Introducing me, the Nokia Beta Labs thesis worker
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!
Hello Ilkka! I’m Stefan, recently started working for Nokia’s Technology Leader Engagement team for the S60 platform. I’m in Tampere, been living here since fall of last year, before that Helsinki in July.
I beta test applications because I’m afraid of boredom. I’m afraid that I’ll stop picking up my phone and explore new things to do with it. I’m afraid to sit idle in a world that is moving faster and faster everyday.
How should Nokia foster beta testing? Well Tommi and I had some coffee in a meeting room and drew out the plans for the site as you see it right now. I’m curious to read the ideas you propose.
Here are some things I want:
More multimedia. Someone had to write the beta applications we’re testing right? Show us who they are and let them explain what the point of their application is and the vision they had for creating it.
More discussion based on scenarios. Let us tell you the scenarios we want to experience with our devices so you can funnel them back to the developers.
Good luck with your thesis!
Comment by Stefan Constantinescu — April 16, 2008 @ 2:25 pm
I have to say, Ilkka, you have done a great start. Looking forward what we can come up with during this year…
Ps. go meet Stefan someday. Brilliant guy. Worth listening to.
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — April 16, 2008 @ 3:43 pm
Hello Ilkka. My name is Bogdan and I’m a frequent visitor of this blog. It’s great to have you here and good luck with your projects
Comment by Bogdan Galiceanu — April 16, 2008 @ 4:57 pm
Instead of just patting each other on the back and talking about how great everyone is why don’t you just cut out the theatrics and go develop a killer app? Not to rain on the parade but I am not excited by most of the offerings here. Like Constantinescu said above, I too am afraid I will stop picking up my phone to explore new things. You are not making it easy when I install Maps 2.0 on my E90 and the buttons and labels are mismatched! Was Maps 2.0 coded by a teenager in someone’s basement? Get your stuff together people.
Comment by cabby — April 16, 2008 @ 5:21 pm
@ Cabby: Harsh words at their anniversary but you are totally right, I figure that 90% of their 100K blog visitors think the same. I congratulate you for the courage to post this. Thank you very much! But I want to congratulate Tommi also for his efforts in the last few years. He deserves much more than a cold shower! Happy Birthday NBL!
Comment by horia — April 16, 2008 @ 7:20 pm
@Cabby: fair enough. I agree, many of the current Beta Labs apps might not have that change-the-world potential. But then again, some do. And beyond a sanity check, I wouldn’t end up as a publishing police - yet another bottleneck preventing Nokia R&D projects trying out their wings at the marketplace. I guess the best solution for this dilemma is transparency: we need to openly tell the technical maturity and set the right expectation level in the application descriptions.
At the end of the day, however, developing killer apps is exactly the thing that matters. I believe we have some really promising stuff in the pipeline. If I didn’t believe it, I would probably go home to fill in my CV…
@Horia: thanks for the support, but I didn’t take Cabby’s comment personally
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — April 16, 2008 @ 8:50 pm
typo: “I wouldn’t” => “I wouldn’t want to”
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — April 16, 2008 @ 8:52 pm
@ Cabby
Give the poor guy a break! he’s just joined the Beta Labs team, also if you find things wrong well that’s the nature of a “BETA”.
@ Ilkka
Welcome to the party that is Beta Labs
I’m Bill, I’ve been an avid Nokia fan for years and a fan of Beta Labs since I found it
I don’t know much about programming or marketing but I know what I like. Also I’m still trying to find a game as addictive as Bejeweled
Comment by Solitaire — April 16, 2008 @ 8:55 pm
@Tommi- thanks for responding. I’m just frustrated with Maps 2.0 not working properly on my E90
I guess that’s why it’s called beta, sorry for my perhaps too harsh language.
