If you believe in your own talk, a thriving “eco-system” is the place where all the players interact and affect one another in a positive way. If you focus on what you can get out of it and how you can differentiate by keeping products away from others… “you are doing it wrong”! If you focus on how you can contribute to the ecosystem, maybe you have the right mindset because you realised that you can only lead by innovating faster than your competitors.

I hope I will live long enough to see who can walk the talk

Wow, it’s really the end of an era. 11th of Feb 2011 is now the day when Mubarak stepped down and handed over his power to the military of Egypt and the Nokia I know ceases to exists.

What is going to happen in Egypt is unclear whereas the future of Nokia is much more clear unfortunately. What to say that has not been said already everywhere on the web? If you really care about Nokia’s profits and cashflow (in the next few years), then this is perhaps the best choice. If you cared about Nokia like Steve J. cares about Apple, then this is the really a suicide mission (which by the way started years ago, not this year).

In the end, it’s not about the hardware or software, it’s really about a curated experience. Buying a Nokia phone means different things to different people but to me there was always something good about this brand. In the past, Nokia only needed good hardware, a good distribution channel and an after sales organisation to sell its products/experience. Now it’s a different ball game and software is indeed important but a sub-brand of windows does not allow you to control your product as well as your image. Look at the story of SEGA and how they shifted their focus to software only and now the company I grew up with is just a distant memory. As Rovio pointed out, Nokia’s probably beyond saving at this point and it’s very sad.

I hope the web (web apps) will free Nokia like it freed Egypt in 3-4 years time.

After almost a year, I finally decided to buy the N810 and have to say i have a lot of mixed feelings about the device/platform/experience. I know there are already a million posts on this device, but I thought a list of pros and cons will definitely come handy since I am thinking about selling this device already ! Anyway, I’ll keep it short but I’ll try to update this list as much as possible.

My feelings at the moment go from excitement about this ultra-portable and very stylish device to utter fear of having wasted 200£ of my credit-crunched money on a simple digital photo frame. Actually, without any intention to offend anyone working on this platform, the device is such in pity state that nobody even made an application to turn a screensaver on and make the device a very expensive photo frame (you have to use the slideshow of some image viewer to make it so). Why I cannot take a picture and as soon as I’m back home or withing bluetooth range transfer automatically the pictures and have them on a N810 screensaver?

Cons

• Writing with it is quite strange. The keyboard is not as useful as I thought (possibly because of the layout), the word suggestions on the screen become a distraction and there are a lot of missing features that could have been implemented to improve general navigation (look at the example below, the Benq S6, for one example)
• My biggest complain is web navigation because when I try to move the page in any direction I often end up clicking on its links. Also, the resolution makes impossible to click on some links without the stylus and the directional pad is used to move from link to link and not move the page. Why Nokia didn’t use the “opera-mini” approach with some sort of pan-view navigation and read-view for reading and clicking on links is beyond my understanding. Just look at how nice is the the Android browser!!! Here’s the browser in action: [Read more →]

Working Class Blogger: Day In The Life, originally uploaded by armanz.

mmm, there is either something wrong with my Google Reader or the world is suddenly gone really quiet…
Surreal!

Recently, I was reading about the news of the “first specification for Interoperability and Preservation of Metadata in Digital Photography” from vnunet and although it’s great news on the photo-data standardisation process it’s really disappointing to see very few progress on the “data convergence front”.

You see the problem I have is that I have one gadget (my dear Nokia N95) which does all of sorts of things in a mediocre way and other 200,000 million gadgets which do one thing very well…Why do we have to stick with this jack of all trades gadget (acclaimed by many people and me) but master of none? Why do we have a “moving target” and it looks like we’ll never get true convergence? You could argue that I have already an exceptional device because my mobile can take good pictures, play music and show videos but my point is that I will claim to finally have a “converged device” when I won’t need to buy something else with exactly the same functionality.

You can read about “one side of the coin” in this post:

“…convergence is the future, many portable devices can do many things at the same time, but at the end of the day when it comes to take a very good photo, you use your $1000 DSLR camera, when it comes to play a videogame seriously, you use your PlayStation and when it comes to record a video, you use your “serious” videocamera. …”

and this could be true for many years to come considering there is a new generation  which is growing up and is more than happy with “beta-quality” standards. Ok, I’m no saint and my generation was more than happy with VHS-quality videos but good quality products are now becoming a premium especially when in the blogosphere people are shouting to give everything away for free!!! Anyway, I don’t think this is the way it should be at all and Metadata Working Group is a fine example at how big companies can get together if they recognise the disadvantages of  walled gardens… Would defining a standard to move and process my data between devices reduce the barrier to convergence? Perhaps, here’s few examples:

• Renting Market. At the moment, there isn’t a gadget renting market because there isn’t a clear way to shift the data from place to place… Imagine if during a concert you can use the best camera on the market to take pictures and transfer all the data to your phone at the end of the event. Imagine that you don’t have to carry with you a 5kg bag all day just to take high quality pictures and don’t have to settle for mobile-quality pictures…well, data mobility could help that. [Read more →]

As time goes by, my memory is getting worse and worse, my schedule is getting  busier and busier and being mobile has become an important requirement to be cost effective as well as time efficient… so I had to find a good strategy to cope with my daily life and this post summarise my activities as well as the tools I normally use.

