ESPOO, Finland

Read on for what this means for Nokia Conversations

In with the new, out with the old
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching the site grow from something unknown, to a peer among Nokia sites. I’m leaving the site growing well, on a good platform, and with a bright future. Nonetheless, I feel that now is a good time to put it in a fresh set of hands. This change will allow the new Editor-in-Chief to grow the site and activities in ways the I am not sure I could have.

Thanks to you
Of course, I owe Big Thank Yous to a ton of folks, both here at Nokia and also all of you who come here and read us every day. In the past few months I have sensed a change, one that suggests to me that we have now hit a new level.

I want to thank all of you reading us and linking to us for helping us grow so rapidly. Carita, JBC, Mike, and the new Editor-in-Chief will have their hands full feeding you with the great stuff they will, for sure, produce.

Now, back to work.

Image from hokacheng

What we also hinted at was that we’d see what we could do to reward all of you folks who were avidly commenting and guessing what was in the parcel. And, yes, we’re happy to say, after a laborious and scientific process, we have chosen someone from the ranks of commenters.

Read on to find out who it was.

Top chap
The lucky winner is Gregg Revelo, from Clarin, Philippines. Randomly picked out of a hat by Ray’s dog, Gregg will receive his very own Nokia 5530 XpressMusic. For those of you who are regular here, Gregg goes by the handle name gregg003. He’s a top commenter of ours and he just can’t wait for us to release the Superman phone (you have heard of that phone, right?). It’s no wonder he came up in this latest drawing.

Cheers Gregg, for adding to the Pass the Parcel fun. And thanks for being such a avid contributor to Nokia Conversations.

And, now, for the heck of it, watch the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic video once more:

The Royal Family hosted an awards event during the Worldwide Red Cross Day in Mérida, in May. Marieta del Rivero, the former Nokia Spain General Manager who oversaw the project and, Alberto Matrone, the current Nokia Spain General Manager were there to receive the award.

Read on more to learn about this project.

The Cruz Roja-Nokia (CRoNO) project provides social and educational coaching for children and adolescents linked to the immigration processes in Madrid, Lanzarote, and Guipúzcoa.

A main achievement was being able to define a model of social integration for boys and girls that could be transferred and replicated. Intervention methodologies were adapted to each specific social and cultural context of the territory where the project was being developed, always taking into account a strategy based on educational coaching and the consolidation of emotional ties. Furthermore, it was also important to keep the solid ties that had been established between the kids and volunteers, educators and other key figures in the community, as well as the networking with other organizations working with underage immigrants.

CRoNO was a 3 year project that started in 2006 and, thanks to Nokia’s Community Involvement Team, will be extended in July for another 3 years (also adding one more city: Cádiz).

We salute the Nokia teams in Spain who have made this happen and wish them more success in the next 3 years of this project.

Solange Cummins Nogueira, Nokia Spain, contributed to this article

GLOBAL

One thing that we’ve been wishing for is a central place that has all the information on a particular product or service. No, we don’t mean some static page with fancy graphics and long lists of technical specs. What we wanted was a page that had some info on the product, some photos, some dynamic ever-changing info about the product, and something fun. A jumping-off place for all you would want to know about a particular product.

What we came up with is The Almanac. And we think it’ll be a hit. Read on for more details.

The Almanac
When you first visit the Almanac pages, you get an array of products and services. These are NOT ALL the products and services from Nokia, but a mix of the latest and greatest, such as the Nokia N97, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and Nokia Maps, but also a few old greats, such as the Nokia N73.

Open any one of them and you get a rich collection of images, quotes, and information about the product. Two parts, in particular, that are very Almanac-y are the “only one thing…” and “miscellany” sections that have short interesting things related to the product.

Ever changing
On the more dynamic side, on each Almanac page we’ve created two boxes with links to Web articles that we or others have written about the product. These links should me more or less changing all the time as we stumble upon interesting articles and add them to these lists. We also have a little section of related videos out of YouTube that are tagged with the product’s name.

