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Fromdistance

sellis | 21 February, 2008 09:56

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. 

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Application innovation shines out in Amsterdam

sellis | 14 February, 2008 15:57

It was an evening of innovation, networking and entertainment. The Forum Nokia Innovation Party attracted a wide range of industry professionals to see and vote for the application they thought was tops for innovation.

 

Some of the best applications from around the world were on show at the Forum Nokia Innovation Cocktail Party 2007 held in Amsterdam in December 2007. A selection of 12 applications was short-listed for the event’s ‘Most Innovative Application of 2007’ award, with the winner being voted via SMS by the party’s 150 or so guests.

 

Competition for the top prize was fierce with innovation shining out from both the commercial and academic worlds. However, there could be only one winner, which turned out to be Reporter from Fromdistance of Estonia. This mobile journalism tool is a complete end-to-end platform for both professional reporters and citizen journalists that enables videos and images to be sent from a mobile device to the publisher.

 

The innovation lies in the application’s combination of good usability with efficient delivery of content to publishers’ content management systems. Ordinary smartphone users can send content to be used by the publisher of his or her choice. Furthermore, the quality of images and videos is not compromised during sending – publishers receive high quality user-generated content.

 

Speaking about his win, Jouko Vierumäki, CEO of Fromdistance said: “The standard of applications here is very high and presented really tough competition. We’ve shown that innovation can be profitable – they support each other.”

 

There was a tremendous range of applications being demonstrated on the night. Each was available for a hands-on demonstration as well as being presented to the audience in short video presentations.

The 11 runners up for the award were:

3DViva  from InterGrafx

From China, this interactive, multifunctional Avatar application enables users to create three-dimensional avatars. At the party, CEO Charles Chiang said: “You can also invite friends to create their own avatar and share it with you so you can see the avatar when the friend calls. This event is a great opportunity to promote this really cool application in the West.”

 

Pocket Express from Handmark

The UK version of this personalized, on-device service from US company Handmark integrates news and information in an easy-to-use interface, that turns an ordinary mobile device into a personalized experience.

 

Vringo from Vringo 

Vringo allows users to create ringtones from video clips, available for download or created by themselves, and share them with their friends and family. The clips then become ringtones that show when the recipient’s phone is called.

 

Phone Alone from Mobisophy technologies

Another Chinese entry, Phone Alone provides a remote control capability for devices that enable an answering service to be set up, or calls to be diverted to another phone, using intuitive voice-activated menus. So should a user leave their mobile phone at home, they need never miss any calls.

 

Share your mobile life from Bliin 

This social networking application enables geo-tagged audio, text and video to be shared from a GPS-enabled handset, directly and in real-time. An online Google map is used to access the social community.

 

LocoMash from Lancaster University

A mobile location mashup, LocoMash enables users to geotag and collate their photos on a single web page to provide a location-based record of an event, instead of a more conventional time-based history. “You can then view the event by zooming in and out of the map and clicking on pictures to see what actually happened anywhere at the event.” says Dr. Reuben Edwards of Lancaster University.

 

MotionLens from Realeyes3D 

Using the cameraphone as a motion detector, this application simplifies the navigation of maps, websites, images and other content by intuitively moving the phone. Representing Realeyes3D at the event, Katia Hilal said: “We have built an application that allows very smooth navigation and zooming just by moving your hand. Our mission is to make the cameraphone do more than just take pictures.”

 

Kyte from Decentral.tv 

Kyte Mobile enables users to broadcast their pictures and videos to a Kyte channel for sharing with their friends. Using LifeStreams, polls and text, audio or video chat, users can also interact with viewers.

 

Xelnex from PSILOC 

The Xelnex Voice Logger records mobile conversations in the background, tags them and encrypts and uploads them to a secure server. Aimed at professional users that need records of transactions, the application enables any authorized person to access the voice recording via the web.

 

Funny Cam Football from Technobubble  

This Spanish games developer was showing how its movement detection technology through a cameraphone allows player physical interaction with games that can be shown on a larger screen such as a TV. The application detects the player’s body movements to interact with the game.

 

Rexplorer from ETH Zurich 

This application combines a game with a sightseeing tour of Regensburg in Germany. In the game, tourists act as assistants to Professor Rex to help discover the city’s historical and mythological spirits located at 30 different locations of interest. “We’d love to extend this to other cities and we are in talks with some who have shown an interest. We are also talking to parties in the entertainment industry,” commented ETH Zurich’s Steffan Walz.

 

Moshing The Mobile Artist

A further demo at the party that was not part of the voting was MOSH, the content sharing site where members upload, distribute and manage content to be used on mobile devices.

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