Quote from an interesting interview in the FT.com where Jorma Ollila says he has seen at least five crises in his three decades at Nokia:

Mr Ollila says that the industry is more competitive but says that Nokia’s track record of overcoming problems in the past would be key to the future. He points to a Lex column from the Financial Times in 1995, which he has kept, that declared Nokia to be at an end.

“This is about making sure you can build in a comeback, or a recovery, after a miss. The strong ones are separated from the weak ones in how they work through these cycles and demonstrate that they can come back.”

Good read and I hope he’s right. Someone else might argue that the best way to thrive is to be like great boxers: agile and able to absorb blows. Nokia might becoming agile now but with declining revenues from Symbian, how do you keep on going until necessary?
Business metaphors aside, let’s see how far €4.9 billion of net cash can take you in this turnaround.

Recently I came across a video of neuroscientist Susan Greenfield that explores just how crucial stories are to our experience of being human. It’s a 41 minutes long video (lots of food for thought) and a similar but shorter version can be found on the BBC website (Susan Greenfield – is the web changing our brains?). The points made in the second video were actually ridiculed in the comments but I personally think that some might be valid issues. The main point was that the sensory “here and now experience” the web is offering might be preventing us from seeing the world in a much deeper or more extensive way.

We definitively process more data, the question is are we more “intelligent”? Actually, my doubts are more about the effects on our  empowerment than our ability to think.

Is it possible that the multimedia experience we have now is so good and overwhelming that it can become an end in itself and not a way of understanding something? Are we really able to develop a critical consciousness if we are continuously overwhelmed by kittens inspired videos from YouTube? “The ancient Greeks first identified the essence of critical consciousness when philosophers encouraged their students to develop an “impulse and willingness to stand back from humanity and nature… [and] to make them objects of thought and criticism, and to search for their meaning and significance”". We have numerous examples of great achievements (e.g. women emancipation) and I believe they started from people’s ability to understand the world in which they lived, their social status and the dynamics of their oppressed condition. I cannot argue that nowadays we have more information but strangely we also need more and more self-help books and catchphrases to understand the meaning of life and how to live.

An example is the recent abuse of the catchphrase “find/follow your passion”. I guess we are able to give a meaning to our life when we get a sense of purpose. However, is fulfilling your purpose merely following your passions? Martin Luther King, Jr. surely said “I have a dream” but I don’t think he meant he wanted to follow his passions with that speech.

I don’t know if this unprecedented change will affect my deep thinking or empowerment but in every way that matters, I am the sum of my memories and I can certainly say that the constant interruption does have an effect on my attention and memory. Actually, I believe it is also affecting my ability to finish reading books, and apparently I am not the only one.

I finally had a minute to think about this but let me write this down before I forget it.

- Reda

Update: I kind friend recommended the following book: “The Shallows”

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 (e.g. the Benq S6)
• 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!!! [Read more →]

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 disappointing to see very few progress on the “data convergence front”.

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 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. 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 →]

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”

The whole experience is very addictive because is basically a positive feedback loop (very engineering view, I know ) and you could seriously end up in an “unstable” mental and physical state. “Greed and fear” drive the economies around the world and I’ve been trying to understand what are the factors that influence the social interaction. 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?

-Reda

I started investing more time in my latest hobby: photography. I used to take tons of pictures because of my urge to remember the moment (I blame Kodak and its slogan remember to remember ) and now I’m really glad I have a huge collection. It’s easy to create something beautiful when you have so much material.

So I started to look at my pictures and tried few things with Photoshop… Few things I learned so far:

1. You can take amazing pictures with just a Nokia N95
2. Take as many as you can because they are not all great (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 →]