NokiaBetaLabs

Beta Labs 2007-2009 in numbers (

Written by Tommi Vilkamo, Manager of Nokia Beta Labs

Friends, a lot of things have been happening lately, and it's time to give you a recap about where we are now – and what’s about to happen next.

First, let's look at our Beta Labs app portfolio:

To sum up:

• on average, we have been launching 2 new innovations every month
• more than half of the innovations have been graduated to commercial Nokia offering

I think this has been a good run, but it’s not enough. We need more cool stuff.

Next, let’s take a look at usage statistics:

Note: the website didn’t have registration until Dec ’08.

To sum up, in terms of size and activity of the audience, we have reached critical mass: ~500k lurkers, ~100k active users, and ~1k active contributors (on average) every month. Frankly, I think this is enough. We don’t really want to grow the usage base much further. Instead, the focus needs to be on quality, not quantity. That is, making the quality contributors feel appreciated, and making the quality contributions get more attention and better responses from Nokia.

Ok… So what are you going to do, Sherlock?

First of all, let me introduce John Markow, whom we hired 1 November as the community facilitator for Beta Labs and Backstage (= our intranet equivalent of Beta Labs). From now on, he’ll be your host, making sure that your feedback gets heard and responded in a reasonable extent. Note that I’ll be still here too, but I’ll be focusing my time increasingly on hunting down cool innovations by Nokia and selected partners of ours, to be piloted and shaped here together with you. Let’s give a warm welcome to John!!

Secondly, note that there will be lots of improvements coming to make Beta Labs more helpful for all of us – the user community and Nokia R&D teams. Ilkka will tell you more about these later.

Thanks everyone.

yours,

 - Tommi