Nokia Developer Web Talks

Well, it is really not live, because the event was in July 25th...

I would say this is US centric disucssion. Still it is quite interesting, if you have not had a chance to fly over for the event. I have also noticed Mr. David Rivas, VP of Technology Management of S60 is also in the video. In normal blog platform, I can acutally embed the video here so you can just sit and back relax. But, since we are special... I have to give you the link only. So, if you have 2 hours to spare... check it out.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/25/mobile-web-wars-live-stream/

There is another post from techcruch that has segments of the stream about Android. If you don't have 2 hours, still you can get an idea of the event.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/02/mobile-web-wars-videos-does-anybody-care-about-android/

Cheers!

Updated 13.08.08

I have changed this Blog title to"Mobile Killer Applicaiton Found..." All phones should have one and they will, and it should be the application that runs the most! Agree? What is better then an application is created for one purpose, and one purpose only...? What is that? To make money!!! It tells you straight in the face, give me your cash...!

Recently, there are a lot of chattering on the web about application download, or buying application online. Analysts are starting to track numbers and write articles about it. I suppose the market is now interesting enough for the talks.

I don't remember when the Nokia Download! app have been introduced, but it has been a long time... May be a couple of years by now I think. We now have the Nokia Download Client & Nokia Download! for PC in BETA lab . And if you take a look at Nokia N-Gage & Nokia Music, these are also mobile "stores"

Even before that, buying applications/games from your phones has not been something new. Most operators have a WAP or WEB site with their own "approved" applications. Interestingly, just recently I have read this blog post, "So, you want to deploy a J2ME app in the US?", by Ofir Leitner. It is a very good summary of the situation.

Here is another news about T-Mobile's Big Idea: An iPhone-Like App Store For Every Phone .

So, perhaps inspired by the early success of Apple's iPhone App Store, it's reportedly making a smart decision: Opening up its phones to more mobile software, and making it easier to download apps.

I think the article is refering to T-Mobile US, but it doesn't make it clear. I am sure all other operators are thinking hard on how to improve their own stores and keep their customers also.

And today, we have iPhone software sales article from WJS.

Super Monkeyball game 300,000 copies @ $9.99 ~= 3 million dollars business in 20 days.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121842341491928977.html

Summary of other numbers from techcrunch.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/iphone-apps-one-month-and-60-million-downloads-later-but-not-one-of-them-is-a-killer-app/

Update 13.08.08

Another company has talked about it sales figures:

	WhereTo	TipCalculator
URL	AppStore	AppStore
Price	$2.99	$0.99
Number Sold	24,094	3,168
Gross Sales	$72,041.06	$3,136.32
Net Sales (after AppStore cut)	$50,597.40	$2,217.60
Total Gross		$75,177.38
Total Net		$52,81

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/13/appstore-developer-taptaptap-publishes-sales-figures/

Store experience will be a good battle coming. Application stores will need to be fun to use just like any other applications. They also needs to help consumers to discovery/search new, popular, high-rating, applications, Track purchased and updated applications. 

One thing for sure, the game has started all over again, and this time expectation is high. Old wireless business folks will have to throw away old ideas and restrictions to complete with the new comers. Overall, for the consumers, this is a good thing.

Cheers!

This is a company blog site, so I shouldn't comment on any products, don't matter if they are from our partners or competitors. So, I link an email with Mr. Gates' own comments. If you have 5 mins, this will probably make your day a bit brighter. And when I get to part "So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it.", all my stress for the day is gone! Thank you!

 Hope it does the same for you too.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

It's Not Rocket Science, But It's Our Work

Very interesting post about Twitter's recent outages, its architecture and what's being done to improve scalability of the application.

I have heard an expression "Do no evil". That is good, but to me there is something better... How about a motto that says "Do some good"? Yes, I work for Nokia, so you should have some reservations whatever you read following. I hope this doesn't sound like a PR entry. I just want to put on a human face and look at the issues.

Donations for rebuild and food are very important in disasters of course. Yet in this mobile age, there is one more item that can really make a difference, connecting people. There is an image I have seen from NPR and I have posted it here. One can tell from the image how desperate and important for people to have connections to their families and friends.  When some thing turmeric happens, such as an earthquake, fire, or cyclone, the first instinct for victims is to find their families and friends. The needs for food and shelter are likely to come a little latter. A few words from familiar voices can lift the spirit and make us strong to face the toughest situations. At least to me, that would have been my priority.

