Reporter service developed by Fromdistance has been voted by the audience of the Forum Nokia Innovation Event, held in Amsterdam 3rd of December, as the most innovative mobile application of the year 2007. Fromdistance competed in the event among 12 carefully pre-selected developer companies which represented the highest peaks of their application areas coming from different parts of the world.

We speak to CEO Jouko Vierumäki about the company, products, and future horizons for the company.

Please tell a little about the project team ?

The project team consists of much of the R&D team of Fromdistance, as Reporter combines our expertise in several arenas: advanced client application, encrypted client/server communications, intuitive administration interfaces and image and video encoding/decoding. Like always in case of Fromdistance, the magic is in smart client/server architecture.

What project history does the company have?

The primary product of the company is Fromdistance MDM – Mobile Device Manager – which is an enterprise platform for managing their IT assets. The focus is on mobile device management; dozens of organizations use Fromdistance MDM for management of their smartphones and PDAs, nowadays also PCs are supported. Fromdistance MDM is the most versatile enterprise mobile device management platform on the market; it offers features like remote device access, comprehensive automated inventory, security policies, software enrollments and so forth.

Was there a particular spark that got this idea off the ground?

We came up with the concept together with our first customers for our mobile professional reporting solution – the leading publishers in Finland. The idea was to offer the general public the same enablers we had built for the professional reporters.

Did you have any problems in getting this production started?

Fromdistance believes in customer-driven innovation – and we are lucky to work with innovative customers. After the idea had come up and the first feasibility studies were done, we only had to take care of the implementation.

    
What challenges did you face in developing the application?

Integrating Reporter seamlessly to device’s built-in gallery was not trivial. Had we started from scratch, also transmission of large media files and building secure client/server communication framework would have been an effort. Now, however, we could use our experience from mobile device management.

What assistance did you get from Forum Nokia in helping overcome those hurdles?

Without Forum Nokia’s help it would have been very difficult – if not impossible – to build the seamless integration between Reporter and device’s built-in gallery. Forum Nokia helped us to come up with integration that received praise from our customers and give us good starting point to build follow-up product concepts.

In your view what are the main development achievements, made by this application?

The primary achievement was to come up with user experience that wouldn’t require the user to learn new ways of using his/her device. Reporter is an application which is not expected to be used every hour. Normally people don’t have a need to send material to publishers every day. Therefore, making Reporter intuitive enough for occasional use was the primary challenge. In this respect we seem to have succeeded :)


What were the main difficulties you faced in getting this concept to market?

Our customers involved in the co-operation see each other as competitors to some extent. Having them around the same table was not always easy to arrange. However, the parties involved shared the greater vision of creating something which wouldn’t be possible without this co-operation – Fromdistance really appreciates their open minds.
 
Having been through this project- what lessons have been learned?

User experience is paramount. Also, innovation without clear scope in terms of application is not a very valuable innovation as such. It is important to recognize the needs of the parties involved.

What do you see as the next big project for your project team?

Having built an enabler for mobile content creation, enabling mobile content consumption would make a nice challenge. This domain has been widely discussed but there are few success stories – we obviously need to make one.

http://www.fromdistance.com 

This is the first in a series of interviews that highlight innovation and best practice in Mobile Development. If you would like to see your product or company featured here - please contact the Forum Nokia Community Team.