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

Folks, I have some good news, and some bad news.

• Good news: Nokia Beta Labs traffic quadrupled this week. Yay!!
• Bad news: people have started complaining that we at Nokia (especially me) don’t respond to feedback as actively as we used to.

If you wonder why, there’s a really simple explanation: the current Beta Labs feedback and conversation system doesn’t scale too well. In the Linux world, there’s an old saying that “Linus doesn’t scale”, meaning that Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux kernel, can’t deal with everything and everyone in the Linux community. As it happens, I don’t scale either, in the Beta Labs context. We need to figure out something new.

So how should we solve this problem?

In addition to deploying new tools, I can see two alternatives:
- bring the middlemen back (wrong solution, I believe)
- get rid of the last one (gee, this just might work!)

The proposal in pictures:

How does this sound?

Please note that most Nokia development teams have been focusing on their day-job, developing cool stuff for you. Typically they don’t have enough experience or resources for whole-heartedly engaging in public dialogue with the beta user community (= 1% of the most passionate Nokia users). Therefore, even if everybody would love the idea, it will probably take some time before everything works flawlessly. I hope you can bear with us, and accept the fact that Nokia will not reply to most of your comments. But trust me, we are listening.

Quick note for those interested in the Master’s Thesis traineeship post at Beta Labs.

I’ll be tomorrow 13 Feb at IT Recruitment Afternoon, looking for a good candidate, from 12pm to 2pm. Come have a chat!
- Venue: Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki Finland.
- Building: Department of Industrial Engineering and management - lobby (Address: Otaniemenkatu 17). Building is number 37 on this map.
- Stand: number 1.
- I look like this:

The position is not yet open in Nokia Careers website, hope to get it done soon.

Ps. one of our beloved Beta Labs readers sent me an email today, casually mentioning “You’re Indonesian if I’m not mistaken”. Made me wonder whether I look or act like an Indonesian…

I really enjoyed the latest article titled Innovating on the Edge of Big Waves by John Hagel. In the article, Mr.Hagel describes eloquently what business executives can learn from big wave surfers. Thought you might like it too.

To summarize the bottom line:

“So, what can business executives learn from the experiences of these intrepid surfers?

First, if you want to push your performance levels, find the relevant edge. …
Second, attract motivated groups of people to these edges to work together around challenging performance issues. …
Third, recognize that the people who are likely to be attracted to the edge are big risk-takers. …
Fourth, recognize that the edge fosters not just risk-taking, but very different cultures that are also “edgy”. …
Fifth, find ways to appropriate insights from adjacent disciplines and even more remote areas of activity. …
Sixth, bring users and developers of technology closely together at the edge. …
Finally, executives could profit from understanding the loose practice network that evolved around big wave surfing. …”

Read the whole story. Very relevant stuff for us beta folks.

As you might have noticed, our Beta Labs initiative keeps growing fast, and it’s becoming an increasingly important playground for both Nokia and the lead-user community. In total, there are hundreds of Nokia stakeholders and thousands of active beta users involved, but operationally, it has been just a one-man team = yours truly.

Ah… So many opportunities, so little time.

As it happens, we need hire someone to help take this monster, once again, to the next level. We haven’t defined the role clearly yet, but in the early discussions, we quickly came to a conclusion that this would be an excellent growth opportunity for a curious and passionate master’s thesis worker in Helsinki area Finland.

Currently, we’re thinking something like:
- 50% hands-on work: helping me to run Beta Labs
- 50% master’s thesis: figuring out the right ways (and wrong ways) of doing beta trials and co-creation in the web age.

If this works, can’t really think of a better opportunity. In addition, should be a fun ride.

Stay tuned.