Symbian Blog: Articles by Haydn

I work as a consultant in open management initiatives like Symbian. Here I helped put together the ideas.symbian.org site; and I’ve worked on the design, content creation and editing of the blog. I have also been involved in some of the thought leadership development. I also develop thought leadership for nGenera Insights.

Location as a Business and a Mindset

Apr 12th by Haydn

There may be some people who remember DRIVE, AIM and DELTA – three telematics research programmes the EU ran up to the early 1990s. Telematics was always seen as the application arm of advanced communications research but somewhere along the way, the twin conceptual spaces of telematics and mobile applications drifted apart. Good to see then that telematics and mobile are beginning to converge again. The convergence goes a step further in the business of location, and to mark that a new conference at the end of April will focus on location as a business opportunity.

The conference, at the Akora Hotel in Amsterdam, has all the big names attending and speaking – Microsoft, Yelp, Nokia, Yahoo, Ogilvy and of course many more including Skyhook Wireless and Cloudmade. I think we’ll see location and place branding come together in a precipitous rush to be the hub for location-based business. That’s going to signal a gold rush in new telematics and travel software and apps, but more so will be a competitive boon to place branding. Read more »

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How Ads Are Shaping Up

Mar 31st by Haydn

I think of mobile advertising in an obviously simplistic way: it will be more contextual, more geared to real-time purchasing opportunities, and will have much higher click through because of its relevance.  Am I in touch with the mobile marketing zeitgeist?

Like many people interested in how apps and content will be funded I’ve watched the data from Ad Mobs and Smaato and wondered, what do the stats they really mean? Earlier today I got a chance to talk with Harald Neidhardt, co founder and CMO at Smaato, and a fascinating conversation it was too.

Is there an area of business less well understood than mobile ads? I say this in large part because it seems obvious that mobile ads are a growing opportunity and contextual advertising is a kind of nirvana. But according to Harald Neidhardt and Smaato most online publishers have very weak inventory sales, despite the power of Ad Mobs and Quattro, backed respectively by Google and Apple. The average of inventory sold globally… 29%. Read more »

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Wrapping the App

Mar 11th by Haydn

The business world has apps fever, if some recent conversations are any indication. At Mobile World Congress of course the GSMA announced the Wholesale Apps Community to push the apps market to 3 billion customers. And conversations with vendors like Good Technology suggest huge enterprise demand for secure apps. “For the first time ever I’ve had CIOs contacting me,” one enterprise vendor told me recently. Sobering then to talk with Jens Lauritzon over at Accumulate. Some of the biggest hurdles to consumer uptake of content comes down to simple market factors like trust and resources. Refreshing to hear those old fashioned economic terms – in some regions 90% of games transactions, for example, fail because the customer has no money to pay for them. Read more »

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Welcome to the new blog

Feb 22nd by Haydn

The new blog design has been up and running for a week so I thought I’d pen a quick note about it. We decided to redesign the blog some months back. The main reason was the lack of content visibility on the old blog. Once an author had written a piece it could disappear from the home page within a week and never be seen again. That was proving to be a barrier to people contributing and readers too had reason to complain. We have over 350 posts and unless you were prepared to search extensively or browse through older pages you would finding content of relevance was a challenge

In addition there weren’t many opportunities to get to know the bloggers. And our video coverage of events needed a little more exposure, so we could actually build more visual treatment into our communications here. So what does the new blog do? Read more »

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Ideas at MWC

Feb 19th by Haydn

My name is Krzysztof Kucharewicz. I’m a Symbian developer, and I take an active part in the Symbian community. I’m watching with curiosity the changes that Symbian has made recently, and I’m trying to be the part of that movement as well. Why do we need Symbian Ideas?

