Warning: slightly off-topic.

I have been watching TED Talks for a couple of hours by now, especially around the theme The Rise of Collaboration. Truly fascinating, amazing stuff - by truly fascinating, amazing people.

Here’s some to get you started:

• Charles Leadbeater: The rise of the amateur professional
• Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics
• Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia
• Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration
• Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

Very relevant stuff. Very. Go watch some.

Note: you can also find there piles of fascinating stuff from other domains, ranging from Al Gore to Stephen Hawking to Craig Venter to Stefan Sagmeister. But that stuff belongs to another story, to be discussed somewhere else…

Here’s one more reason for you to finally upgrade to the “final” version of Nokia Maps 2.0: we are going to stop supporting satellite images on the beta client soon.

Don’t worry, just upgrade and you’ll still receive satellite maps as before. (not to mention getting the other cool stuff like network based positioning, which is ultra-fast and works also indoors)

…and the Nokia Beta Labs Contributor of the Month, May 2008, is Ricky Cadden*. Hurrah!!!

Jury: Mark Wheatley, Product Manager, Nokia Music for PC
Justification: Ricky posting fixes for some .NET problems a lot of users were having, and getting them using the application.
Prize: the greatest Beta Labs award ever (awesome collection on a CD*)

Ricky, I’ll send the details in email, and your priceless prize in snail mail. Hehe.

* = yeah, in the future we’ll learn to use Nokia’s own service vouchers…

Although we did not have that many following the conversation it was definitely a good experience. There were a few beta labs users participating as well as Nokia employees. The topic was about how Nokia Beta Labs website and feedback system should be improved and we mainly discussed about how to receive and respond to feedback. Here are the main points based on the discussion:

• You would like to get more personal response to feedback you give.
• You would like to get notification about how Nokia is reacting to your feedback.
• You don’t like registering or signing in to be mandatory.
• Taking into consideration people browsing with mobile devices is important.
• There is a need for a variety of feedback tools - not any single one satisfies everybody

Thanks for participation!

Click for more, I find this truly fascinating.

(more…)

The Nokia PC Suite team, who is now piloting the new feature Communication Center through Beta Labs, is very much impressed by your passion to test their stuff and contributing your thoughts. They asked me to thank you, on their behalf, for your overwhelmingly abundant feedback!!

Here are some concrete examples about what they have appreciated the most:

—-
A. Most inventive

By Sergey Zak:

This is simply indispensable to those of us who only use N-series PC Suite.
BUT a couple of feature wishes :
1. Please make it minimize to the System Tray.
2. Please show baloons from the tray when SMS/MMS received/failed/sent etc.
3. Allow replies/forwards from the hyperlinks in the baloons.
4. Detect and smartly sync the content.
More visions here.

Good luck! and thank you for twin resurrection

B. Best suggestions

By C Perera:

Calling functionality.

Might seem stupid, but If i’ve got my phone on a docking station, I really don’t wanna fiddle with the phone. If there is an incoming call, have a skype like popup with answer, reject, send sms. If answer is clicked, pick up the call, and switch phone to loudspeaker. Perhaps have an option to use computer speakers/mic.

And by Alex:

Somebody tell me please plz, is there any CONTACT GROUP support added in this version?

Let’s see if this stuff gets implemented

Niko Nyman writes about Disney’s decision to close their “promotional” community site:

When you start to think of it, it’s very different to tear down an advertisement billboard, than break down a community. While tearing down a billboard evokes images of two guys in blue overalls doing their job, pasting up the next billboard for the next advertiser, tearing down a community is more akin to images of the Chinese government forcing a city of a million people to relocate to make room for an artificial lake.

Read the whole post. Good thinking there.

This thread of thought is closely related to the problem I have been struggling with for a while: how should experimental community services be piloted by a large and established company, with an immensely valuable brand? Is it socially responsible (and does it make business-sense) to try out experimental community services, if you can’t guarantee that they will last? What if you would have multiple potential solutions: should you just pick one on the community’s behalf, of should you let the free market decide?

Here is the Catch-22. If you boldly promote your community service, and end up bulldozing the community later, your most passionate customers will end up hating you (righteously). On the other hand, if you admit on day #1 that there is a chance you will need to pull the plug later, would you have any chance of building a successful community in the first place?

I wonder.

Thoughts? (I don’t assume there are simple answers…)

As discussed earlier, we have now moved Nokia Text Messenger and Nokia Location Tagger to Beta Labs Archive. This means that you can continue using them, but Nokia is not further developing these as standalone apps, nor fixing any bugs.

The good news is that you can expect to get similar functionality integrated as part of standard Nokia offering in the future. Thanks for your valuable comments!!

Ps. I think we should add Location Tagger to the Graduates list too, as location tagging functionality has been productized and integrated as part of Nokia device offering.

Hello folks!

We’ve decided to try out the idea of a chat session. You asked for it, we think it might be a good idea and here it comes. We have no idea if this will work or not - however we want to try.

The chat session will take place on Friday 28th 30th of May 2:30 to 3:30 pm EEST. Based on an educated guess, we chose to have the chat on IRC. Here is the detailed info for those who are familiar with IRC:

server: irc.freenode.net
channel: #nokiabetalabs

For those who are in the woods with IRC, here is a simple walktrough to join the discussion:

1. Go to http://www.mibbit.com/
2. Select Freenode.net from the server list
3. Write #nokiabetalabs as the channel
4. Pick a nickname for yourself (this has to be unique, so try to come up with something more original than “John”)
5. Click connect.

The channel is currently protected with a password and will be opened at the beginning of the session. At least me and Tommi will be joining from Nokia’s side.

Hope to see you there!

Guest blogger: Martin Ramsin from Nokia Maps team

Nokia Maps 2.0 is now ready to graduate from beta. Since it was announced back in February a lot of work has been done to correct bugs, improve and add new features.

Thanks for all the comments and constructive feedback! We have been reading carefully each and every comment and many of the improvement made to the final Maps 2.0 come from your input, for example:

“Difficult to see what licenses I have purchased” – we added a “My licenses”.
“7 digit Postal Codes does not works in the UK” – works now.
“Difficult to find how to plan a route” – new flat menu structure makes this easier.
“I walk faster than GPS can keep up” – increased the GPS frequency
“Cannot zoom to see route overview in navigation” – added manual zooming
“Show longitude and latitude” – added in Details view
Etc.

The main new feature since the beta is Network based positioning. It will position you really fast, usually within 5 to 10 seconds. It works indoors, on a bus or train.
Network based positioning cannot be used for navigation since it is not accurate enough. However it works just fine for showing where you are (roughly) on the map. A pink circle in the map shows the accuracy of the position. When GPS fix is achieved, this is used instead of the Network based position, and the pink ring disappears.
Network based positioning is now enabled on all A-GPS enabled devices. (E90 users need to install new software update that will be available soon).

In addition to new features and functional improvements, we have expanded the navigable countries with New Zeeland, Venezuela and Chile. You can use Map Loader to get the latest maps.

Maps 2.0 is graduating from beta labs. Check it out on maps.nokia.com!

/The Nokia Maps team