Lee Williams and I met Bernard Leong at the Nokia Developer Summit in April where we extended an open invitation to every developer and tech blogger to visit us at any of our offices. At the time, it was pretty much just London and San Francisco but now it includes Beijing and Tokyo. Bernard is from Singapore and took us up on our offer the other week. Here’s his blog post from the visit. 
Symbian Blog: Articles by Anatolie Papas
I have been a fan and marketeer at Symbian for many years and am now working at the Symbian Foundation as a community matchmaker and a sponsor for our online presence. My background is in market communications and specifically comms and media and analyst relations. I love to promote Symbian to non-tech people, and I need your help!
A visit to Symbian Foundation
Aug 4th by Anatolie Papas
Mobile malware “study” not news
Aug 2nd by Anatolie Papas
SMobile Systems issued a press release the other day, with the headline “one in 63 smartphones infected by mobile spyware and malware”. Unfortunately this headline is misleading and has caused a lot of inaccurate reports and hype, namely on Twitter. Normally we wouldn’t bother responding to most mobile malware studies and press releases but we couldn’t help it with this one, it was just too easy to take a part. More importantly, consumers deserve an explanation so they don’t worry about their favourite device. If I could spin like this I’d probably be more a lot more popular. Colleague Craig Heath posted a brief explanation on the Symbian Security Blog. Bill Ray does a good job too.
Disambiguating the brand
Jul 7th by Anatolie Papas
I met some lovely people at the Traveling Geeks party at a London venue Sunday night. I was looking forward to speaking with this Silicon Valley group that I had heard about. Admittedly I had an agenda which was to make sure that they knew what Symbian Foundation was and why it mattered, other than to provide black t-shirts with ducks on them at the event. Read more »
Open Mobile Summit
Jun 10th by Anatolie Papas
Lee Williams will be keynoting at the at the Open Mobile Summit tomorrow during the Open Mobile Ecosystem, Software and Applications session as well as participating on a panel on the future of the OS along side a few industry friends. A few of us will be attending, hope to see you there.
Why is today a special day?
Apr 2nd by Anatolie Papas
A few colleagues and friends have been asking when and if the Symbian Foundation has officially launched. If there’s any confusion here’s my attempt to clarify and shout out YES! We are open for business, officially launched, fully operational, drinking from the new water cooler, receiving membership applications, etc. Added to that, today, with the launch of our new heart logo and icon and our beta website opening up to members for trialling, marks a significant milestone in the launch of the Symbian Foundation so let’s call it ‘Day 1’.
Community involvement is paramount to the evolution of the platform so members of the Symbian community are being invited to feedback on the website. By next week, select Symbian friends will also be invited to trial it. In total we are opening it up to thousands of people before we launch it publicly sometime this quarter (PR talk for very soon).
The website will include a full member developer offering which includes platform release information, council charters, wikis, forums as well as access to the SDK, code repository, tools, documentation, Wiki, bugtracker and forums. Non-developers will probably be more interested in the consumer section of the website.
I won’t say too much about our new HEART as I’ll leave that to our branding head Annabel, but finally I wanted to share our excitement about the continued support from companies and people across the industry through blog posts, tweets, PR and membership applications. On the latter, since the membership programme first opened at MWC in mid-February, 80+ companies have applied for membership and are currently either going through the formal process or have become members. What’s interesting is that 50 of these are first time endorsers. We’re just gathering the data from our CRM system and will soon have an update of company names to share with you on our interim website. In the meantime, you can register for news alerts to keep updated.
Robot Duckie you’re the one
Mar 12th by Anatolie Papas
You make work time lots of fun… After a debut at a recent big mobile conference in Spain, the S
ymbian Robot Duckie or as Ewen Spence calls it, the Evil Robot Duck Overlord, is referenced in more conversations than any other topic in my first official weeks at the Symbian Foundation. I’m Anatolie, heading up market communications at the foundation, and have the privilege of working with many bright people including those who gave birth to the Robot Duck, also known as Disco Duck, as well as all the other hand drawn designs we’ve recently made public such as the Friendly Spaceman, Egg Cup Man, Speedy Mug and Mr Switch. You can view the illustrations on our Flickr site.
Personally I just can’t get enough of her. I’ve tried talking Annabel (our head of brand & design) into making Robot Duckie the new logo and image of the Symbian brand but she’s assured me that a logo is on its way and that Duckie will play a key role in the foundation. She sure will – I’ll be offering her a role on the team.
People have had mixed reactions to the foundation’s new look – the suits aren’t quite sure what to feel but they know it’s different, developers seem to get the madness. Whether you wear a suit or not, I’m willing to bet that you like the Robot Duckie. And if you like her still, you may grow even fonder when you see her in action – see what I mean?