SW or HW required

• Microsoft Outlook
• Nokia mobile, PC Suite and (optional) Handy Calendar
• Gmail Account + Google Calendar Sync

Calendar

The calendar is to me what the memory is to any normal individual… well, that’s possibly an overstatement nonetheless it’s unbelievable how much I am dependant on my outlook calendar. I use it to save flight tickets, hotel reservations, planned holidays, bank-holiday, train timetables, milestones in my study plans, end of any interest free balance transfer periods and of course appointments as well as anniversary… basically anything that has a time, a booking reference and/or a location is on my calendar… Everything is then synchronised with my mobile and my Gmail account using PC suite and Google Calendar Sync respectively.

My tips (i.e. what works for me ):

• Colour labels. Very effective when I look at monthly view in my outlook calendar
• I tend to paste all relevant emails in the description field of the appointment “form” and use Handy Calendar on my mobile to best view any appointments’ details.
• I always put my reference numbers in plain view (the location field is often the best location for reference numbers)
• Use my local time (UK) in all appointments because they will change when I change the time-zone. E.g., on a flight entry, if the arrival time is on a different time-zone, I set the end time in the calendar appointment as UK local arrival time not the destination local time.
• Hotels bookings, locations I need to be and days spent on holiday are always all-day events, everything else has a start and an end time
• I use Google Calendar Sync as well as my Gmail accounts to share my schedule with my girlfriend.
• I tend to avoid the use of Tasks as much as possible to reduce the admin I have to do unless there is something I want to be constantly reminded once the deadline is passed.

Emails

When I started working few years ago, I never imagined I would end up being constantly overwhelmed by tens (sometimes hundreds) of emails, so I came up with the following personal toolbar to manage all my emails (btw, the following strategy is also similar to the GTD method)

For each email I receive, I apply the following flags if necessary:

• Red Flag: Important emails which I need “to action” by the end of the day. Usually no more than 4-5 emails should be marked with this flag
• Blue Flag: Emails which need a response usually within 1 or 2 weeks. No limit to the number of emails that can be flagged, but the more emails I flag the more difficult it becomes to review all of them at the end of the week.
• Green Flag: Important emails, no action needed but I flag them anyway to find them amongst hundreds of emails.

Furthermore, if an email requires a specific action or is due by a specific time I add a reminder as shown in the picture below.

Together with the toolbar, I also use a “Search Folder”, to manage and find my emails.

Steps required to create the Toolbar and Search Folders

Toolbar:

• Click on “Customize…” from the “Tools” menu.
• Click on “Toolbars” tab
• Click on “New…” button and give a name to the toolbar (default should be Custom 1)

[Read more →]

I decided to try the Out of Bounce effect and found a very nice picture from a trip I did to Paris in 2005 (one of the first pictures I uploaded to Flickr actually) and this is the result…

Picture in Flickr

It’s really easy to do. You can find a very nice tutorial here (www.logicscape.com/oob_tutorials/)

I’m sure some of you all read the NY Times article (In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop) but I wanted to add my two cents and that is… not only bloggers are the one affected by the "24/7 disorder"!!! It’s “every content producer” who ends up in some sort of system which is 24/7 and in a social-network everyone is a content producer! Internet addiction is almost an official mental illness now but the active participation in the tens of social services we have today (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…) makes Internet even more addictive and makes anyone who’s “exposed” more at risk to this "disorder"

I think the whole experience is very addictive because is basically a positive feedback loop (very engineering view, I know ) and you can potentially end up in an "unstable" mental and physical state so watch out . You know how "greed and fear" drive the economies around the world? Well, I’ve been trying to understand what are the factors that influence the social interaction and basically I think it’s all down to "narcissism and control (of your data)". Each one of them affects each other and both can drive you nuts!

Personally, [Read more →]

Recently I started playing with a small heart anti-stress toy and I found it quite nice. The only downside is that I don’t want to carry this toy with me all the time so I leave it at home most of the time. However, there’s one thing I carry with me all day long (in my hand actually) and quite incidentally :-) it also needs some sort of protection: my N95. So I started looking for a bag/protector for my mobile phone that is also an anti-stress toy…well, there isn’t one ! There are all sorts of cases, holders, bags, protectors (as shown at the end of the document)… everything you can wish for except mobile anti-stress bags for my mobile phone!!! How’s that possible? Arghh…

-Reda

 Following images are from http://www.ishoppe.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=n95

I’m sick as hell (I’ve got chicken pox or chicken porx since I’m a little overweight these days) and got time kill in bed. So I started spending more time in my latest hobby: photography. It’s strange how I used to take pictures just because of my photo obsessive-compulsive disorder and never realised I really like photography;  that is. the urge was primarily to remember the moment than to enjoy the picture – I blame Kodak  because it used to say remember to remember
Now, slowly, thanks to Internet, my N95 and in particular Flickr and its community, I’m looking at my pictures in a “different light”…

So, considering I had a huge selection of pictures and I could not go anywhere I started to look at my past pictures and started playing with them using Photoshop… Few things I learned so far:

1. You can take beatiful pictures even with a N95
2. You’ve got lower chances of taking nice pictures with the N95 so you should take as many as you can unless you want to take a proper camera with you. Thanks to Nokia (in a sarcastic way though) and the extremely high compression of its photographs (notice the high variation in size), you can take a lot of pictures before you fill your memory card…
3. Black and white conversion seems not give the best result with N95 pictures. There is always a lot of noise in the pictures and the image does not look crisp and clear as it should (compared for example to a 5 years digital camera)

Some examples:

N95 – day example. OK

[Read more →]