Ron Liechty's Forum Nokia Blog

Ask the Expert about Symbian Platform Security, manufacturing grantable capabilities and Java verified.

2008-01-07T22:27:00+02:00

Forum Nokia devotes one week to answering questions on a specific topic on our discussion boards. The Nokia expert that will answer the questions daily that are within their expertise as long as it is a reasonable question or comment.

We are fortunate this week to have an expert on application signing, one of the hottest topics on the discussion boards. I am sure there are lots of questions about Symbian Platform Security, manufacturer grantable capabilities and Java signing.

So if you have any questions about Symbian Platform Security, manufacturer grantable capabilities and Java signing please ask them. However, Symbian Signed questions are to be asked at the web site set up for Sybmian Signed questions and not in Forum Nokia.

Ron

Webinars are great.

2007-12-12T23:39:06+02:00

Webinars are great. They give developers a lot of useful information when they need it before they need use the information. Hartti has already told you about the Generating Revenue with Flash Content and Services that is Thursday, December 13, 2007
from downloads, and network services, to mobile commerce. There will also be on on Mobile Advertising – The Next Frontier Friday, December 14, 2007. that is described this way. Mobile Advertisement: a global business in its infancy. The next big promise. In last few years many billions of dollars have been spent on mobile advertisement. What are the promises, what is the reality? What can we do today, what can we expect tomorrow. How do we engage the advertisers, the developers and the customers? The speaker is Floris van de Klashorst, Director, Head of Publisher Network, Nokia Advertisement Business

To register go to http://connectpro26249165.acrobat.com/ma/event/registration.html

Other Webinars that are coming up are

Exploring Flash Lite Video Capabilities for Mobile Tuesday, December 18, 2007

and

FlashLite and Flex for mTourism Wednesday on January 23, 2008

These free sessions pack a lot of information if you don’t get the invitation in the mail you can always register online.

2008 Technology Innovation Competition

2007-12-04T16:52:15+02:00

Nokia extends the possibilities of open innovations to start up and midsize companies. By seeking out technology inventions in four design and HW focus areas the aim is to further drive the aspects of miniaturization, enhanced performance and green technologies in the area of consumer devices. Namely the four focus areas consist of:

Mobile Multimedia Experience: specifically driven by audio reproduction, camera and display technologies for exiting and professional performance.
Future Device Architecture: as enabler of enhanced device capabilities, faster processing and lower energy consumption for increased customer usability possibilities.
User Interface interest areas are very much in simplicity and human intuitiveness together with naturally required haptics.
Future Touch and Feel is seeking after novel look & feel, form factor, durability and movement solutions which provide unique design possibilities and may even enable the capability for individual personalization with no compromises on the usability.

In order to file in the proposals the inventor is asked to go to http://www.mobilerules.org/technology/ and fill in the given fields.

The winning companies will get into closure discussion possibility of solution development and resulting product creation with Nokia or the involved industry players. In total, there will be four winners as one within each of the Technology Innovation Competition categories. Further more, there will be three finalists nominated in each of the categories.

These finalists will be invited to an Innovation Exhibition within the Nokia Head Quarter in Espoo, Finland to demonstrate the developments and may get discussion with Nokia decision makers. For the advantage of the finalists Nokia will also make a public announcement, naming the 12 finalists as the short listed companies of this competition.

Timing of the Technology Innovation Competition Technology Innovation Submission starts
29 November 2007

Technology Innovation Deadline
25th January 2008

Finalist announcement
15 February 2008

Award ceremony
21 March 2008

Help Nokia to Help You

2007-10-11T17:10:28+03:00

How Can Forum Nokia Help You Shorten Your Development Time? Nokia wants your feedback a special forum was created for one month to gather your input. Please take advantage of this opportunity to improve your time to market.