This dynamic part is our way of making sure you always get the latest info on each product.

Cool?

More to come
This is a growing Almanac. We’ll be adding more products and services. We’ll also be trying to get some cool images, such as designs and the like, more than your usual set of product pictures.

The Almanac URL is easy to remember: http://conversations.nokia.com/almanac. Feel free to give us any feedback, for example, to tell us what you think of this, or of any classic devices of the past you’d like to see included, or it we mis-stated or omitted something.

In other side(-bar) news
While we are talking about the Almanac and have you doing a bit of exploring, please note that we’ve changed our side-bar. All year, the lower side-bar had been forgotten and getting dusty. We’ve now made it easier to see what our main channels are for you to follow (that’d be: this site, of course, but also Nokia Conversations on YouTube, Twitter, Delicious, and SlideShare). We also stole an idea from our pals at blogs.nokia.com and also are promoting other Nokia channels available on Twitter.

The List
Another thing you might have noticed is that we killed that bloated blogroll. After so many have asked to get on that list, we realized that it was not the right way to let folks know what sites we followed or knew about that were related to the things we read and thought about. So we found a simpler way to get everyone recognized and created a directory we call The List.

The cool thing about The List is that you can provide us the URL for us to review and approve. Our goal is to create a list Nokia mobile-, design-, and business-related sites out there. If you’re running a Nokia related site then feel free to submit your site to The List.

We’ve already entered a few on our own. But, as is usual, we might have made mistakes or need to update something, so please let us know.

As with the Almanac, the URL for The List is simple: http://conversations.nokia.com/the-list.

Summary
As you can tell, we keep adding and tweaking things to better deliver the information and conversations you are all interested in. The Almanac and The List are just the latest in a long line of things we’ve built around here and I am sure there will be more.

Cheers!

To listen to it, there’s a Blogbite player in the upper right of our site, and a feed for your favorite podcast app or for iTunes.

But, what’s better, we’ve managed to include the Nokia Conversations Blogbite into the Nokia Podcast Directory, found in many Nokia phones (learn more about the podcasting app on Nokia.com). If you have the Nokia podcasting app on your phone, the Nokia Conversations Blogbite can be found in the Featured Podcasts listing.

Below, I show you some screenshots to help you set this up.

All you have to do to subscribe to Blogbite is to go to your phone’s Podcasting application, select  Directories and then Featured.  Here’s how it goes:

1. The Podcasting app is usually in the Media or Music folder.

2. Select Directories

3. Select Featured

4. You’ll see a bunch of featured podcasts. The Way We Live Next ones are pretty good, but if you’re looking for us, we’re the second entry at the moment (hmm, just above Sesame Street?). 

5. Subscribe to Blogbite

6. Blogbite will now be in your Podcasts folder where all the new Blogbites will show up

That’s it. I hope it helps.

By the way, in addition to Blogbite, there are a ton of other ways to follow Nokia Conversations listed in a previous post.

ESPOO, Finland

As you should be aware by now, we have a few different streams you can follow. We have video, presentations, bookmarks, and, of course, this site. We’re doing our best to fill the streams and interact with everyone who participates in those streams.

Below, I’ve listed some of the newer streams, particularly highlighting some we haven’t properly promoted yet. So, read on and see if you’ve missed any.

The Nokia Conversations Blogbite
One of the newest additions to our collection of media streams is Blogbite, a short weekly audio summary of our top posts. We worked with Rob Knight and Dan McGrath to create a fun way to catch up with the week’s posts. A new edition is up every Friday afternoon (today!).

You can either listen by clicking on the player in the right sidebar of our site or pop the Blogbite feed into you favorite podcast app or add it to iTunes.