Comment by cabby — April 16, 2008 @ 9:44 pm
@Tommi… one last thing: why is it taking so long for a simple key mapping change to take place??? I know I’m repeating myself but I just feel totally frustrated. I am of course talking about the infamous wrong labels in Maps 2.0 on the internal E90 screen. Surely we are not talking about something impossible to do? I just want the right labels on my keys, is that too much to ask? This shouldn’t take months to fix, should it? You might not think it’s important but believe me when I say this is a total disaster for Nokia. Want an example? Just last week I was driving with my wife when I handed her my E90 with the maps 2.0 open and asked her to find a street address for me. Guess what? She certainly did not have the patience for mis-labeled keys. She just laughed it off, thought it was a joke of some hacked app and quickly handed the E90 back to me. Having wrong labels on the keypad is not the right way to introduce someone to the wonderful world of Nokia, is it? I have a friend who has an E90 and when he found out from me the keys are mis-labeled he didn’t even bother installing it, said no thanks, he’d rather use Garmin instead. You talk about grand ideas of talking to the end user and having this blog, listening to the people, cutting out the middle man, developing great apps and all this beautiful stuff etc. etc., yet you ignore the most basic of complaints. Why is that ? Do you people not see that you’re being counter-productive? You’re pissing people off and losing them for good. Again, I/we are not asking you to find cure for cancer. I/we are asking for right labels on our phones for crying out loud! THIS IS A SIMPLE CODE CHANGE. I paid premium dollars for a premium device, is it too much to ask for the key labels to be correct ??? Put your words into action and listen to your customers. PLEASE FIX IT AND RELEASE A NEW MAPS 2.0 FILE FOR E90 USERS !!!! PLEASE FIX MAPS 2.0 FOR E90 ! Thank you.
Comment by cabby — April 16, 2008 @ 10:12 pm
I for one, love the transparency that beta labs provides us. So what if the keys for an app aren’t how you’d like, it’s nothing compared to the persistant Call Log bug present in the N95s, far from a ‘beta’ project I might add.
Welcome to the blog Ilkka, I look forward to continued discourse with you, and the other Beta Labs Web Workers!
Comment by Robb — April 17, 2008 @ 7:34 pm
> This shouldn’t take months to fix, should it?
Nope. And I’m sure it doesn’t.
I believe the question is more about how many public Beta Labs releases the Maps team sees worth doing, before the commercial release. All intermittent public releases require some amount of time & resources, and they need to evaluate are the benefits (= your feedback) worth the trouble.
Let me ask the team what are their plans…
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — April 17, 2008 @ 9:25 pm
@Tommi… Thank you. I await your/their answer.
Comment by cabby — April 17, 2008 @ 9:49 pm
Thank you all for the warm welcoming! I am confident this thesis of mine will be extremely interesting and I hope to bring value for you guys - probably not directly by programming killer apps, but perhaps indirectly by helping in steering the Beta Labs to directions you would also like to see it go.
Comment by Ilkka Peltola — April 18, 2008 @ 9:10 am
I know I’m late to the party, but welcome, Ilkka!
“How should Nokia run beta trials and co-creation activities in the internet age?”
I like Beta Labs, but I wonder if there shouldn’t be some sort of forum (to repeatedly suggest something that’s been suggested here before) where internal teams could start a thread saying ‘we’re working on this, what does it need to do/be?’ and users could chime in. I can think of several instances in Beta Labs where this could have saved the dev’s alot of trouble, for instance, the Conversations app, that I most often hear people saying it should be part of the messaging, not contacts.
I love the transparency on the Beta Labs, though, and love that users are able to easily and directly provide feedback to the teams responsible for each product. Nokia is one of the few companies that makes it easy for any joe on the internet to do so, not just bloggers.
Comment by Ricky — April 23, 2008 @ 10:59 pm
Hi Ilka,
I’m Geoff. I’ve owned Landmark Nokia phones since the first WAP phone (7110), then the first Camera phone (7650), and now the first GPS phone - the N95.
I’ve worked in IT deveopment, Project Management, and now am responsible for the Customer Interface of my IT Organisation.
I’m proud to have been voted Best Beta Labs Contributor for Feb 2008, on the basis of my contributions concerning Nokia Maps 2.0 .
I’m very interested in the “co-creation” aspect of your brief, and this fits very well with my comments in post number 7 here: http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog/2008/02/15/getting-rid-of-the-last-middleman/
Improving Customer Involvement is absolutely at the cutting edge of where Nokia is, and needs to go, and I envy you your involvement in this imaginative and very forward-thinking company at this exciting time.
