Mapsters...

Brand new global campaign from the client. I like. Go to www.themapsters.com.

Geo-tagging and route-mapping in the Gold Coast

Before I left Malaysia I said I wanted to try out route-mapping in the Gold Coast with the help of the beta Sportstracker application. What I wanted to do was walk around the city, take some pictures, and have it recorded on a map so I could easily share some of that experience with you.

Click on the below picture to see the results:



Couple of notes I'd like to make here:
1. I turned on the GPS to get the initial lock and then for the most part of the rest of the trip, my N95 sat in my pocket. The magic is that with the initial lock, the application then uses the accelerometer to determine the direction and number of steps you took to 'map' the route. I did take it out two or three times again to get a re-lock, but as you can see from the route, the accelerometer was quite accurate.

2. I snapped pictures along the way and I think it's quite descriptive of what we did. Basically, this route was mapped when we to take a walk around to do some grocery shopping. Along the way, we passed some awesome sites and snapped a few pictures. There's another route that we took that I mapped with some pretty good pics as well. All the pictures snapped are compiled as media and geo-tagged to location by the Sportstracker application.

Overall, I had some fun doing this and it worked beautifully even without a Wi-Fi connection. Of course, the GPS took a little while to get the initial lock (about 4 minutes for me) without the help of A-GPS, but after that, the re-locks happened real quick. CNet's already predicted earlier this year that GPS-enabled cameras will be the next big thing and from my personal experience, they can't be far from wrong. What will rule, at the end of the day, is ease-of-use and the simplicity in getting the mass consumer to understand this new experience.

Okay, that's it for this update, I'm thinking of budget-travellers guide to Gold Coast as a future post but we'll see how that goes.

*For the sake of disclosure: I do work for Nokia as a consultant. However, the above opinions are purely my own, coming from the corner of my geek personality but probably influenced by my deep(er) knowledge of the technologies Nokia works on. Which often make me exclaim (cool!) anyway.

Maps on Ovi

Client had another interesting video crossing blogs today. Personally, I'm impressed (nothing to do with me working on the account), this is just what I need when I'm planning a holiday in Australia :).

Proper stories here and here. What do you think?

Maps [check], GPS [check], Internet [check] this is what I'm gonna do in Brisbane.

This is awesome. I'm inspired. When I go to Gold Coast and Brisbane next month, this is what I'm going to do.



Okay, first off, Stavros is a fictional character Nokia created for this pretty (clever) online advertising campaign. But the technology is real. Yeap, you can download Nokia Sports Tracker, use the built in GPS on your N95 or N82, and send the routes you've walked and photos you've taken online. Perfect for chronicling your adventures. You can even create the map and embed it on your blog; check here.

So what I'm gonna do is try doing this whilst I'm in Aussie-land with the wife and see if it's really as simple as its made out to be. Hopefully, I'll come back with lots of pictures and interesting routes to try.

Jason, Robin, Ernest, interested in seeing if we can map a couple of mountain bike trails and post them online?

Of course, in case you didn't already know, in the interest of full disclosure, Nokia is one of my clients but I am not writing this post for anything remotely job-related.

Random Nokia stuff

The client's keeping me busy with work, so I might as well post these here.

Firstly, in case you haven't heard already, there's a Nokia Independent Artists Club (IAC) gig happening this Saturday. Scroll down and click on the scans of the flyer for details. Given that I'm obviously no expert in the local music scene, I'm told that the acts are actually pretty good. So do drop by and have a listen.





Secondly, the smart people over at the Nokia global marketing team have come up with a fun aside to help us spend some more time in the office. It's actually a teaser for N-Gage , Nokia's new gaming platform / service. Go check it out by clicking this link: www.get-out-and-play.com.

Oh, and... the arkanoid clone is not the teaser, it's just to help you kill time while the flash animation loads. So play a while whilst you wait.

N-Gage Screens and my catch of the day

So I spent a good chunk of my morning snapping screenshots of N-Gage games from my N95
so media could use it (disclosure: I work for Nokia. But no, no one paid me to write this). They turned out quite nice and I thought I'd stick'em up here.


This here's the 'dashboard' where at a glance, you can see yourself and a summary of all the information.


The games tab lists the games that you've downloaded and can play.


