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!

Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco, CA

Nokia Speaker: Mike Manos, VP Hosting Operations Production

Nokia Speaker: Rob Taylor, Director, Forum Nokia

Theme: What are the development platforms available and what are the development and business considerations, market characteristics of Consumer and Enterprise mobile apps?

Nokia Speaker: Samir Agarwal, Head of MeeGo Operations

1:00pm – 1:45pm [Panel] Who Owns the User? With mobile computing moving to the cloud, a host of new mobile winners like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and cool app developers such as Pandora and Yelp are benefiting from mobile payments. Can device makers and carriers, who used to own the user through the SIM card, remain relevant? You can bet they’ll find a way…

Panelists:
» Kevin Thau, Twitter, Director of Mobile
» Samir Agarwal, Nokia, Head of MeeGo Operations

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    

June 11, Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf, 9:00am to 5pm

During the Qt Training day we will have a technical look on few Qt features that make the development of mobile Qt applications effective and help you in generating the “WOW!” effect. The event is an excellent opportunity for a developer to hear about the latest Qt tools and features – Nokia Qt SDK and the new Qt Mobility APIs. Participants can also try the features personally with hands-on sessions.

Additional information can be found at the registration page.

May 12, St Regis Hotel, San Francisco

Nokia Speaker: John Gardner, Nokia Growth Partners

2:15 to 2:55
VC Panel: Getting Funded in the new Mobile Economy
The art of securing funding has become more of a challenge in this post-recession economy. Business models around mobile entertainment content, apps, and content platforms have evolved over the past 5 years, thanks to the exploding growth of smartphone use and mobile application development. This panel will have an open discussion with our attendees about what business models work, what investors are looking for, new exit strategies, and what kind of funding options are available for mobile app developers, entertainment content producers and mobile tech firms.
Speakers:
David Zilberman – Comcast Interactive Digital
Hamet Watt – True Ventures/WV Labs
Toby Nuber – RBC Capital
John Malloy – Blue Run Ventures
John Gardner – Nokia Growth Partners

Speaker: Dr Ora Lassila, Principal Technologist, Nokia Services & Member of the Nokia CEO Technology Council

To meet with Dr Lassila, please contact karen lachtanski at nokia dot com.