At Nokia, we have the audacious goal of improving the health, wealth and education of our users and bringing them these benefits regardless of their geographic location or economic situation. But this post is not about Nokia, it is about the small developer or entrepreneur that wants to make a difference.

For a lot of people a mobile phone is their window to the Internet. Nikhil Jakatdar, the CEO of VuClip, told me that people are paying 50 to 80 rupees ($1 – $1.50) to view videos on feature phones in India, since they don’t have computers through which you can get access. And this is just one example.

The phone is the means to a better life. Nokia Life Tools is a great example where aspiration meets affordability. Working with our local operator, government and third party content partners, we created a service that provides critical locally business-relevant information like crop prices, government advice on modern farming techniques, medical, emergency and educational information, and entertainment. SMS based pricing and installments payment options to ensure that people can afford it. Even though they can opt out anytime, the service is very sticky.

And big ideas can really impact lives and is a means for critical information. For example, in Ghana, mPedigree saves lives by letting people know if their medication is genuine or counterfeit. This is a quite serious and life saving application in markets where counterfeit drugs are a chronic problem. And, also created with a small third party partner, Nokia Tej in Kolhapur, India, is demonstrating how mobile phones can increase sales efficiency and productivity in the textile industry.

One quick plug for any creative minds reading this post, Nokia is now looking for the next big idea – and we are willing to fund it. In fact, Nokia will invest $1 million (USD) in the winning idea submitted to the Growth Economy Venture Challenge.

And, to help pick the winning idea, Nokia has recruited a global panel of judges, including: Executive Producer of TED Media June Cohen; filmmaker Jesse Dylan; blogger Erik Hersman; journalist Jennifer Schenker; industry insider Ram Shriram; Rodolfo Lara Torres from the World Economic Forum; and high-tech veteran Joseph “Yossi” Vardi.

Submissions are due by July 31, 2010, and we have received great ideas from all over the globe including China, Egypt, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, Norway, Pakistan, Romania, the UK and many other locations. I hope we also get a lot of ideas from the creative minds based here in the Silicon Valley!

I am a junky for that “aha” moment of finding an solution to a technical puzzle. It is why I love being an engineer and working in the technology field. There are always problems to solve; either something is not working the way it is suppose to and you need to debug it; or even better it is working exactly the way it is suppose to but you need to make it do something else. I know I will never win a Nobel Prize, but I still can find and solve pesky problems and feel very satisfied. Sometimes you get stuck in the doldrums, overwhelmed by lots problems and apparent lack of elegant solutions. And, I do not know any magic to force inspiration to come on command. But, last week I did remind myself that there are good ways to get some mental fresh air and get a fix of aha moments.

Every spring my kid’s school has parent volunteers come in and teach mini-classes to the 4th and 5th graders on Friday afternoons for the last month of school. Last week I taught a group of kids Boolean Logic. I got to share in that moment when one by one each of the eight kids had the aha moment and understood the basic Boolean logic functions and could relate them to the truth tables. Then the excitement when they realized their understanding was scalable and they could work through a logic function propagating values.

Determining the difference between an AND gate and an OR gate by seeing when the light lit up on a bread board did not solve any of my problems at work… But, an afternoon working with the kids did remind me that the aha moments are out there. So I start this week a little bit more optimistic and energized.
-Quinn

Dr. Jacobson is a Research Leader at Nokia Research Center,Palo Alto. He leads the Mobile Computer Systems team researching next generation high-performance mobile platforms. Dr. Jacobson has been with Nokia since 2006 leading efforts in both mobile services and system architecture. Prior to Nokia he was at Intel and Sun Microsystems where he was, among other things, the Chief Architect of Sun’s UltraSparc IV processors.

Q: Henry, in your words, what is Nokia Research Center or “NRC”?
NRC is a cradle of new far-reaching ideas for Nokia… While Nokia does a brisk business of ideating and innovating many products and services in the name of going to market, NRC seeks to generate alternatives outside of the scope of typical product development. We operate on a longer time scale, we represent the Big “R” [Research], and our motives are less directed.

Our charter is an exploratory one, and as a result we also take larger risks and often fail. From my perspective, if we had a 100% success rate, or even 75% success rate, we would be doing Nokia a disservice because we obviously would not be not reaching far enough.

Q: What is your role at Nokia? Particularly in light of the recent announcement of Rich Green as CTO?
I am the head of all things NRC, which as I mentioned before means I am the owner of Nokia’s long-term research and development. I enable NRC to give Nokia alternatives to ensure our competitive future. Rich as CTO is my “brother of the present” working to secure our technological competitiveness today. We will work in tandem and yet independently.

