There are some great opportunities for getting more involved in this part of the platform.  For example, there is still more work needed to fully enable multimedia on QEMU/Syborg – see both the multimedia forum and the wiki.

One obvious question is why these codecs are only available as binaries.  Currently, non-free codecs form a significant part of the multimedia world, and so enabling the platform to work with the broadest variety of use-cases for now means binaries.  Aricent are contributing source for the codec wrappers – these will be available once the issue about where such components sit in the system model is resolved, and will help to greatly simplify end-to-end testing and integration.

Of course, if anyone is interested in contributing EPL versions of the open codecs (or is already working on this), then we would be very interested in hearing about it!

Symbian’s councils play a critical role, representing the community and guiding the future direction of the Symbian platform. We are looking for active and engaged individuals who are keen to make a difference and help to write the next chapter in the Symbian story. All member companies are invited to nominate employees (or contractors) wherever you think that you can make a difference – be it in the areas of roadmaps, UI, architecture or releases (or all of them).

Any member company can nominate candidates for council seats. If you want to nominate representatives from your company, the process is simple:

• go on line to read through the details and download the nomination form
• fill in the nomination form, making the case for your candidates
• email the nomination form back to us at councilelections@symbian.org and we’ll do the rest

Valid nominations will be published to the candidate lists on the Symbian website as a service to voters. How will you make your pitch stand out from the crowd?

The schedule for the elections is as follows:

• Nominations close at 12:00 UK time on Friday 26 March
• Voting commences on Monday 29 March
• Voting concludes on Wednesday 7 April
• Results announced on Thursday 8 April

Once the nominations are in all member companies will be invited to vote. More on that later. For now we invite you to read through the details and get your nominations in.

Ian Hutton is a member of the Technology Management team at the Symbian Foundation. He chairs the Feature and Roadmap Council and publishes the roadmap for the Symbian platform.

“While there are more opportunities than ever for you to unleash your creativity and develop mobile apps, there is a complex landscape of devices, operating systems and app stores to navigate. We’d like to explain why you should spend time, money and effort on developing a Symbian app..”

And so starts the latest engagement campaign under the heading ‘yourapp‘. But why have we done this?

There are a sea of development studios, independent developers and startups out there who have already built successful applications on platforms such as iPhone or Android and are wondering what the next step is for their app. We believe it’s Symbian.

For some of the less technical people out there, such as those in the marketing or biz dev, delving into our developer site for clues can be a daunting task at first, so the logical choice was to create a document that explained the vast array of benefits that Symbian can offer.

As the yourapp page demonstrates, some of the world’s premier application developers have already made the decision to port their app across and have been kind enough to share quotes to demonstrate the benefits each of them has gained from doing so, plus videos of their apps on Symbian as demonstrated below.

Mobileway’s Gravity Twitter & Foursquare client:

Fring:

Spotify on Symbian:

Nimbuzz:

For any of you attending SXSW Festival that would like to meet and discuss the possibilities of porting your app, please feel free to mail me at joen at symbian dot org or send me a tweet to @Joe. For those of you who aren’t there, feel free to have a look at the yourapp site here.

Thanks,

Joe

In the first 48 hours of being published the application has been downloaded almost 1500 times from all over the world including 116 in India, and downloads in unexpected countries like Tajikistan and Azerbaijan.

This is a great achievement and really shows why the Horizon publishing program is so worthwhile. We have not only made the guys at Mobbler happy but we now have a fantastic Last.fm player for Symbian which we can shout about in the same way Apple do about their third party applications. But even better, this one was created through the collaboration of our community.

The work does not stop here though and we hope to be able to provide a route to market for Mobbler in China through our relationship with China Mobile.

On top of an inhibited transaction process (and the accompanying low ARPU),of those people who try a pre-installed game (80% of users will give it a go) only 5% buy.

Finally distribution has tended to be monolithic, pre-iPhone’s App store. Now distribution is broadening but there is still a lock that the games producer can’t unpick. To access the market he or she is dependent on the established distribution channels – the operator, Handango, Getjar, or other apps stores.