With regard to the Beta Labs experiment I am quite clear about what its primary needs is - which is to improve the strength and effectiveness of the partnership between user and deveoper.
To achieve that two things are needed:
1. A system whereby contributions and contributors (of BOTH users and developers) can given scores by the community - that is again the community of BOTH users AND developers), so that it can be easy to see the value that the community as a whole places on contributions and contributors, in order for the most valued to be the most prominent and have the most influence. This should also work in such a way that as helpful valued and popular posts float to the top, unhelpful unpopular and off-topic posts sink down to the bottom until they’re out os site. In that way, you would achieve a forum that could be largely self-managing.
2. A two-way dialogue, with much more involvement by the Developers. It is obvious that the more you put in, the more you get out. This applies in the case of Beta Labs especially to the Developers. Frustratingly for contributors and users, the Nokia Maps forum is an example of where the Developers have not provided much visible evidence of engagement with the contributors, and the quality of contributions, and of the overall outcome in influencing the product development has therefore, I believe, been significantly less than it might have been. This is true in terms of the quality, quantity and completeness of the accompanying documentation provided, the quantity of responses from the team in the Blog area, and the number of updates of the beta software that they have provided to the beta community (only the one beta version to date with no updates since February). There are other developer teams in this forum who have been much more visibly engaged with their beta tester community, and the quality of the engagement has therefore been much better. This is an indication of what and where we need to learn (rather than a complaint).
Of course, it was more of a challenge for the Maps team to engage because of the sheer volume of contributions, and on the plus side, implementing mechanisms that I’ve described in point 1 above will help developers deal with the volume of contributions and the signal to noise ratio so that it is far easier for them to do what I’ve discussed in point 2 above.
3. That is the reason why it is so important to put in the investment to have in place a really effective tool to achieve what I’ve described in point 1. So, to make both of the above possible, and again to deal with the signal to noise problem, it’s essential to have a system that allows people to register and be identified. Of course, this may involve writing a brand new forum management tool - but this level of customer involvement and engagement is a glittering prize that’s in prospect here if this works well, and if such investment were put in, the returns on this investment would be very great, I believe.
The current open-to-all blog could be retained, but a much lower level of response from developers would be expected, if any, to the open-to-all blog than to the forum for registered users.
So Ilka, welcome to an exciting time at Beta Labs! I’d be happy to correspond with you direct if you would like to. As I’ve expressed in various places at Beta Labs - this is a project which interests me greatly, and which I very much hope to see go from strength to strength.
Comment by Geoff — April 26, 2008 @ 6:20 pm
See comments 10, 12 and 13… Once again Nokia ingnores their customers. I waited and I waited and I waited and I waited, and… NOTHING. What a joke… this sites is supposed to “interact” with the end user. Yeah right! I did want to interact and talk about my issues with Maps 2.0 but betalabs simply ignored me in hopes that I will forget. Well, I didn’t forget and I am tired of this complete lack of regard for the user/customer. This is pathetic.
So off I move on to another non-symbian phone where the apps actually are interesting and the community thriving.
You people have a lot learn. Have a nice life.
Comment by cabby — April 28, 2008 @ 3:15 pm
Cabby: Didn’t forget. Just didn’t have any news I could publicly share.
Maps team has been improving the app/service a lot, but there are still technical reasons why releasing mid-point beta releases would have been counterproductive.
You have a nice life too, in that other thriving community supporting open dialogue. Umm… Just curious, which one are you talking about exactly?
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — April 28, 2008 @ 7:32 pm
Thanks Ricky! And thanks for the suggestion.
Thanks also Geoff! I must say that the points you made have already been under intense discussion between me and Tommi. Valid points and I do agree these need they be solved.
And, I promise you, I am here to study alternatives for improvements and these kind of things are exactly what I am interested in.