The rankings tab gives you more information about your reputation (I'm nil!), your friends and how many N-Gage points you've scored through playing offline or online. There's also a friends tab which lets you message online friends or leave them offline messages. You can also hook up with them to start multiplayer games.


Finally, the Showroom tab lets you download games (you can play the trial versions for free) and purchase them subsequently. I bought my first game (yes, bought you people), Creatures of the Deep, for US$ 7.99 which I didn't think was too bad a price. Creatures of the Deep people - fishing is fun.

Creatures of the Deep - why I like fishing.

Kel told me he thought this game was meh and no one would be patient enough to patiently sit by waiting for fish to bite. Especially not in a virtual simulator. I still wanted to try it out and after a couple of passes with the Trial version (they let you score points even with the trial version) I was hooked (no pun intended). This ain't a review, it won't be fair, but I just wanted to share a few screens.


I love the loading screens. Fun quotes appear with each screen.


The world map and the fact you can travel to different locations to fish I thought was fantastic. Being an RPG nut, I liked that you could level up and upgrade your equipment. Level 10 fisherman anyone?


Every little resort has a shop where you can upgrade your gear to catch bigger fish. That piddly beginner's rod you start with won't catch a shark.


Fishing starts with you clicking on a power button to cast your line. The further you cast, the more you'll have to reel in, but also, the better chance of a good catch whilst you're reeling in.


Once it's cast, you have to wait a bit. Urm...to be fair to Kel, this is the part that I find a bit tedious. But I'm not the patient sort anyway.


A bit of smart tapping, and soon, you get a hook! Start struggling to reel it in. Too fast and the line breaks. Too slow and the fish gets away.


Of course, once you've reeled your catch in, you're told what it is and given some experience points (to level up). In this case, my expert skill means I caught a 66.3 KG Yellowfin Tuna.


And made it to the media. :)


And I'll even sneak a screen of FIFA 08.

NGage is live. I'm going fishing.

Yeaps. That's right. Surf over to www.ngage.com to download. The official blog posting is here.

As for me? I'm going fishing. Oh, and if you fancy testing your fishing skills against mine, add me as a friend on NGage. My handle is darthpoke (don't ask why.)



Happy gaming.

Anyone interested in winning a Nokia N82?

Hi guys,

In the midst of all the election posts, I thought I'd just ask if anyone out there wanted to win a Nokia N82.

Nokia Malaysia (full disclosure: my client) is now calling for public entries to join in on the Nokia Nseries Wireless Adventure 2: Discover the Soul of the Night. All you have to do is sign up and if you're one of the eight lucky people selected to run the race on April 5th, you'll win an N82 to keep. The winner of the race will also get to go to Hong Kong. All you have to do is go here or www.nseries.com/soulofthenight



Okay, that's the winning stuff part. I'd also like to share a bit of the whole concept of Discover the Soul of the Night - it's not just a race, but it's an online platform where we're trying to encourage people to go online and post photos of interesting locations, events and activities or just things they've seen at night.

Of course, if you're curious and also want to discover stuff that happens at night, you can also do just that by checking out what other members have posted. Better still, if you use a Nokia Nseries device, you can download an application that'll let you post stuff up immediately.

A Nokia phone that's nothing new

I'm so proud of Nokia (disclosure: one of my clients) today... this is the stuff I used to dream about as a kid - to take something from all the trash in my house and actually make something of it.


This phone's called the 'Remade', simply because it's made out of 100% recyclable or renewable materials. I spent a good while looking at the pictures to try and figure out where the recycled parts came from. You could almost see the aluminum that's similar to what you find in canned drinks, and I've read that the plastics come off recycled plastic bottles. Really interesting.

Anyway, read Jan Chipchase's blog post to get a better picture on the social idea behind Remade. He's got some interesting pictures of a gentlemen "remaking" the phone.

My N95 now knows how to shut up...

... when I flip it over! Yay!

Remember sometime late in 2007 when Nokia (me client) unveiled the Symbian S60 Touch platform that will be making its debut this year with this video?



One of the key features was that the new UI will really start to take advantage of a built-in accelerometer (the thing in your device that detects if the device is moving, face down or tilted). If you watched the above video, the lady just has to flip her phone and it mutes itself. Intuitive, really.