I truly believe the mobile industry is a very unique technology industry. For what we do are very personal and human. Sometimes, the impacts are more then we can ever imagine... And some times, the human sides are not something we can designed and architected, they come naturally...

Highlights from Nokia press releases.

Nokia donated 5,000 phones with prepaid SIM cards in partnership with Sichuan Mobile.
In addition, Nokia sent its Care Vans into the affected regions to supply power and telecommunications to survivors and rescue teams, as well as transport a 25-strong medical team.

http://pressbulletinboard.nokia.com/tag/earthquake/
http://pressbulletinboard.nokia.com/tag/myanmar/

W.Seto 

I have come across this video in some blogs and on youtube (well, what is not on youtube anyway). Enjoy... 

I regularly enjoy watching video podcasts on my N82, usually while on my train commute to and from work. Mostly I download them with the Nokia Podcasting application, or sometimes with another computer when there's no WiFi around then copy the videos to my N82 with the USB cable.

Here is a roundup of the video podcasts that I watch including the RSS Feeds that you use to subscribe and download the shows,

DL.tv: Video podcast about things in your Digital Life, for Tech fans, by Tech fans. Hosted by Robert Heron. Robert is very knowledgable about the various High Definition technologies ranging from HDTVs, to Bluray, and often discusses HD on the show.
RSS Feed: http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/ziffdavis/dltvipodpspvideo

DiggNation: Weekly show discussing some of the top stories from social news website Digg.com. Hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/diggnation/feed/quicktime-small/

Tekzilla: Weekly show answering your tech questions and helping find solutions to with your problems. Hosted by Patrick Norton and new co-host Veronica Belmont
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/tekzilla/feed/quicktime-small/

The Totally Rad Show: Three friends discussing the latest in movies, video games, and occasionally TV or Comics. Hosted by Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/trs/feed/quicktime-small/

The Digg Reel: Weekly show covering some of the most popular videos from Digg.com
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/diggreel/feed/quicktime-small/

Smartphones Show: Video podcast covering the latest Smartphones and the Smartphone industry. Hosted by Steve Litchfield
RSS Feed: http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/sshow/sshow.rss

RocketBoom: Daily Video show covering a wide range of topics with a comedic presentation. Hosted by Joanne Colan
RSS Feed: http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/tele_daily_enclosures.xml

Cranky Geeks: Weekly show covering the tech industry from a cranky perspective. Hosted by John C. Dvorak
RSS Feed: http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/audioblogs/crankygeeks/cg.ipod.xml

Driving with The Guru: Come hitch a ride with the Symbian Guru as he discusses the latest Symbian and S60 news and devices.
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/symbianguru/drivingwiththeguru

These video podcasts can be played on the Nokia N95 8GB, N82, N95, N93, or N93i.

If this isn't enough videos to keep you entertained for hours, Revision3 hosts a few other video podcasts. Also DL.tv and Cranky Geeks have recently started to be made available for download in 3GP format, (15 FPS, 320x240 resolution videos) that can be played on a wider range of mobile devices, such as the N81 8GB.

Do you have other video podcasts that you enjoy watching that I missed? If so leave a comment so I can check them out! If I like the show I might add it to the above list.

Following the last post I had... Today I have tried the new Google Reader on my N810.

 

I rest my case. I just hope Goolge will not do some "clever" thing to detect my http headers and redirect my N810 to the regular site later..

I have seen discussions about "one web". Meaning no one wants to see optimized web pages for mobile anymore. Some even would say it is waste of time to optimized pages, because mobile devices are now powerful (or getting more powerful) to render the full web. I think it is true in many ways...

But then I see this kind of news keep coming...

Brand new Google Reader for iPhone

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/05/brand-new-google-reader-for-iphone.html

I have tried it and it is really good experience. What is the motivation to optimized for 1 device? Obviously, some resources (engineering time) have to be spent to maintain and  develop this single device version. In that effect, resources are taken out from the "standard" version, I suppose.

I would like to hear your thoughts... Please! 

