Nokia:

Nokia converged mobile device (smartphone and mobile computer) volumes came in at 24 million units, a bit more than a quarter of total devices volume, up 42% year-on-year and 12% sequentially.

Maybe Nokia is improving or maybe all boats rise with the tide.

However:

A recent developer survey from Open-First reveals that Nokia’s Ovi Store is lagging in several key areas with nearly 20 percent of the participants unlikely to use Nokia’s app store in the future. Although the majority of developers surveyed will continue to support Nokia’s ecosystem, more than 42 percent said Ovi is below average when compared to other app stores, such as those from Apple and Google. These responses indicate that Nokia doesn’t only have to play catch up with its smartphone operating system strategy, but also with the marketplace that’s helping to power device sales.

Ovi is not pretty. Nokia Symbian code and tools are not that nice and developers don’t make much money focusing on Ovi. Nokia’s market share is so massive in some areas that developers will keep coming but the trend line looks not too great.

This is the scary part:

And now consider the next shocking chart.  Apple will generate 2X as much handset profit as the rest of the industry combined this year DESPITE SELLING ONLY 3% OF THE HANDSETS BY UNIT VOLUME.

Apple comes out of nowhere and destroys the incumbents at their own game but I would proffer that Nokia should be the most embarrassed. The bottom line is Apple focuses – something Nokia does not seem to be able to do.

I didn’t realize so many people were after Palm. Nokia, RIM and MSFT could have used it. Nokia more than any of them.

Urinals:

Krug scrambled to counter the plumbers’ public health claims. He hired Charles Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona. Gerba studies “filth, pestilence, and disease,” with an emphasis on the bathroom, and says he has done more field studies on the toilet than anyone else in academia. From his point of view, there was a clear explanation for the plumbers’ resistance: It drained their wallets. “Plumbers don’t like the waterless urinal because it cuts down on their work tremendously,” he says. “There’s no more piping to install, and the urinals have no moving parts to repair.”

To test the plumbers’ assertions, Gerba compared a traditional flush urinal with the Falcon waterless. He found that the Falcon urinal presented a less hospitable environment for germs than constantly moistened conventional bowls. The process of flushing could actually eject those germs into the air. “If it’s a traditional urinal, you should flush and run,” Gerba says.

I had no idea it was so complicated. However I can envision all sorts of stuff hitting the air every time I flush. It is like when someone farts – smelling it means you ingested it. Pleasant.

Another reference to the Shallows.

These guys are amazing:

Penn says we should compare their relationship not to a loveless marriage but to that of “two guys manning a 7/11 down the street. If they aren’t best buddies what do they care, as long as the coffee machine is working and the shelves are stacked? Teller and I work together every day, but socially we go out together maybe only once a year.”

Super strange brew but these guys are amazing. I love how deep they are about life, magic and the ability to astound people.

I talked about AVH last time and now his company is picked up by Flipboard:

The first version of Flipboard just hit the Apple app store tonight, but the next version will be even more interesting, as it will be powered by the relevance engine built by Ellerdale. In recent weeks, Flipboard acquired Ellerdale, which had developed a set of real-time search and discovery tools based on Twitter. Ellerdale co-founder and CTO Arthur van Hoff has joined Flipboard as CTO.

Thought this was funny – what people search for that is KPI related…

kpis for office boy
sales kpi apple
mobile kpi
kpis of 7/11
we have no kpis
kpi for creative people
keyperformanceindicators
key performance indicators for coffee sh
kpi for startup
ui of kpi
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nokpis

I miss 4th of July with my family. Going to Donner Lake, swimming in the freezing cold water, bbq’ng and then watching fireworks. Those were the days. Sometimes I think growing up really sucks. Shanan looks to be on holiday. Props.

Before I get to Nokia  – a few other things…

Diaspora – I am really pulling for these guys. Not just because of FB hate but I like the model of doing product development in the open:

People have been asking us almost every day what our development schedule is, and when we plan to finish exactly, and the honest truth is we don’t have an exact day. With one week “sprints,” lots of end-to-end, user driven features are being added every day. We try and “theme” our months to be features around a given area.

Will this work ? :

In another groundbreaking move, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has launched a plugin for the popular blog-publishing tool WordPress (see disclosure below) that allows web sites to embed the full text of Guardian news stories and other content for free. The plugin comes with a catch though: Sites also have to embed the newspaper’s advertising. The new tool is part of an ambitious program of opening the paper up to the web — a move that got its start in May of this year when The Guardian launched its “open platform,” which allows developers to use the publisher’s open API to create apps and services that include the newspaper’s content.