Comment by Ilkka Peltola — April 28, 2008 @ 8:36 pm
Tommi: Let’s dissect your rather cynical response. Firstly I am not asking you to find cure for cancer or end hunger in Africa, am I? I am not asking to overhaul and do wholesome changes to an application, am I? I am asking for correct key mapping in the application (Maps 2.0 on the E90), this is the program I (and countless others) rely on. I am insulted by this line you’re feeding me saying this would have to be another mid-point beta release. LOL. It would take approximately 45 seconds to rewrite this faulty code and change the key mapping for the E90. Then you could simply replace the .sis file with the new one. It does NOT have to be a new release. Please spare us the theatrics, they might give you an Oscar for the performance. The whole exercise would take approximately 2 and half minutes out of your busy life. Believe me this is done at Nokia on a regular basis. I do have some contacts still at your company. Go talk to your buddies responsible for firmware files and releases (wink). You think product teams don’t update the firmware files available on the NSU site, without making it an oficial firmware upgrade? Yeah right, I think I just saw Elvis walking by. The public firmware files are being constantly updated invisible to the end user. The firmware file that I update my phone with today may not be the exact same file someone else updates their phone with next week. Minor errors are fixed all the time my friend.
I won’t even begin here to go into how the rather expensive E90 is Nokia’s unwanted and unloved baby. That’s a topic for another day. All I will say is people got moved off the E90 project because of their incompetence, maybe they are now at betalabs.
Secondly, you said you didn’t have any news you could publicly share. Umm… I didn’t know you were on a top secret project at NASA for the next Mars mission. Or maybe you’re part of some high level CIA group working on counter terrorism? Wait… I know! You found Osama Bin Laden and you couldn’t “publicly” share it. I understand. Hint: if you don’t have anything you can “publicly” share then don’t engage in public dialogue and close this site down. Simple, isn’t it?
Thirdly, you have created this site in hopes of, in your own words “co-creating”, “communicating”, “interacting”, etc., etc., (I forget now some of your other fancy terms you used) with the end-user. Yet you choose to ignore that same end user and hope he/she goes away. What goes on this site is not about dialogue, you’re just interested in people singing praising and bowing down before your highness. May I kiss your ring Your Holiness? People vent and raise their concerns but then nothing happens and status quo remains the same. What’s then the point then of “co-creating”? It’s either the Nokia way or the highway. Countless many people have complained and cried about Maps 2.0 on their E90s to deaf ears. Your approach is to pat each other on the back and think everything will be rosy.
Fourthly, you ask me what the other thriving community is. I will let you figure that one out on your own. It’s a community where everyone truly talks and “co-creates” together in harmony. In this other community they don’t brag about their birthdays and how many apps they have come up with, they don’t post silly pictures of cakes with candles. They just do what they’re supposed to do: create great programs.
In conclusion, as I mentioned early, I do still have some contacts at Nokia. I will obviously not mention any names, I respect their privacy. When you live in Finland, like I used to, then you will sooner or later come in contact with someone at the company. What I know for sure is that not everyone is completely in love with betalabs. There are some key folks making some noise. I don’t know if it will do any good but if I were you I would re-visit the priorities for this project. Sooner rather than later
- cabby.
Comment by cabby — April 29, 2008 @ 12:57 am
Yeah, I’m very much aware that Beta Labs is far from perfect. We are years away from the ideal state I often talk about. Almost everything needs still a lot of work (the website, the processes, the feedback & conversation tools, Nokia R&D team’s ability to listen and react, quantity and quality of conversations, …). Nokia is an enormous R&D machinery, and you can’t change it overnight. And building a thriving community is not an easy task either. There’s always the looming threat of it turning into a “swampy mush of spam”. Sometimes I wonder why so many people tolerate the current state of affairs, and urge us to go forward.
About the “not allowed to comment”, this sure isn’t a top secret Mars mission. But there is a rule I need to follow if I want to keep my job: not talking about unreleased products and Nokia roadmap.
I’m sorry about the slightly cynical comment in my previous comment. I understand that you are frustrated, and that you are entitled to feel so.
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — April 29, 2008 @ 8:21 am
Tommi: it’s ok. I guess what frustrates me the most is the lack of care for the E90. First maps 2.0 has mismatched key labels, now internet radio is out for E51 and E65 but not for the E90. So on and so forth. The E90 has potential to be an awesome device but it is totally disregarded by Nokia and the community at large. The E90 is Nokia’s unwanted baby it seems.
Comment by cabby — April 29, 2008 @ 5:20 pm
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