Well, as of today, so can my Nokia N95. This is thanks to a nifty little application called FlipSilent by Tong Ren. It's not yet widely available on the net, but I got my heads up from the guy I think is Malaysia's foremost Symbian expert - Smashpop and he was even kind enough to sign it for me. (As a security feature, not all apps can be installed on your S60 device unless its signed to your IMEI (the unique ID of your device, which you can see by pressing *#06#).



You have to let FlipSilent run in background. The footprint isn't too big - about 50kb so it shouldn't make your device run too slowly.



You get to select which profile it switches to when you flip. You can also select that your phone hangs up. Or, for laughs, get it to ring even louder when you flip!

Okay, still sounds unbelievable. Well, here's a video from Smashpop (because I was too lazy to record my own) that shows what it does in real life:


FlipSilent for Symbian from smashpOp on Vimeo

Too cool? I agree.

Back on Twitter... Coz it's on my N95

A couple of months ago, I gave up on Twitter and joined Jaiku because of a cool S60 app that Jaiku had that meant I could post updates whereever I was from my Nokia N95.

Well, today I discovered a cool little Java app that runs on my N95 just as well and allows me to do essentially what the Jaiku app did and more! Add that to the fact that I have more friends and followers on Twitter (a grand total of 6) than I have on Jaiku, making the switch was a no-brainer.

The app name? Twibble!

All I had to do was surf over to http://www.twibble.de/ , download the app, install it, key in my user details and pronto - Twitter on my Nokia N95. I'm guessing it'll work with just about any S60 device out there.



Twibble lets you post your Twitters (they call it 'tweets' for some reason) via internet (3G, WiFi, whatever) or using Twitters' own proprietary SMS method. Even better, it's location aware and if you got GPS built-in to your device, Twibble will let you post your location too.

Haven't had any problems with Twibble in the 20 minutes I've fiddled with it and I really think it's a cool little app. If you've grown tired with Jaiku (coz it doesn't sync properly!) then try out Twibble and switch back to Twitter for a change. :)

New Nokia N95 Firmware update!

Lol. This piece of news makes me so happy, because I've always guessed a firmware update was waiting to happen, and when this finally happened...it feels great.

Check out: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/6308_The_N95_classic_hits_v20_firmw.php

For the uniniated, the update helps:

1. Faster camera-time between shots
2. Gallery loads up faster
3. Built-in Search 4.0 feature, right in your front-screen
4. Demand Paging with 30 MB free RAM after booting (sounds like a computer? This means more memory to play around with apps)
5. N-Gage Preview and Nokia Music Store applications (yeah...Ovi...mmm...)

*Disclaimer, yes, Nokia is my client, but I also own an N95 (denying the temptation to upgrade to 8GB) and I can surely blog about my own devices and my excitement over a release that affects me most as a consumer. SO there. :)

Nice Hamper or not?

Today, what a pleasant surprise!

So, the story goes I was out for the better part of this afternoon for meetings and helping to manage a TV interview (actually pitched and setup by Vicky). Not really in the mood for work because of yesterday's long night, then when, just 15 minutes after I stepped into the office, a nice yellow hamper came in.

Vicky actually picked up the buzzer first and muttered to me over the divider "Some package for you..."

The delivery guy stepped through the door, and Libby rushed to sign the delivery order. We were all working quite a bit (I was drafting some email) and then Beatrice decided to rush over and check it out...

She yelped.

"David! It's from Nokia!"

"Uh, phone?"

Okay, that wasn't how I responded. I checked out the package and the cool card attached to it and it made me think - "Wah....first present from client liao..."

So, check out these pics:



Yup, there was Famous Amos, Esprit (fruit drink), some Macademian chocolate and oooh... Coffex Turkist coffee.

I was actually a bit puzzled, because clients always tell me to lay off the coffee...so....coffex? Anyway, just wanted to say a big THANK YOU! You really know my taste.

Your next ad agency - Google?

*Disclosure - I work for Text 100 on the Nokia account. This blog posting is purely my viewpoint, taken from my knowledge of the industry, without any confidential information.*

"There's money to be made in online advertising," - [random internet company exec]

There was an interesting article today in The Business Times (yes, I read NST) about how Google was seeing a real rosy future in mobile phone advertising. (read it here) Well, this isn't exactly new news per se, but I just really liked the article as it presented a real concise picture of the next step in the convergence of mobility, communications, technology, services and content.