It is interesting seeing this compared to the rising pay walls and the state of content. I am not sure it will be a slam dunk but I love where it is going. Sure – embed our content but allow us to make some money from it. Not a bad trade-off really. What would be interesting is if let’s say I drive a lot of traffic and the make some money – shouldn’t I get a cut of it?

This shit is so good:

My own Facebook birthday was a complete disaster. I’ve been logging on to the site since before they opened it up to the general public and I swear, I’m well-liked on the outside. But when my birthday arrived, there was nothing more than a couple messages from those two friends everyone has who always comment on everything anyone posts. I expected my Facebook wall to look like Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party, and instead I got a panoramic shot from the now abandoned set of Deadwood. And this rebuff came only a couple months after I had to watch my wife my scroll the length of the Torah to get through her Facebook birthday wishes.

This ain’t half bad either – is Social Networking ruining humanity?

The US is so screwed, I mean that is what it feels like:

By contrast, China’s fiscal stimulus has been more effective, partly because China is at a different stage of its development. Citizens of Beijing can now use subways to go 50 kilometres to the summer palace for almost nothing, while residents of Shanghai are making plans to walk along West Lake in Hangzhou, getting there on the new super fast train. In short, parts of China have a first world infrastructure that will help to stimulate domestic demand and more balanced regional development. Unfortunately, the US fiscal spending plan more closely resembles that of Japan than China – and is likely to have the same minimal or even counter-productive impact. Away from home, American citizens are increasingly voting with their feet. In Hong Kong, so many US passport holders fear the deluge of US taxes that will inevitably follow the spending binge that it can now apparently take as much as 11 months to secure an appointment at the US consulate to surrender US citizenship.

I am happy to be an American but I have to say I have been living overseas for 10 years now. I miss my family, some of the shopping (things are just cheaper there) and I miss big open roads to ride motorcycles on that I did not have to pay 2.5 times their value. Apart from that – I think I am better where I am. When I read stuff like this I know I am – American is in debt, not doing the right things to deal with it and the services rendered for taxes paid will only go down more. Given I don’t live there I sometimes wonder what it is I am paying for?

Nokia – I think about it all the time as it is and then my buddy Pak Budi writes this:

Let’s see how this new platform works and how the market reacts. Since I will attend the Nokia World 2010 in London, September 14-15, so hopefully I would hear Nokia’s latest strategy and could see their new MeeGo devices. Come on, Nokia. This is your (last) chance to impress the smart-phone world! At least, trying to convince me that you have better device and platform.

There are many reasons why I find this interesting. One is Budi is going to London and I am not. I may have to change that. The other thing is Nokia regularly points to Indonesia as a position of strength. This was the land of the Communicator and now the country moving the most C3s but Budi is the canary in the coal mine. Blogger, media pundit, geek and gadget freak as well as pure Indonesian – he is all but giving up on Nokia. This is trouble. I played with the N8 this past weekend and was impressed but would I use it over an iPhone or an Android device? Not sure yet but it was slick. Point is – if Budi is saying this – Nokia has a problem.

But it gets worse:

I can’t continue to support a manufacturer who puts out such craptastic ‘flagships’ as the N97, and who expects me to use services that even most of Nokia’s own employees don’t use. I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations.

This is the problem with big companies like Nokia. They can’t focus. Too many OSs, too many crappy machines and a reputation that some folks won’t carry a decent Nokia cause they know someone is running around with a crappy Nokia. That is why people buy brand names – they want non-tainted affiliations.

This part is so spot on:

To Nokia, you guys are losing. Hard. Wake the hell up. Doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results is the definition of insanity.  I’ve been a huge Nokia fan since my 2nd cellphone, and I just can’t do it any longer. You guys aren’t competing like you once were, and everyone but you seems to see that. You used to build the world’s best smartphones, the world’s best cameras, the world’s best GPS units – you’ve lost pretty much all of that, and with nothing to show for it. You unveiled your Ovi vision over 2 years ago – I was there. Today, it’s still a complete mess. I have to log in every single time I visit the site – regardless of how many times I check the ‘remember me’ box. I spent 6 months (and about 3 hours at Nokia World 2009) trying to find someone to help me with Ovi Contacts on the web – no one knew who to point me to. You spent millions of dollars purchasing your Ovi pieces – Ovi Files, Ovi Share, and a host of other little companies – are you proud of what you ‘built’ with them? Most of your own employees (that I’ve talked to) don’t even use them, so why should I?