I spent the Tuesday morning this week volunteering in the ideas.symbian.org lounge at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The place, full of soft pouffes, maintained in yellow-white-black design, and also decorated with huge bath-ducks (that’s a Symbian’s mascot these days) attracted many business people, who either wanted to rest for a while with a tasty-yet-free coffee (the bartender didn’t share recipes, so no open-source here, Symbian ;-) ), have a little chat in this quieter place, or just use the free WiFi access.

Having an opportunity to talk to some of them I tried to inquire for ideas they could share with Symbian to improve future devices and our experience with more and more capable smartphones. That’s no surprise that among people who visited the lounge many used Symbian (and in particular Nokia) phones for a while, but abandoned them for the sake of BlackBerries or iPhones. The very common words repeated in these talks were that these competitors bring speed, simplicity of the software (watch the huge scrolling menus) and intuitiveness (shall I mention kinetic scrolling yet?). We’ve heard it before but they wanted to converse and share their view.

There were of course some hardcore Symbian users or partners, who had very precise ideas what they need from the platform, and knowing where it’s going they just wanted to take advantage of the new business opportunity. Read more »

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BBC on mobile education

Feb 17th by Haydn

One of the unsung heroes of the mobile lifehack, education. The BBC announced today that users in Bangladesh have accessed over a million lessons from its Janala service. Janala “is promising to transform the way people learn language through m-technology in the developing world.” A big claim, it should also draw our attention to the role of mobile in improving lifestyles. Here specifically in helping people into the global economy by teaching them English. Whether English remains  ticket to global access remains to be seen but Janala is probably, more importantly, a demonstration of the scale that education programmes can assume if delivered by mobile. The way the system works is a model of simplicity. Read more »

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Skype on Symbian

Feb 16th by Haydn

If you spend any amount of time roaming or if you habitually use your mobile for most phone calls the announcement that Skype is now rolling out for Symbian is really good news. Available at launch  for Nokia phones, Skype will become available on other Symbian powered models soon. The king of Internet telephony on the dominant smartphone platform! What does it add up to? Read more »

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Symbian in Open Screen

Feb 15th by Haydn

Symbian has joined the Adobe-led Open Screen Project, the industry initiative to bring Flash to mobile screens. Or to put it more precisely: to enable the delivery of rich multiscreen experiences built on a consistent runtime environment for open web browsing and standalone applications.

The Flash platform has a community of more than one million developers and delivers over 80% of web video, and of course Adobe have a great track record of providing excellent cross-platform authoring tools. What I find particularly exciting about the Open Screen project is that it is not just about the mobile web but about creating a seamless experience across all anticipated devices including desktop, mobile and consumer electronics and the potential for innovation in content. The Open Screen Fund…. Read more »

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Vivaz Pro

Feb 14th by Haydn

Sony Ericsson launched the Vivaz Pro this evening at Mobile World Congress, one of the first big launches of this year’s event. The phone, due to go on sale later this year (Q2 seems likely), packs the same 8.1 Megapixel camera and HD video recording as the Vivaz, announced in January. Naturally it is powered by Symbian. The Pro version comes with a Qwerty keyboard. But that’s not all that marks it out as a great device.

One image doesn’t do it justice. Go to the Sony Ericsson MWC blog for a little bit of detail but come with me through some of the past information releases, recent blog posts and videos for a lot more. Read more »

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Creating the unwired world

Feb 11th by Haydn

From Andy Braun at the CTO office, Sony Ericsson: Russ McGuire, VP Strategy at Sprint Nextel says “Just as microprocessors have been built into virtually every product that has a power source, over the next ten years, it will become expected that wireless connectivity will be built into virtually every product that has a microprocessor.”  His opinions are echoed by service providers and CE manufactures across industries.

This undeniable trend makes the news that Symbian is now completely open, incredibly exciting. Open democratizes innovation opportunities. Closed operating systems allowed those of us in the phone business to make great phones with more and more features. Closed operating systems provided a level of security and stability that was vital for a growing industry. We can and will continue to create the next generation of communication devices and some truly innovative products. But there is also a different kind of innovation needed. Read more »

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