Q: Since this is for Nokia’s Silicon Valley blog, what does NRC do at its Palo Alto and Berkeley locations?
The way we are organized, we treat Palo Alto and Berkeley as one location under one Lab Director, John Shen. They are associated with two schools, Stanford and UC Berkeley, on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay. Both world-class in their educational and research activities. Why are we here? The same reason we are at any of our 12 locations worldwide, to be a proactive member of the local ecosystem. In this case the ecosystem of Silicon Valley. Obviously the Valley is a critical part of the world where computer innovation (defined by me as a range of hardware, software and networking/cloud technologies) has always been explosive. And, as we all know, mobile phones are becoming ever more like computers, and we need access to partners and talent in the computing space to innovate and compete effectively.

Q: What Bay Area NRC projects are getting to a point where you think they will be of interest to the public?
Naturally we are a large organization so we have a lot going on at any one moment that is attention-getting, but a couple from the Bay Area would be projects we call Family Story Play and Terminal Mode.

Family Story Play is all about collaborative user experiences and while some of the innovation is in the technology, a lot of it is in how people use the technology and how the system facilitates new types of rich interaction.

Terminal Mode is about your mobile device becoming the computing hub of your car for navigation, entertainment, environmental, and other purposes. It is your mobile phone “jacking” into your car so you can interact with it via in-car controls such as the in-dash touch screen, accessing applications designed to enrich your driving experience. We are very excited to be on the forefront by proposing an industry specification around this and look forward to seeing developers engage to create applications specifically designed for in-car use. The car is about to become an extension of mobile computing, and therefore mobile developers will already be well versed in those platforms. And, drivers can now “upgrade” their car simply by downloading new applications or purchasing a new phone.

Q: For the sake of those who don’t know you, what is your background?
I like to say that I am in my 38th year of hacking… A computer scientist with extremely broad interests ranging from theoretical physics to social sciences. I also like to say I am a “wanna-be biologist” since I almost studied molecular biology early on in my career. While I went the computer science route, biology remains fascinating and inspiring to me. I was so interested in research early on that academia became a life.

I went into private industry because I saw that there were many new things to learn there, and I’m been extremely satisfied with that choice, especially in light of my current work [at NRC]. I think it was the right thing for me, because I believe that after a period of time in each place, in each competency you reach a plateau of learning…at least the speed of learning.

In academia at a certain seniority point you reach a type of saturation with the things you do…you have all your labs, you are sitting in all the possible program committees, you are giving keynotes, you have a lot of projects, you have graduated a lot of Ph.D students, and so on. So you have to decide where you go: you can go further in the university administration, or you can try to take your research to new levels, or you can look outside for ways to grow.

Nokia gave me this opportunity to make a new kind of impact, and we all want to make an impact, and I feel like I have an ability to do so on a global scale. Across growth economies in particular, mobile technology is changing peoples lives for the better in a very concrete way on a scale that is nearly impossible to implement from a university setting, and being part of this I find to be extremely gratifying.

Posted by Brett Murray, June 7, 2010

For the purpose of this conversation, let’s define the term “club” as any community, group list, alumni list (schools and employers), list serve, IM group, etc. Using this definition, if I count all of the clubs to which I belong, the number is quite large and increasingly difficult to keep track of.

Next, let’s expand on this definition by considering the purpose, scope, usefulness and lifespan of a club. For instance, is Craigslist a club? On Craigslist you can buy a car, trade various items and services, ask questions, get answers and generally investigate a variety of topics and areas. Based on these criteria, one might consider MySpace and Ning clubs. But what of the late GeoCities? Was that a club? And what about clubs whose purpose or focus is less pragmatic but still fun?

We’ve seen a wide variety of ways to communicate and interact with people throughout the Web 1.0 days. We’ve watched and participated as they have appeared, evolved and/or died. In this respect, you can view clubs through a Darwinian natural selection sort of lens. Now there are new breeds that have adapted and endured to become better, or at least more accepted versions of clubs.

In a sense, all of these clubs – a.k.a. social networks – have come and gone with the single purpose of connecting people in various ways. An interesting exercise is to take the components of “Old Clubs,” e.g. email, IM, chat rooms, list serves, postings and classifieds, put them in a Darwinian blender, apply Web 2.0 rules and see what you get. Is it Facebook, Twitter and clubs yet to be invented or re-invented? And what are the qualities that support survival and further adaptations?

