Greetings people! As I promised to Arthur and everyone else interested, I will now present the results of the survey I conducted a while earlier.

Usually such internet surveys attract only a handful responses. You, however, have made me very happy with a total of 650 responses. So, thank you all insanely much for taking part. This really is turning out to be the most significant part of the master of science thesis I am working on. I hope you understand how much this really is appreciated :). Once again, thank you.

The results can be found here as a PDF.

Feel free to comment and to point out further interesting points to study.

The raffle that many of you also participated in will be addressed very soon in another blog post.

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…

We are currently planning a serious upgrade for Beta Labs website, to make it more engaging for the user community (= you), and to increase the quantity and quality of feedback for us (= Nokia). As our initiative keeps growing, there is a lot work to be done in both of these areas.

What do you think we should do next?

• Keeping what works: what do you like about our current approach, what should we keep?
• Abandoning crap: what do you hate, what should we get rid of?
• Bringing in something new: what should we add or improve next?

Here at Beta Labs headquarters, we find two of the most important improvement ideas to be (a) setting up a formal reputation system, and (b) deploying public wishlists = idea collection & prioritization system. Both of these require careful thought. In addition, there are loads of potential community features (wikis, blogs, discussion forums, chat rooms, user ratings & reviews, …) that we could deploy, but we need to choose which ones to really try.

Anyway, the floor is all yours, baby…

Deadline for suggestions: 30 May.

And so it begins… Nokia headhunters asked me to add this advertisement to Beta Labs front page:

Heh. I guess you have proved to be a lucrative group of people for targeted recruiting campaigns. I wish we would have already a formal Beta Labs reputation system in place…

More as this develops.

We just had a cup of coffee with Ykä Huhtala and Jussi Kaasinen, the dynamic duo behind Nokia Sports Tracker. Or actually, it was a latte, as we were humbly celebrating our story being picked up by BusinessWeek in the article How Nokia Users Drive Innovation (good one!!).

This is good. The Sports Tracker success case and BusinessWeek’s blessing gives our user-driven-innovation approach a truckload of credibility, hopefully facilitating the whole Nokia transformation.

Anyway, as the discussion rambled on, Ykä raised a question… Does anybody know who has created this YouTube video?

It’s a nice marketing video about Sprorts Tracker, filmed in Curacao - the beautiful island where I happened to spend my honeymoon two years ago. The Sports Tracker team would like to get a high-quality version of this video for marketing purposes, but strangely enough, nobody seems to know who has created it.

Dear LazyWeb: if you have a clue, please drop us an email.

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?

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.

Two quick notes, my friends:

I’ll be traveling until 30 March, with very limited time for following and participating Beta Labs related online debate (the actual development teams will still be there).

Also, I have some good news. We just hired a brilliant young student to do a Master’s Thesis about Nokia Beta Labs. And we posed him a big and hairy research question: “How should Nokia run beta trials and co-creation in the Internet age?”. Fascinating topic, huh? Anyway, I’ll let him introduce himself properly later on, as soon as he starts the actual work on April. Let’s all help him make a great study!!

Yay! There’s a story about Nokia Beta Labs in the front pages of Digitoday and Taloussanomat (Finnish tech & business magazines).

Thanks Aleksi!! As you wrote such a good piece, you are forgiven for publishing that dorky picture…

Anyway, there was only one thing that I and a couple of other commentators were not fully comfortable with: using the word “geek” in the title. Of course, geeks - using the particular Merriam-Webster definition “an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity” - represent one large and important segment of Beta Labs users. They tend to push the technological limits, and set the highest technological demands for Nokia R&D guys. But they are not the only tip of the lead-user iceberg, as we like to call the user community around Beta Labs. There are several peaks. We hope to attract athletes to shape the sports apps, traveling salesmen to shape the navigation apps, and visually impaired people to shape apps like audiobooks. Or artists. Or race drivers. Or priests. Or war correspondents. People at the edges. People pushing the boundaries.

That’s a great place for certain kind of innovation to happen, I believe.

Time for a question from the audience:

Q: Doesn’t Nokia listen to normal people anymore?
A: Well, yes. Obviously, lead-user innovation à la Nokia Beta Labs is not suitable for everything. Usability studies, for example, are better conducted with more regular folks. And Nokia does.

Here’s a wild (and not-fully-thought-out) idea: would you want to become the video star of Nokia Beta Labs?

The thing is, it would be fun and useful to add explanatory videos to all Beta Labs application pages. Nothing too fancy, just something that would help people decide whether something is worth a try. Of course, we could hire professional scriptwriters and actors and to do the videos, but given the nature of this site, somehow it wouldn’t feel right. An honest word from a fellow user might be better for everyone.

If you are interested:
1. Pick your favorite Beta Labs application
2. Shoot a 1min explanatory (engaging! fun! interesting!) video about it. For example, record a N95 screencast with TV-out.
3. Upload your video somewhere, and send the video link to the comments section of this post
4. Tell your “price”: is fame, exclusive previews, and exclusive access to Nokia development teams enough, or what would you want in return? Of course, you can also tell this later privately. If possible, however, I’d prefer to keep cash out of the relationship, in order to maintain certain level of integrity.

If we get good candidates, let’s vote for the best: 50% user votes + 50% Nokia votes.

Heh.

Below some examples about what other companies have done:
Example 1 by Google product managers
Example 2 by Google and Common Craft
Example 3 by Apple
Example 4 by Nokia product managers
Example 5 by S60 online marketing