Ron

Power saved is Product Sold

2007-09-26T23:56:38+03:00

Increasingly I see complaints on the discussion board about poor battery life. Of course there are bad batteries out there but for the most part batteries live longer now than ever before. One of my mobile devices would go for days on end without needing a charge but if I used it for an alarm clock it would need charging daily. If I had not observed that it was this one application that caused the battery problem I would have been extremely upset with Nokia. Knowing what caused the poor battery life made me quite upset with the application and I only used it when absolutely necessary.

If you are planning on selling your product and want to have loyal customers you need to consider the power consumption of your application or utility. Forum Nokia has created a web site that will help you achieve this with information and tools. Please visit this page as it is not only important to Nokia to have long battery life but also for you or the company you work for to have the ultimate power management. Right now they may blame Nokia but do not under-estimate the word of mouth that would spread if your product was listed as an energy waster. A good programmer always tries to write the most elegant code and this will help you achieve that.

Ron

Hartti and Ron go to WeirdStuff

2007-09-25T00:15:30+03:00

Last week I was in training in the Silicon Valley in California so I took some time to meet with my teammate Hartti Suomela to do some team building. When Hartti gave me the choice of where to go after some gathering of information on the internet, I chose Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale California. After questioning my sanity and admitting that he had never heard of the place Hartti reluctantly trekked off with me to see the great unknown.

WeirdStuff is a showroom and warehouse for all the flotsam and jetsam that is discarded in the high tech industrial world of Silicon Valley. From vintage 1990 computers to barrels full of miscellaneous nuts and bolts (which sell by the pound) all things salvaged from business close outs and other salvage end up at WeirdStuff. If you need an 8 foot glass server rack, or a shell for a Donkey Kong arcade game. Do you need a 1/2” tape backup or a copy of Amish Utilities for Windows 2.0 this is the place to be. A chip tester, an oscilloscope, or a really great 10 foot high “you are here” kiosk almost everything high tech related is for sale. From a box full of corded and one wireless phones to a Sybase back up system it was hard to find something that stumped both Hartti and I.

Hartti and I were typical WeirdStuff customers, just people that have heard of the place and were there out of curiosity. Luckily for me I had to fly home or the trunk of the car may have been full of spare parts before I left Monday afternoon. Other store browsers were electronic hobbyist trying to find parts to build a home robot or fix an old computer for the kids. If you needed a resister or miniature motor or power supply here was a great place to get it. Another large segment of the stores business is lawyers. Not that lawyers are known as electronic nuts but they investigate in order to get patent rights. Was there an older version; is the new device you have just a rehash of someone else’s idea? All is very interesting and WeirdStuff proved not to be so weird and mostly just stuff. If you aren’t in the San Francisco area you can check it out on the internet. But there is nothing like picking up a 15 year old piece of computer history in your hands and saying I remember this.

Ron

Web 2.0 rev. 8.0d

2007-08-28T02:42:25+03:00

I never got the purpose of a Wiki until I started using Wikipedia. To me the only thing that Wikis were good for was for collaboration projects. I did not grasp the concept of contributed documentation, only contributed code and comments. Now, a Wikipedia is my first stop for documentation of anything I am curious about. Want to know what SOA is? Then wikipedia.org is the place to go. Now granted there are twenty other possible solutions besides Service Oriented Software but generally from the context of the phrase you are reading it, you will get the right answer.

I hope that Forum Nokia’s Wiki can be the place for all mobile device developers to go to first for answers. I hope that when a person predominately doing Samsung device applications wants to find out information that they check the Nokia Wiki first. I say this because then that that same person will contribute his knowledge to Nokia’s developers Wiki. Sure we could all just use Google and let the Google Brats rake in the dough but do we want another mega-corporation dominating the world? (Well, yeah, if it is Nokia).

The best way to learn something is to teach it, the next best way is to write an article about it. If you don’t have time to do those, read a Wiki. If it is wrong, don’t worry an expert will come by and correct it in short order. I don’t comprehend why I resisted Wikis for years, most likely is that I just had this concept of it as a project tracking system. Whatever held me back, like a dam breaking my enthusiasm is bursting out. So, watch out below.