I was in Web 2.0 Expo for 3 days, working... The expo was held in Moscone West, San Francisco.  I didn't have time to walk around until the last day of the conference and took some snap shots while I was walking around. The usual conference suspects were there, IBM, Google, Micoroft, Nokia, Oracle, Sun, Yahoo and etc (sorry if I didn't name your compies here). I would say the expo was developer focus. Companies showed of thier platforms, APIs, out-source services. Though some of the hip/hot compaies like Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter were no were to be found. I was hoping to see them there... Then for small startups, they probably didn't think sharing their secrets/products in such expo/conference would help thier business, because the conference was not for consumers.

Plus, isn't Silicon Valley itself already a big Web 2.0 expo?  Whlie many of them already live in the "expo" everyday, why relive it again? Just a thought...

Nokia this time around had shown off its Internet Tablet, Map 2.0 service, Ovi share, Mobile Search, N-Gage, Web Run-time, Widsets... The main theme was "Share more. Experience more." Well, as you can see from the booth picture below.

If you want to look at some of the prestnations, follow this link to Slideshare.net

Pictures from tagged with Web2Expo08 @ flickr are here. Pictures of Fake Steve Jobs, Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Tim O'Reilly, Marc Andreessen etc...

Oh, and here is another article on Fake Steve Jobs, here... 

Reported by the Symbian-freak.com Plusmo announced widgets for S60 devices, here. 

If you want more details, why don't you do a search yourself.

Probably many of you have heard by now about Flickr adding support for video uploads, here are my thoughts on the new feature. First off some interesting facts, Flickr chose to put some restrictions on the Video uploads to begin with:
- Max filesize upload 150 MB
- Max length of video 90 seconds
- Only Pro accounts can upload videos

I have a Flickr Pro account that I use to upload many of my photos, I feel like videos are a welcome addition as long as it does not disturb the photo sharing part of Flickr. In general I'm not sure what I think about Flickr adding video support we'll see how it works as time goes on, but I did find the restrictions they imposed an interesting approach to video sharing. The restrictions certainly encourage video editing to make sure the videos are no longer than 90 seconds and to keep the interesting part of the video quickly accessible for the viewer, it saves on bandwidth costs for Flickr streaming all of those videos, it saves on storage costs for Flickr having to save all of the uploaded videos, also it definitely cuts down on the likelihood of members uploading TV shows and/or movies that they do not have permission to upload.

I think it's understandable for them to limit it to Pro accounts for 2 reasons:
1. It is a new feature and they have a huge user base. Generally rolling out new features can cause problems to the existing system, so limiting it to the Pro users first in a Beta phase for the paying members makes sense. Whether they will open up video uploading to Free users in the future or not I don't know.
2. Looking at the monetary side of things, Flickr might keep the video feature Pro only and thus use the new Video feature as a way of encouraging new Pro Account purchases.

Check Flickr's Blog for more details on the new video support http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/04/09/video-on-flickr-2/

There is a recent trend towards live streaming video from mobile devices on the internet. Qik and Flixwagon are 2 of the companies that are providing S60 applications and storage on their website. With either of them you can start recording video with your Nokia S60 device that is then uploaded and streamed live to their website.

Matthew has posted an entry over on Darla Mack's Blog that compares the audio and video from a recent event he attended. While at a musical play he used 2 Nokia devices, one live streamed with Qik and the other with Flixwagon.

Another big event was Live streamed this weekend. The Symbian-Guru decided to use a couple N82s to Live stream his Wedding on Flixwagon. Now that is an excellent way to share the marriage live with others that couldn't attend! =)

What do you think of this recent popularity of live streaming video with your S60 mobile device? Have you tried Qik or Flixwagon? If so what one do you prefer and why?

If you haven't tried either yet but are curious why not head over to one of their sites and sign-up? They are free to use, the only thing you would have to pay for is your Packet Data usage while streaming over the cellular network. Therefore if you are using one of these services, WiFi is the preferable upload method unless you have an unlimited Data plan from your cellular provider.

http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2008/03/objective-c-library-brings-google-data.html

Dear Google, would you make Symbian C++ libraries too... :p

 

 

Yesterday, Forum Nokia Americas hosted a Web Runtime code camp. I was there the whole day and had wonderful discssions with developers. It was a good time but my legs hurted after standing the whole day.

More details and picutres about the code camp can be found at the wiki page here:
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/FNA_CodeCamp_WRT