Technology Blog

Blyk - a new, free mobile operator - announced this morning it will launch in the UK in mid-2007. Blyk offers free calls and texts in exchange for ads pushed to the handset.

The youth-oriented operator was founded by former Nokia President Pekka Ala-Pietilä and his college buddy Antti Öhrling, who heads an advertising agency. The duo recruited Marko Ahtisaari to manage Blyk’s brand and design.

Blyk’s addressing an obvious need: mobile communication is still overpriced and nobody has yet disrupted it the way low-cost airlines like Southwest and EasyJet disrupted the airline industry.

The future for Blyk looks bright. The ad-based model so clearly trumps the prepaid/subscription model from a teen’s perspective, that with decent marketing it shouldn’t have trouble attracting a customer base.

A more vexing question is how the text ads will work. Sure the Net Generation is accustomed to ads online. But they’re also accustomed to filtering the spam from their inboxes.

A lot of that boils down to relevance and creativity. With the information Blyk gathers about its customers, it has the potential to target its ads very precisely. The challenge they pose their advertisers is: now that we offer you the means to reach this audience, can you engage it with equal originality?

Good luck Pekka, Antti, Marko, and team!

I did something that sounds completely nuts. I resigned from my position at Nokia Multimedia after just six weeks. That so because it turned out unfeasible to do what I consider sensible there. Better to acknowledge it in good spirit. There are some good people there and we remain friends.

Guess it’s time to try and make meaning.

On March 1st I joined Nokia as Senior Product Manager, Internet Handhelds. I’m based in Helsinki. In Nokia’s org I work in the Convergence Products Business Program, which is part of the Multimedia group.

I’ll be responsible for the development of new Nokia products based on the open source Linux software architecture developed for the Nokia 770 internet tablet.

Analysis on Nokia’s Convergence Products act in Business Week last month:

One way or another, the 770 is a sharp break from Nokia’s past that points the way to a dramatically different future.

Here’s a link to the article.

Three, the UK operator, sells 3G contracts but doesn’t tell its customers that it blocks them from accessing the internet. Al Iguana shares the experience:

I got an amazing new phone, a Nokia 6680. Symbian 60, dual camera… you can read reviews of it all over the internet. Superb bit of kit.

My wonder-phone has a flaw. a serious flaw. because I’m on Three. I can’t access the internet. They’ve blocked it. No blog clients. No RSS readers. No Wap. All I can do is visit Three’s website. A Pay website. Want to read the news? Each item costs 50p. The weather? 50p. OUT-FUCKING-RAGEOUS!!!

So I have all this stuff on the phone, Opera, Lifeblog, Yahoo Messenger, and I can’t use it. Whats the point of that??

quote Three:

“Due to a business decision 3 have chosen to promote a great range of products and services available via the 3 browser instead of offering open internet access

Open internet access is something we are currently looking at, however, I can provide you with no definite information at this time.”

Time will tell how long they’ll be around with such “business decisions”. (Thanks to Olli for the link.)

Dan Bricklin podcasts about the need for an open cellphone

I’ve started a new podcast for DiamondCluster International (a consulting firm that David and I are “Fellows” of). The topic of the series is the Open Cellphone. That is, a cellphone where the technology (the software, ports, etc.) are open and common and not controlled and dictated by the carriers.

Here’s the link to the first show.

The telecommunications industry is heading towards a disruption by non-cellular wireless internet devices. Here are my two cents’ worth on the matter:

How severe the disruption will be depends on the players’ next strategic moves. It’s telecoms that’s getting disrupted by the internet and not vice versa because the telecoms industry has not proven to be nearly as innovative as its bubble-prone internet counterpart. Bluntly put, this is so because it is structured as a closed world, which is dominated by the operators. It is a royal court that goes on with its internal power struggles. But outside, legions of geeks have been quietly chipping at the walls for quite some time already, and the first bands of pioneering insurgents (led by Skype) are now storming the bastille.

Perhaps the world is ready for a new mobile device that will become the icon of the real mobile internet revolution. Most likely this new little jewel would work first in wifi hotspots, connecting from further afield as 802.11 and its siblings become more ubiquitous. It will probably do VoIP and IM exceedingly well. It’ll possibly also do email, RSS, and music. All these we can pretty much take for granted. More interestingly, it may start doing completely different things. Its ability to go where laptops can’t go, and do things that mobile phones can’t do, will create new needs and new opportunities, which make people write new apps. It might be used to access place and event information in the form of annotated maps for instance. Or it might be used to download and watch TV shows. Or make them in the spirit of podcasting and guerrilla TV. When high bandwidth mobile data becomes free, some of those old mobile service ideas that history left for dead might suddenly begin to make a lot more sense. The fact is, we don’t know what the device will be used for. That’s why the code base has to be kept open.

And what might the device look like? It would need to be small and afford effortless one-handed use, incorporating the best learnings from over two decades of mobile phone design. This points to a Blackberry-style roller wheel to scroll up and down the buddy list, the email inbox, and the RSS feeds. However, it would also need to have a QWERTY keyboard or some radical new key layout if it’s going to do text input well. The large footprint of a full keyboard suggests a flip design of some sort. But it would have to be extremely slim.

Here are a few sketches.

On the software side, the limited screen real estate requires that the active application must occupy the full screen. IM would probably be the default active app because the presence status of buddies has to be visible at a glance. Switching between apps would need to be extremely simple and smooth, like control-tab on the PC. Perhaps quick switching is important enough to warrant a dedicated button on the side of the device. Click! From IM to email. Click! From email to RSS. And so on.

Here’s a sketch about the ‘full-context switching’ between apps (it was Chris who introduced me to this term)