Quiver & Quill

I had great time in Helsinki speaking with the impassioned geeks Nokia had flown in from around the world. Together we walked to Helsinki’s museum of modern art and spent a few hours in conversation. Everyone in our group was equipped with at least two cameras and two global phones. The mix of researchers, bloggers, and category experts made for lively discussions.

I asked a few people to share a website or two they recommend. Here are a few they shared:

* Tag Maps: “We crunched through 50 million photographs on Flickr to see what people deem important in the world.”  Rahul Nahir, Yahoo researcher.
* GeoSpot: What’s open right now (in San Fran and LA)
* Carsonified:  – a creative agency, “I love the way the site looks,” Ilicco Elia, head of mobile, Reuters Europe.   
* Mizpee – where to find a toilet fast, recommended by Steve Dembo, Discovery Channel.
* Get Satisfaction: consumers and corporations can meet and get satisfaction online, recommended by Mikko Eerola
* Karaokeparty: The Singstar killer, recommended by Janne Saarikko
* Zero Punctuation: Video game reviews by a brit with a sharp wit, sardonic tone and a dirty mouth. Just. Brilliant. Recommended by James Whatley
* Phreadz: still in closed Beta, it’s a threaded multimedia conversation platform that offers the whole area of threaded archivable, taggable conversations, including video, text, photography, slideshare, audio etc. It rules. Recommended by Steve Lawson
* Silobreaker:  helping with pattern recognition related to current events, recommended by Teemu Arina
* Christian Lindholm: how life blogging should be done, recommended by Rob Evans
* Mike Maddaloni – SitePoint @ sitepoint.com: a great tech, design and business resource for creative and like minded people from around the world, like what I hope we build for OpenLab!

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Nokia is flying me, and 34 marketing and technology experts from around the globe, to join them in Helsinki over the next few days for the Nokia Open Lab.

They equipped us with their new e71 phone to review, encouraged us to share this experience on our blogs and social networks and have made every effort to ensure our comfort and spark our enthusiasm.

Here is our agenda over the next few days:

There are four workshop topics in total. Each will begin with an introduction by a facilitator who will talk a bit about the theme for that workshop and introduce the task. You will then be split into smaller groups to discuss the issues as set out below:

Workshop 1: Neighborhood
During this workshop you will be asked to outline your own online community involvement and social media history on a timeline. You will then get together to create a map/timeline of technologies and solutions for content creation in the future.

Workshop 2: Connected Life
During this workshop you will be asked to create future forecasts for geospatial solutions and technologies. The task will be to create such a forecast in three stages: very near futures, next 3-5 years and the more distant future.

Workshop 3: Entertainment
During this workshop you will try to identify which type of entertainment (e.g. music, gaming, movies etc) will have the most future potential. You will then be asked to create a business model focusing on how consumers will want to interact and pay for such an entertainment in the future.

Workshop 4: Work
During this workshop you will look at the communication technologies and solutions in use today and then try to come up with new uses and business models for one of those solutions.

I will share my notes and thoughts with you. Let me also say that I am extremely impressed with Nokia’s experiment for several reasons

1) When you invite experts who are deeply embedded into social communities, they are going to share their thoughts with those communities.
2) By inviting experts, paying for their travel and accommodations and making them feel like honored guests—they are circumventing any consulting fees these experts would otherwise charge their clients.
3) I can only imagine how much thinking and preparation was involved in bringing 35 people from all over the world together. It’s a very involved initiative, and I give them credit.
4) Nokia has made no effort to influence our opinion. In fact, quite the contrary, they have encouraged us to share our candid assessment.

Considering that on multiple occasions I was ready to toss my iPhone out of the window for dropping calls, not opening a browser properly or freezing, I am eager to find a replacement. And perhaps that will be the e71. Will keep you posted.

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