I have talked to many a Nokia employee who can’t even get Ovi to work most of the time. Nuts. So if this dude, a Symbian fanboy, is giving up then what will happen next? Worse is that most people will tell you that Symbian development is harder than J2ME, iPhone and Android so if Nokia can’t make it easier for developers then what can they offer?

If Nokia thinks a blog post like this is going to help – think again:

Symbian and MeeGo are the best software for our smartest devices. As such, we have no plans to use any other software. Despite rumors to the contrary, there are no plans to introduce an Android device from Nokia. There has also been some confusion about Symbian and Nseries. The Nokia N8 will be our only Nseries device on Symbian^3. Of course, we ‘never comment on future products’, but a Symbian^4 Nseries device is a strong possibility. A very strong possibility

All this did was add to my confusion and the smiley face almost makes me want to cry. This guy just said yes we have 2 OSes and we might keep having 2 and then again maybe one. We are not sure yet – Nokia if you are not sure then who is?

For me, my first hand-phone, was a Nokia. I still buy them from time to time when I need a cheap phone that I know works but a smart phone – I would not touch most of the Nokia smart phones since most of them are overprices bricks. I played with the N8 and have hope but I think Nokia needs to get hip fast or they are in trouble. This means Apple and Android take over and RIM holds on to the keyboard freaks. This is not a good thing.

I like this if I were a time traveler:

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what I’d do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.

Love the cheesy photos – well cheesy only in the sense that they are now but wouldn’t be back in the 70’s. Nice.

Nokia. What can one say then wow how the mighty have fallen. We can say all we want that they have he feature phone market or they own rural india but the problem they are not in the growth markets. And if they ever did adopt android that would have to be admitting defeat – no?

I think the iPhone 4 is going to crush it. People I know who never even wanted one think they have to have one now. My friends or family who have old iPhones were considering something from android – not now. I think the defining innovation for this phone will be Facetime.

Curated app stores, despite app developers bitching, seems to be better:

Overall we estimate that $6,000,000 has been paid out to developers for games, and $15,000,000 has been paid out on apps. That is a total of $21,000,000, almost 50x lower than the amount paid out to devs on iPhone.

This really indicates how much of a cottage industry the paid Android Market remains, with insufficient sales numbers to warrant full-time labor for paid content. Other approaches, such as ad-supported apps, may prove to be more sustainable.

With time this will change as android continues to grow but it is no different than why I might be a mac versus a pc. I appreciate the difference in build quality, the available ecosystem and the gains in productivity. Apple has created a better app store with all the momentum but it could easliy change.

Congrats to Flickr on their new look and the kudos it is ganering:

For those using Flickr every day, such quirks will quickly fade and there’s no doubt that the redesign is a vast improvement. Flickr also claims that page load times are faster, though we didn’t notice a huge difference while previewing the test site. Still, loading a larger photo without slowing down the page will likely be good enough for most users.

Required reading:

Pixar’s approach to creativity is striking for two reasons. The first is that the company puts people before projects. Most Hollywood studios start by hunting down promising ideas and then hire creative teams to turn them into films. The projects dictate whom they hire. Pixar starts by bringing in creative people and then encourages them to generate ideas. One of its most successful recruits has been Brad Bird, who has presided over two Oscar-winning feature films, “The Incredibles” (in which he also provided a character’s voice) and “Ratatouille”.

It sounds so easy but pretty much everywhere I have worked products or maintaining them always seems to be more important than finding the right people and nurturing them. It is hard to do and means profits can’t be the first goal but it is probably better for the company in the long run. Some really nice takeaways in this article.

I love daring fireball – I can’t lie but it is for his little comments more than anything.

It started with this:

Yesterday Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than 600,000 of Apple’s new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions. Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock.

Then gruber says this:

According to AT&T, that’s 10 times higher than the first-day pre-orders for the iPhone 3GS last year.

This is very good news for Android, because Vic Gundotra told us at I/O that Android is ahead of the iPhone in U.S. sales.

he kills me and I am not even a fanboy – I don’t have an iPhone.

😉