Not to be outdone, we’ve managed to include the Nokia Conversations Blogbite into the Nokia Podcast Directory, found in many Nokia phones. If you have the Nokia podcasting app on your phone, the Nokia Conversations Blogbite can be found in the Featured Podcasts listing (I’ll post soon about how to do it). Therefore, if you subscribe straight from your phone, then you’ll never have to miss another Blogbite!

Yay!

@nokconv
A while back we quietly started using Twitter to see how it could be used to supplement the conversations we were already having on different streams. With that in mind, we’ve been using hootsuite to connect some of our streams to our Twitter stream. The idea is that is you can get a peek into what we are thinking when you see what we’ve been bookmarking (through delicious/nokiaconversations) and the videos we’ve been favoriting (through youtube.com/nokiaconversations). What’s more, during events, we find Twitter a great tool to spread the news via hashtags.

And not to turn @nokconv into an impersonal, mechanized, stream, we’ve also been tweeting (interesting?) things ever so often and interacting with those that @ reply us. Come follow us!

We’ve been happy with the level of re-tweeting, interaction, and numbers of followers. If you really want to know, the Nokia Conversations team is very careful about selecting a new stream, making sure we match expectations with what we can deliver. If we choose to use Twitter, it’s because we mean it.

Nokia Conversations mobile
Did you know that you can read Nokia Conversations from your mobile phone? Just point your mobile browser to the usual URL, http://conversations.nokia.com, and it should format this site nicely for your phone. Alas, we’re doing a little plug-in trick, so sometimes we turn it off, especially during high-traffic times, such as during an event. But, most of the time, it’s on. We actually use it a lot.

We’re not the only ones doing this at Nokia
Our good friends at www.nokia.com have recently created one single page for you to get all your Nokia streams. Located at http://blogs.nokia.com, the page lists us and other Nokia blogs and streams. It’s a good entry point into all the stuff Nokia is participating in online.

And in case you’re wondering about that URL, blog.nokia.com (singular) is an alternate URL for us (as is www.nokia.com/blog). But please keep using conversations.nokia.com. We are, indeed, singular.

Don’t forget the usual
Here’s the summary, including some that you should already know of:

The first
The Nokia 7650 was chock-full of firsts for Nokia: it was the first S60 phone, the first with a camera, and the first with MMS. It was also way ahead of its time, a slick slider with an amazing screen. The Economist put it on its cover as the Monolith from “2001″, saying it was the future of computing.

At the 7650 launch, Nokia was showcasing both the camera and MMS by sending three art students into Barcelona, where the launch was taking place, to take pictures of the city and send them back via MMS to the show floor, where the photos were displayed on a large screen almost immediately. In this day and age, it might be hard to imagine the wonder of all this back then.

The funny thing is how the simple VGA camera (uh, 0.3 megapixel) was a lot for us, not only wowing us with the quality, but also straining our GPRS networks.

Lifeblog
The next big milestone for camera phones at Nokia (and for me) was the launch of Lifeblog and the Nokia 7610, in early 2004. The Nokia 7610 was the first megapixel phone for Nokia. And Lifeblog was a multimedia diary that made it easy to manage and browse images and videos on the phone and PC and also made it easy to post images either to Flickr or TypePad.

By this time, photo sharing online was big, with a ton of manufacturers making camera phones and a ton of folks posting online to their heart’s content. With the Nokia 7610, Nokia began to say that photography on the mobile phone was starting to compete with digital still cameras. Indeed, Nokia worked with Rankin, a fashion photographer, who used the Nokia 7610 in the process of making a portfolio of artistic photographs.

Further leaps
The year 2006 was the year of the 3 megapixel camera phone. Two key products that year were the Nokia N73 and the Nokia N93. The N93, a follow-on to the Nokia N90, was designed mostly as a video camera, with a swivel screen and optical zoom. The N73, a favorite of mine, was more of a camera than a phone: it had a mechanical lens cover that would activate the camera upon opening and had a dedicated camera shutter key (standard in most Nokia camera phones now).

