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?

Quite a many of you have asked me to show some numbers and trends about Beta Labs. Here you go…

Application portfolio

Most popular applications of 2007: (measured by traffic & downloads)

• Conversation
• Device Status
• Nseries PC Suite 2.0
• Gizmo
• Sports Tracker

Web traffic

• Year 2007 in total: 1 754 079 page views and 545 006 visits.
• December 2007: 460 748 page views and 144 204 visits.

Downloads


EMEA = Europe, Middle-East and Africa; APAC = Asia and Pacific; AMER = Americas

• Year 2007 in total: 319 123 downloads.
• December 2007: 87 022 downloads.

Note: only files that are hosted under www.nokia.com/betalabs website are included in the statistics above. Some of our projects have used different download infrastructure, therefore not included in the statistics.

Feedback
Unfortunately, we don’t have history data about your feedback, as we didn’t start counting it systematically until 5 December. Anyway, the amount of feedback has skyrocketed. So far there have been 867 Beta Labs blog comments, hundreds of application review blog posts linking back to us, and thousands of private feedback items through feedback forms etc. Now, as all of this goes directly to the development teams (everything gets read), increasingly they don’t have time to reply to you. Consequently, some of you have grumbled about us not listening, but that’s not the case. We love you, and we live on your feedback. Not-replying is just the unfortunate cost of cutting out all the middlemen between you and the developers. Hope you understand.

To sum up, 2007 was the year when Nokia Beta Labs was born and got ramped up. There are lots of things that we still need to do, but already now, things look really good. Thanks everybody for your attention and contribution!!

I just had a 2H07 review meeting with my boss, and we were really satisfied. Nokia Beta Labs is rapidly gaining momentum: during the last 6 months, the application portfolio has grown ~200%, web and download statistics ~500%, and the amount of feedback ~1000%. Thanks everybody for your active participation!!

The boss made two questions, however, that I couldn’t answer: how large is our core beta user community? And who, in particular, have been the most valuable contributors?

Identifying this group of elite contributors would be important for several reasons, including:

1. we want to express our gratitude for them
2. we want to listen them even more carefully
3. we want to offer them opportunities to get even more closely involved in Nokia’s device/software/service development processes
4. given the growing amount of Beta Labs feedback, and the limited time of respective Nokia application owners, a time might come when we can’t equally listen to everyone anymore. Spam, irrelevant comments, and overly-lengthy ramblings need be ignored first.

I think we need some kind of karma system.

And I think it should consist of three components:

1. active contribution (e.g. number of feedback submissions or blog comments)
2. high-quality contribution (as judged by the respective application owner in Nokia)
3. trustworthiness (like virginity, you can lose your trustworthiness only once)

I have a dream about a system where the Nokia application owners, after reading your feedback, could rate it with a single click:

• +1: This was a good comment
• -1: This was waste of my time

Consolidating the votes, we could generate a “karma database” of Beta Labs contributors, offer people with different karma levels different opportunities, and decide whom to listen and whom to ignore.

How does this sound? Does it make sense? And does somebody know what would be the easiest way to implement such system?

Note: Nokia Beta Labs blog is currently being moved from http://blogs.s60.com/tommi to here i.e. http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog. We are still in the middle of transition, and the new blog doesn’t work properly yet (for example, RSS is missing and linking doesn’t work properly either way). But don’t worry, we’ll fix this soon.

Please use the old blog until further notice.

Sorry for inconvenience.

Yay! They included us in today’s press release, in addition to being part of Tero Ojanperä’s keynote speech in “The Way We Live Next” event.

I heard your comments were shown live on stage. Let me ask if I could publish some video clips from the event…

Note: this is a LazyWeb question for Nokia people only. Others, please ignore.

We are thinking about adding closed* beta testing opportunity to Nokia Beta Labs, in addition to the current open/public betas. In practice, Beta Labs would offer an easy-to-use beta management tool, and a recruiting channel for an exceptionally insightful user community. In simple cases, if everything goes well, it might not cost you anything extra.

Please send me an email if you are interested.

* = a closed beta is available only to a select few users, and the SW distribution and feedback system happens behind firewalls.

Update: umm… seems that I wasn’t clear enough. This post was intended for Nokia R&D teams, not for Nokia users. Thanks for all volunteers, but currently, Nokia doesn’t do closed beta tests through Beta Labs. I just wanted to change all that. I’ll let you know whether this idea flies or not.

Now, this is going to be a bit ugly… But I’m singing happily “Don’t worry, be crappy”, as Guy Kawasaki famously put it, and doing it anyway. Feel free to hate me - please don’t blame Nokia.

Ladies and gents, let me introduce the new version of Nokia Beta Labs website. Thank you all, once again, for your feedback!

It is still very much incomplete and plainly broken in some parts, and we have dozens (hundreds?) of items to do before it’s ready (layouts, human-understandable permalinks, rss feeds, search, sorting, ratings & feedback system, etc, etc). But we decided to publish it anyway, so that we would have time to iterate it a bit before Tero Ojanperä’s grand demo next week. Nokia.com is going to the dark side of the moon during the Q3 results publishing period, and we couldn’t afford to wait until the site updates would become possible again.

Please help us prioritize our ToDo list, and maybe fill in the gaps: what would be the top-3 most important items that you would want us to implement/fix first?

Ps. Nokia Beta Labs blog will be transferred from blogs.s60.com/tommi to www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog during the next week or so.

We got an interesting comment to the Share Online 3.0 feedback form:

It would be great if you could include a qr-code so we can quickly get the sis file’s url into the phone, instead of having to transfer it to the PC first.

You mean like this?

Instructions: if you have a barcode reader application installed, point it at the barcodes above. With some monitor types, reading the code from the screen is a bit difficult. For me, having a cheap LCD display, it worked like a charm.

Interesting idea, and a nice way to promote 2D barcode usage! What do you think, would this be useful or just annoying clutter?

Folks, I need some help. Our Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanperä would be willing to promote beta culture and Nokia Beta Labs in a big event this month.

Would you want to be a part of his show?

If so, please write below short testimonials: what do you think about Nokia Beta Labs? Why do you like it? Why would you recommend it to your friends or co-workers? What is the greatest thing about it?

Two rules: (1) write authentically as your true self, and (2) keep it short.

I’ll forward the best 10 testimonials directly to Mr.Ojanperä and the people helping him with the slides. No guarantees about will they use these at the presentation. It’s their call.

Of course, you can also write what you hate about beta labs, that’s good input for us too. But for Mr.Ojanperä’s presentation, we need some happy customers