Jens claims to have the answer to all these problems with the Flexion App wrapper that allows people to download games for trial (so the low credit customer completes on the download if not on the transaction). The wrapper can also take a customer to the games developers’ own website and shop, not just to an apps store.

Whether you buy into the Accumulate approach or not the argument that a more naturally open market for producers is desirable is surely a given. The 50% operator haircut or the 30% Apps store haircut were fine but where else is it mandatory?

The event was sponsored by Sasken, which enabled us to have the Stammtisch meeting in a very nice restaurant called Vltava. Olli-Pekka Saksa from Sasken gave an overview of the kind of services they have for Symbian based device vendors. After that, Jani Turpeinen outlined Social Mobile Framework project Sasken is developing openly for Symbian Foundation.

The event was quite a success! Firstly, I was surprised that we had “full house”.  We where expecting to have 20 people but more than 30 people showed up. Secondly, I was surprised that we had people from outside the Helsinki area. There were people from Tampere and even from Estonia! The third surprise was the discussions. It was GREAT to hear feedback and comments from people not working for Symbian Foundation or Nokia. I really enjoyed the discussion during the evening.

The mix of the participants was also very good. We had people from Saxken, Fambit, Ruuler, Teleca, Ixonos, Electrobit, Bitbar, MyStrand, Viztreand, Helsinki University of Technology and other companies in addition to Nokia and Symbian Foundation. We had software developers, package owners, system architects, business developers, sales men, entrepreneurs etc.

I look forward for the next Stammtisch evening!

Hi, I’d like to tell you a little bit about what’s been happening here at Symbian with the creation and launch of our values, and how we’re living them. We’ve got to the point of creating and launching the imagery around our values, and we’ve made a video for you to see how we got to where we are now. And just so you know, there’ll be more to come on this.

But the main thing I want to say is, let’s live it!!! Cheesy, I know.

Really though, if they make sense and they came from us, what’s stopping us live them? Or is the only thing actually stopping us ourselves?

How open is open? We had a great discussion about what can be discussed in an open environment and concluded the open approach should include an understanding that occasionally there are situations that protect partner companies or even individuals. But we need to openly agree these situations exist.

How do you collaborate with silos being created? You can’t, so break them down, take it on personally. A silo only exists if either you or the person with the information allows it.

What’s that mindset that I have to adopt to be inspired? It’s a change of attitude. Approach the new situation ready to listen, that’s the starting point.

How do you work with incredibly passionate people? Be aware, it could get emotional. Passionate people really believe in their chosen passion which can manifest itself in a full range of emotions. (This is where I thought I would link to an appropriate thought-provoking link to working with passionate people written by a renowned author. But I failed.) We may be breaking ground here, let’s share our experiences. Just like William Roberts has here.

The fundamental idea of the calendar is to enable you – our community – to find out about events that may be of interest to you. And more importantly for you to add to the calendar. That is why it has been implemented using Wiki technology.

If you …

• host an event related or useful to Symbian, add the event to the calendar
• found out about an event that may be relevant to the community why not add to it
• if you as a member of the community talk or are present at an existing event, why not update the event page and let others know

To make this easier for you, there is a template for new calendar entries and a help page accessible from the calendar.

The more people use and collaborate around the calendar, the more useful it will be for all. Have a look, bookmark the page and add to it.

To spice things up a bit more, I have a nice bag of goodies for the occasion. But to get them, you must do some work! Look out for the “Banana challenges” during the presentation and win a book, Symbian-branded USB sticks and more.

The great thing about the future of Symbian is that everyone can take part in shaping it -  the more diverse and interesting contributions we receive, the richer and more useful the platform becomes .  We’re reaching out to the far corners of the telecommunications industry to raise awareness about Symbian, to broaden our community and diversify our contributions.
This week I’m speaking at the UC Expo at Olympia in London. Unified Communications (UC) blurs the line between fixed-line, mobile, voice and data and is an exciting growth area. Symbian already provides a number of UC features and is the ideal platform for future UC innovations. I’m excited to share the opportunity to collaborate and I’m sure everyone will have a great time at the conference. However, the true measure of success for Symbian will be securing contributions from the UC community and making Symbian an integral part of the UC future.

UC Expo: UK’s Leading Enterprise Communications & Collaboration Event