You see, the first problem companies really had with the internet was how to monetize it. Why? Because the internet is used mainly by a bunch of freeloaders who expect and want everything to be free. Yet, even if you're generating be best content in the world, the moment you ask people to pay for it online, you can expect your readership, listenership or viewership to drop to about 10% of what you've got. Wonder how many people would watch YouTube if you had to pay US$1.00 per clip? Uh-huh.

So, advertising has been the way forward for making money on the Internet, and this one company, Google, has gotten pretty good at it. Indeed, when the then leader Yahoo! was floundering, along came Google with AdSense and voila! we discovered the first truly workable internet advertising model. Of course, it helped that AdSense was really Web 2.0-savvy (simple bloggers could just add AdSense and make money) and the blogosphere was in the middle of its boom.

So now, as we're moving on to the next great phase of technology - the mobile internet - it suddenly makes sense that Google would want in on bringing advertising to the fourth screen - your mobile phone (or device or multimedia computer). Tom Merritt once said on Buzz Out Loud (though I forget which episode), that "Google's goal is to advertise to you wherever you are with whatever means possible." Fantastic plan, actually.

However, Google's probably not the only one moving in this direction this time. Microsoft, via its Live services hopes to attract a couple of eyeballs and sell some advertising as well. Yahoo! is shaping up its own internet advertising offering. Both have solid partnerships with handset manufacturers and are developing application suites that may (and I am heavily speculating here) include advertising in the future. Nokia (and this I know for a fact) has already acquired mobile advertising firm Enpocket and a bunch of other services companies like Twango, and more recently Navteq - so you can expect some innovative new ideas on advertising soon. Do you think Apple might consider moving into advertising too?

So here's the big picture, you now have several big companies steeped in devices, software, or services, all moving towards one zone of competition - advertising. As the internet becomes a more powerful medium, this little niche in advertising may one day become the mainstream mode of reaching people (if it hasn't already). What, then, do you call companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Nokia? Ad agencies?

I'm chatting with you on my mobile...

If you own a Nokia Nseries device and you click onto your download folder, you'll see a new folder pop-up saying "Windows Live". Yup, the Windows Live suite announced last month in Europe has now been made available in Asia.






















I've actually been running this little piece of software for days now since downloading it through MOSH but didn't expect it to reach Asia so quickly.

To be honest, the Windows Live Messenger client is utterly fantastic. So good, in fact, that I've gone ahead and replaced Fring with it. After all, I mostly chat on Windows Live Messenger. No screenshots to share yet coz I don't have a screenshot capture ap on my N95, but I'll get that soon.

Just back from Nokia: Go Play

Just got back from Nokia: Go Play (which I attended as the agency PR manager from Malaysia) and of all the concepts and devices that were shown, this is what I felt standout. The concept of the fourth screen.

Click the below YouTube video to watch. Oh and by the way, if you have Jaiku, drop me a line.

Mosh!

In the interest of full disclosure, let me first say my day job is to do public relations work on behalf of Nokia, through Text 100 their public relations agency. The following is my wholly, totally biased opinion.


Word's leaking around the net with regards to Nokia's just beta-ed Social Networking experiment - MOSH. Funny name I know, but I really love the concept. What MOSH promises is to bring social networking into your mobile device - i.e. your mobile phone or multimedia computer (if you own an Nseries device). Think of it like Friendster, or MySpace, or Facebook. You have your obligatory photo, video, music sharing.

But what I find most interesting about MOSH is the ability to share games and applications through the site. In fact, I just downloaded a working version of Nokia Wireless Presenter (which is free off the Nokia website if you dig deep enough anyway).


Why this is interesting for me is because this allows us to share more forms of content then ever. A recommended game, or a useful application. And when you click on those small little icons for the apps, you get to discuss those apps, let others know if it worked or didn't work for you and discuss them.

This opens the possibility of very targeted conversations going on in the MOSH space where people aren't just discussing a collection of photos, but applications, games and documents. It also opens up interesting questions on intellectual property, but I'm sure Nokia has found a way to safeguard that as with all other sharing sites.

Still, the biggest thing for me is the ability to bring it mobile, open an app that sits on my multimedia computer and get a tailor-made interface that works great for how I want to connect.

Oh, PS. I can invite people to join, apparently. Let me know if you want an invite to the Beta. Or if you already joined, add me: davidlian, to your network.