But the real game-changer was that 3 megapixel was starting to be of enough quality to compete with analog film. What went from Polaroid snap-shot quality in earlier phones had become good enough to replace the family digital snap-shot camera. And the Nokia N73 sold in the millions.

At the top of our game
Nokia’s push into camera phones was primarily driven by a division, set up soon after the launch of the Nokia 7650, dedicated to imaging phones (what Nokia called camera phones). Before the group was formally dissolved in 2007, one of their last devices built around photography was the Nokia N82, a slick 5 megapixel camera phone with a Xenon flash.

With the N82, it seemed that the imaging team had reached some sort of pinnacle in the fusion of mobile phones and cameras. The Nokia N82 was hailed as the best cameraphone of the year. Nokia became the largest manufacturer of cameras (surpassing digital and analog camera manufacturers). And uploading photos and videos online from mobile phones is now a part of global culture, changing the face of how we socialize, tell stories, and participate in journalism and capturing news.

Is there more to say?
While the dedicated imaging team is long gone, it is clear that Nokia still has more to say about camera phones. This year, Nokia launched the Nokia N86 8MP, Nokia’s first 8 Megapixel phone (see video below). I’ve been using one for a while now and it will definitely replace my Nokia N85, which is the N86’s older sibling (but only 5 megapixels).

My surprise when I first held the N86 when it came out was that Nokia was able to humbly raise the bar once more on what a camera phone should be like. Not content to just shove any old 8 megapixel element into a phone, the camera in the N86 is the latest in a long line of camera phone elements from Carl Zeiss that Nokia has been putting into Nseries phones. Also, there’s software in the phone that is similar to current digital cameras that provide excellent image quality and helps create panoramic photos

Not that I really know (I don’t), but I don’t think Nokia is done saying all it can say about camera phones. When asking a colleague, who does know more, his comment was, “What do you think? We’re just going to say we’re done, turn off the lights, and walk out?”

I think there’s more to come. So feel free to discuss until we find out what my colleague meant.

Read on to find out more about what to expect from the Where 2.0 Conference.

With over 1,000 key people in attendance, this year’s event is already proof of the rise in significance of location-based services and tools for the mobile industry as a whole, and is primed to be a hotspot of creative thinking and investigation into what’s possible in terms of location-based services today, and what’s just around the corner.

There are a great deal of interesting topics that are being covered at the event, including the implications of our new location-enabled lives, reality mining, augmented reality, crowdsourcing, Government 2.0, mapping and immersive and 3D imagery.

The Where 2.0 Conference kicked off yesterday and runs until tomorrow. We’re expecting some interesting developments to emerge, so stay tuned for more updates coming soon.

Recently a 13 year-old girl called Rosemarie Hartman, with ambitions to study Maths, Science and Technology, visited Nokia headquarters to do exactly that, and created a video diary of her day shadowing women within the company, from meetings about Comes With Music to teleconferences about recycling and a visit to the Nokia flagship store in Helsinki. It’s a great little video, that gives a candid insight into how the ’shadowing day’ program works as well as a peek behind the scenes at Nokia House. Click to watch the full video.

Here’s what Rose had to say about her experience at Nokia on her ’shadowing day’:

“The whole day was really interesting. I am sure that studying mathematics and science becomes much more interesting for me in the future as I know what kind of environment I could end up working in. Women have really good opportunities to advance and work on the same conditions as male engineers. This day has definitely given me a motivation boost and I would recommend a visit like this to all teenagers in my age. Thank you for giving me this opportunity – hope to see you again in the future!”

Viviane Reding is EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, and the woman originally behind the shadowing days initiative.

“Getting more women into ICT careers would be a force for change and a major boost for this key economic sector in Europe”

How important do you think youth schemes like this are for our economies, and just as significant, our societies? Are there any similar programs you know of that you’d like to mention here. Let us know your thoughts below.