific (about 11%), North and Latin America (abt 12%) and Middle East Africa (about 8%) have also been well represented. The service has had about 3500 unique users monthly and page views reached over 30000 in March.

Looking forward to provide you more publications – we got a Comics channel coming – and yet a better experience!

Thanks for your support
-tatu

Nokia PC Phone has been just updated to version 1.2.2204. This fourth public beta release contains loads of bug fixes and a couple of new features. Overall, the concept is getting more mature, and we decided to raise the technological maturity indicator to yellow = “some known issues”.

See full release notes here.

Download here.

Today, we are celebrating* the 1-year birthday of Nokia Beta Labs. Go us!!!

Looking back at my email archives from April 2007, I found this humble email from the founder of Beta Labs, announcing the launch of it to a couple of Nokia insiders:

“As planned, this is a soft launch. No press releases, not OPK giving announcements to Reuters. But yes: please spread the word internally and externally to friendly bloggers and influencers.”

Darn right we did. Looking at digital archives, I was apparently the lucky one to break the news first (I didn’t work for Beta Labs then), followed by Stephen Johnston and Janne Jalkanen. And the story started spreading among the bloggers, including the usual suspects like Darla and rising stars like Stefan Constantinescu. Despite the whole concept being quite simple, people inside and outside Nokia seemed to just love it. And the rest is history. Or at least the beginning of a history…

So what have we achieved so far? Let’s see:

• 4+18 application launches
• huge usage growth: ~1M page views, ~200k downloads, and thousands of comments / month already
• vibrant user community: experimenting with new apps, sharing thoughts, and helping each other
• early signs of a massive culture change inside Nokia, towards co-creation and beta culture

Due to this early success, we have also had some challenges:

• Our current systems don’t scale. There’s pressing need to a major overhaul to the Beta Labs website and feedback systems.
• A single Mr.Beta doesn’t scale. I’m not an omniscient expert on all Beta Labs apps, and I can’t answer to most of your questions (see: Getting rid of the last middleman). Also, as Nokia is taking beta trials and co-creation increasingly seriously, my personal working bandwidth is going increasingly into work “behind the curtains”.

But these are good problems to have. And we have some good news: the operative Beta Labs personnel has now been doubled*. Our new Master’s Thesis worker Ilkka Peltola just introduced himself. Let’s make him feel welcome: go and drop him a comment!!

* = this invitation comes a bit late, I know, but does anybody want to go and have an after-work beer (at Helsinki Finland) to celebrate the birthday?
** = Beta Labs is a virtual organization, consisting of me and Ilkka as the operational team, and dozens of people in various support roles. Together, we do our best to help Nokia R&D teams (hundreds or thousands of people) and the beloved user community (~100k people and counting) to shape the future together.

Hello, world!

Tommi hinted you already before Easter that a new thesis worker is starting at Nokia Beta Labs. So here I am, introducing myself.

My name is Ilkka Peltola and I am a student at Tampere University of Technology, Finland. I was hired by Tommi to study how Nokia Beta Labs is working and how it could be improved for everybody’s benefit. To be able to do this, however, I would like to ask for your help so we can together build this to be the best community-driven beta portal in the world. That said, all comments are welcome!

The research question of the thesis currently is “How should Nokia run beta trials and co-creation activities in the internet age?” I will be studying current co-creation and beta trends to see what works and what doesn’t. What I would also like to do is to learn more about who you are in order to take this service in the right direction. For the next six months I will be commenting here on how the research goes and hopefully getting comments from you guys.

Nice to meet you all!

Key changes:

• Can be installed also non-English operating systems
• Corrected bug: If device was connected in Non PC Suite Compatible mode (i.e. MassStorage), it crashed the sidebar

Please note: When updating the existing version of Nokia Text Messenger, please reboot the PC after the installation, as is instructed in the installation program. If this is not done, application does not find the device.

Download here (for Windows Vista only)

Final thoughts?

The guys behind Nokia Text Messenger got the honor to nominate the Nokia Beta Labs Contributor of the Month, March 2008. After going through all your contributions, they finally found the top dog, Shaun Yeap from Malaysia.

Congratulations Shaun!! The gift pack prepared by the development team* will be heading your way soon.

Many thanks.

* = as you can guess from the picture, Nokia Text Messenger is being developed by the same team as Nokia PC Suite.

Quick note: Gizmo for S60 was updated to v.1.1.013. (no change log available, sorry)

Also, the project just got a new product manager. The original one - lovely young lady who prefers to stay anonymous - is heading for new challenges*, and she asked me to publish this note:

Hi people! I would like to send you chocolate and flowers but instead I write a short boring note

I want to sincerely thank you for all your time and effort with Gizmo. You have had a great impact for developing the application but also our way of working. I also want to thank Tommi for the great work. Hope to meet you soon again in Beta Labs.

Ms Productmanager on behalf of the whole team

* = this is not a definite goodbye, as she liked you so much that she might come back with a cool new Beta Labs launch later this year…