Ron

Web 2.0, Part 2.0 Sales

2007-08-21T00:24:05+03:00

My local newspaper recently changed to truly be local with only one page devoted to national or international news yet on Sundays they have the expanded news and there is one page devoted to business. In this weeks paper the main feature was Technology helps reinvent cell phone advertising an Associated Press story from the Broadcast and Communication Exhibition in Singapore. The story is how advertising on mobile devices is now less obtrusive and not as distractive. Some advertising can be beneficial information which is a big part of Web 2.0 philosophy.

Why this is important is that even in small town America the mainstreaming of the Internet on mobile devices is recognized as the future of the Internet. Just as people that do not have home computers are missing out economically so will those that do not have multimedia devices miss out in the near future. What has kept many people from accessing the internet by mobile device is cost and speed.

The cost is certainly going to go down if advertising can be done in a manner that most people perceive as beneficial. For example when using your GPS aware device you wish to dine out, a list of restaurants near by will pop up. These restaurants have paid the search provider to be listed on the web the same as they pay to be listed in the Yellow Pages of a phone book. What developers need to do is create new applications that use a beneficial advertising. This way you are paid by the advertiser and do not need to worry about how to distribute and sell the application.

Ron

Web 2.0, Part 1.5

2007-08-17T22:11:13+03:00

While I enjoy blogging and it does put a human face to a company I don’t see it as the penultimate feature of web 2.0. However, when you talk to bloggers or the media (where journalists are pretty much just paid bloggers) you would think that blogs are the beginning and the end of Web 2.0. A recent article about the iPhone told of an AT&T customer that had ran up a $5,000 roaming bill by using the iPhone to access the Internet while in Europe. Who can deny that the mobile device and the Web 2.0 are totally united for better or worse? Steve Jobs carefully used the Internet to generate hysteria for the release of the iPhone and the popularity of the N95 has mostly been through word of mouth over the Internet.

In reality, blogs are a small segment of the Internet and saying outrageous things on the net does not make you any smarter than saying outrageous things on a soap box in front of the town hall. You just get laughed at by more people. While someone might think he is wise and has a cult status the truth is that blogs are a small piece of the internet communication. Anyone that thinks that a single blog is directing the way the world perceives something is mistaken. However, when well orchestrated as in elections and iPhone releases, they can indeed be a powerful force. Like news and commentary on television where it represents about 10% of the online time there are other channels of communications we should be aware of.

Stay tuned for more information on Web 2.0 and how it affects mobile developers.

Ron

Web 2.0, Part 1.0

2007-08-15T23:25:06+03:00

I dislike buzz words like Web 2.0 that don’t mean anything so why not have a series of articles that tell what it means. One of Nokia’s employees uploaded a thesis on Web 2.0 to the Developer’s Wiki that I think every mobile developer should read. When it was uploaded, my first thought was that I wondered if this is really related to developing for mobile devices. Then it hit me, not only is this related; it is the most important media technology for developers to understand concerning the future of mobile devices.

Is it social media or a technology, is this just MySpace, eBay, YouTube or MOSH or is it technical like all the alphabet technologies AJAX or XML, CSS, RSS and all of that? Everyone that uses the internet thinks Web 2.0 is something else. Let’s start with something called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is highly touted as the future on all the Information Technology magazines.

SOA is a customer service oriented aspect of the Internet that I read a lot about and another thing I am never sure I understand. However, if you’ve ever filed an insurance request online, you have experienced it. While this total Web interface is effective and efficient and has made amazon.com and Geico Insurance big winners. Generally the customer service aspect is to get your money and often works very well for support after they have the money. However, in the case of highly technological support such as mobile device development, Forum Nokia needs to go way beyond SOA and understand it is not a panacea but only a piece of the pie.

Stay tuned for the next blog as I (feeling like Dogbert) give my opinions of other aspects of Web 2.0

Ron