Posted by Atif Hussein, May 17, 2010    

Twenty years ago, when I arrived in the Bay Area from the UK,
I could talk to my mom for 10 minutes for $10. Now, the kids talk to Grandma on Skype for an hour on Sunday morning and it doesn’t cut into my budget. But there is another side to this increasing and easy connectivity and I don’t know if it is friend or nuisance, but it is disrupting my life at an alarming rate.

As I was trying to stay connected to my family from a continent away, email emerged and I could get a reply within minutes. My email experience quickly grew to my friends, family, my bank, my brokerage account and online shopping. In a short time I needed multiple identities to manage my activities and that doesn’t even include my IM accounts. I was having trouble knowing who I was “logged in as,” and not in the reflective existential way. I literally could not remember all my passwords and account names.

Enter the lure of these cool new social networking sites to stay connected to friends and family, leaving the business stuff to email. Good plan. I have my friends on Facebook and great conversations when I tweet; this is just what I needed! Wait a minute, who just started following me on Twitter? I don’t even know that person…and these friend requests, I have no idea who these people are. Yikes! How did I get 486 friends on Facebook? This was supposed to keep me connected to the people who are important in my life.

I have to admit that at times I feel like I am riding the technology roller coaster. I don’t want to get off, but I need some way to make it work for me. Some connections are deeply important to me, others not so much. Is there a way to have the best of both worlds? Can I keep in touch with the crowd and still have the time for the deep, meaningful conversations with those that matter most? Can I manage staying connected without being overwhelmed with friend requests and information? What about the pieces I don’t want to share with everyone, just a few? At Nokia, my quest is to look for these answers…I would love to know how you are dealing with this.

Some people say being cute isn’t everything, but in this case I would argue being Qt actually means a lot. Nokia’s Qt cross platform development and UI framework is hyper-relevant in today’s increasingly fragmented development environment.

Rich Wong recently stated in a post on Techcrunch that “mobile fragmentation is forever,” but if you own 44.4% of the smartphone market, then you can do something to improve that situation while also providing access for developers and publishers to an enormous end user base.

For the past 18 months, we have worked very hard to simplify our tools using Qt and, therefore, to improve access to the large Nokia audience. Nothing out there is simpler, nor as robust, as Qt. For example, if you are a Java developer, it will take you less than two weeks to get ‘up to speed’ on Qt, that’s pretty simple. And with regard to power, Qt is used by developers across the world to create some really amazing applications, like the VLC player, Google Earth, Skype and is used by organizations from the European Space Agency for true ‘rocket science’ to The Foundry supporting a huge number of special effects creators in the Hollywood entertainment industry.

And on a final note, Qt will also give developers access to a great many devices running on a common platform, from cars to TVs, as the newly announced MeeGo platform will also run on Qt. These days Qt-ness is really attracting a lot of attention.

Since taking the role of VP of Forum Nokia last July, I’m often asked “What does Nokia have to offer to developers in North America?” It’s a fair question and I love to answer it. Nokia has a lot to offer!

Our size and scale means we have a lot of customers and a variety of devices. But what is interesting is what developers can do with our devices that they can’t on other platforms. Take for instance, Qik, who enables the sharing of video via the mobile via access to our video APIs. Or Fring who is able to use background processing for their Skype video calls. And don’t get me started on Flash. Nokia has shipped more than 400 million Flash-enabled devices (since October 2009). It can be the difference between “Free” and “Fantastic”.

We believe that in the future, you can argue that it is true today, that apps will be either free or fantastic (that is not to say that they cannot be both). Customers are willing to pay for something that is fantastic and to offer fantastic, the app has to be very compelling, very useful and very relevant.

For the majority of free, casual and social applications, the key is a low cost of investment and rapid development time; building web apps with Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) comes immediately to mind as the best choice of technology where developers can use standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And with more than 30 Nokia device models (as of Oct 2009) shipped with WRT, the platform opportunity for mobile apps is sizable at a very low cost.

Fantastic though, requires much more lower-level access, meaning much deeper integration with device features. Access to the camera, phone book, telephony APIs for example, give developers the ability to create interesting, differentiated applications. For developers looking for fantastic, Nokia’s Symbian platform offers such access. And the newly announced Maemo device, the Nokia N900, goes even further in enabling access for the open source developer.

Further, for developers interested in cross-platform development (across mobile platforms and desktop-to-mobile), Nokia offers Qt.

A variety of development options can sometimes be confused with complexity. And we acknowledge we have a long way to go to make it simpler for the developer. The teams are working hard on that as I write. But today, our development options, our size and strength, our strong carrier relationships and market knowledge – along with a developer support organization, Forum Nokia, offers a lot to the North American developer.

I should point out that Free can sometimes mean free in cost in exchange for something else, like advertising. What do you think about Free and Fantastic?