By Joe Padre
3rd March 2011. 20:37
Category Archives: Blog
Here’s a quick GDC11 recap, or “re-play”, of Sony Ericsson’s activities from March 2.
I recently tweeted that I love working at a big consumer facing company. I’ve been lucky in that in many of the places I’ve worked I’ve been able to interact directly with the people using what I’ve produced, but at the same time I feel that I’ve been unlucky in that I haven’t always been able to receive when they’ve wanted to reciprocate.
In my presentation series over the last few years a key recurrent theme has been what’s sometimes called “the gift economy” (and I recommend Tor Nørretranders’ excellent book The Generous Man on the subject). What we usually refer to as business, “the gold economy”, is only part of all the ways humans interact, and keep track of the value of those interactions.
Another part of my message has been the evolution of interaction from static, to search, to social. It’s very obvious that social is part of the gift economy, and vice versa. The concept of social currency captures this pretty accurately.
It’s not enough interacting one-way with everyone around you, your company and the products you create. As Eric von Hippel has shown, innovation tends to happen outside of your chosen four walls. That’s true also for the reputation based economy, the social currency, where the value of something kept behind closed doors would be less than if it’s made public. The observation of interest here being that this is true not only for things, but for the persons involved in creating those things as well.
The value of your employees increase the more they’re able to interact with everyone else. When their ideas are made visible they’re vetted and the social currency of both the employees and the ideas themselves are made part of the global knowledge economy. The alternative is for your employees and ideas to wither behind an iron curtain, unable to openly compete on equal terms.
I suggest porous companies, those that let ideas and their proponents be part of something bigger, are not only able to make better use of global knowledge but also to offer a more attractive workplace. Open Innovation is thus not only a buzzword affecting the way you do product development, but also part of the cost & benefits package you offer your employees.
When you have your next incredible idea, you’re going to talk to people whom you know do great stuff. If the great stuff I’ve done is locked inside a filing cabinet with our legal department, that won’t be me.
The design of the Xperia™ X10 mini is much appreciated by many people, and this year it was also rewarded the Red dot design award. But what thoughts and ideas was put into the design of the Xperia™ X10 mini?
Well, we hooked up with Matthias Kierysch, colour material designer at Sony Ericsson, to find out more:
Read more about this on Sony Ericsson Developer World.
The first stage competition of the Ericsson Application awards is now over, and the lucky winners were Team SnowBugs. They certainly made an impact on the jury with their Hollywood-inspired application video. Watch their video here.
Karl-Johan Dahlström.
Next week Karl-Johan Dahlström from Sony Ericsson’s Developer World will be talking on the topic “Why Android™ is not enough”, at the Apps World conference in London, UK. Certainly an interesting subject, where the point is that Android is important to Sony Ericsson, but it is not enough to only have Android to be the smart phone market leader.
That is why Sony Ericsson has created the Xperia™ brand, which is based on three pillars: Android, Sony and great Sony Ericsson hardware and software design. At Apps World, Karl-Johan will explain more on how this can be turned into a winning formula. Read more about these thoughts in Karl-Johan’s blog post on the Apps World web site.
The event will take place on 30 Nov -1 Dec at Olympia, London, UK. Read more about the event on the Apps World web site.
The Open Mobile Summit, which will be held at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in San Francisco on November 8-10, brings together many of the most powerful people in the wireless and internet industries for discussions on how to build and monetize an open mobile ecosystem.
With a wide ranging set of keynotes, panel discussions, and experienced-based presentations, the event is sure to address many of the key issues and opportunities related to open mobile applications and services.
I recently made a comment in a thread on future developments in bio technology with the view that I already consider myself to be technically augmented. Thanks to my mobile and its always-on connection to the Internet I have access not only to global human knowledge, but to my social circles and situational as well as location based information at the point of need.
Actually, that’s only true most of the time. When traveling, although there are some exceptions, that augmentation of mine is cut off. I become disconnected – and it hurts.
I’m writing this while on a train, which is one of the more positive traveling experiences. My mobile is connected throughout the trip, and if the train company offers WiFi (or I bring my mobile broadband) my laptop is as well. Since the train manages to arrive at my destination without needing my constant attention and guidance, I can also write blog posts like this one. Let’s claim that trains fulfill two of the three needs I’ve identified as being important when traveling – and let me get back to what they are in more detail later.
Tomorrow I’m going to catch a plane to Munich, where I will participate in a panel on Thursday with a topic related to this blog post. I fly quite a lot. When in an air plane, being connected becomes more complicated. We’re told to turn our mobiles off (with dubious motivation, but that’s a topic for another time) and to only use non-wireless equipment while in the air. To be fair, there are some airlines now offering in-flight WiFi, but it’s still an exception. I’d say flying currently only fulfills one, maybe two, of the three needs we have when traveling.
The conference I’m going to be at is Telematics Munich, an event focusing on the in-car digital environment. I like cars. I’ve had a driver’s license for about 18 years now and for most of that time I’ve commuted daily by car. For traveling, it’s a strange environment. While passengers in a car have a similar experience to passengers on a train, it’s quite hard to be connected as a driver. There’s no problem with the actual connection to the Internet, but since constant attention is needed to stay (safely) on the road there’s a struggle of concentration. Some research claims that the dangers we associate with using mobiles when driving is actually due to the shift in attention, and while headsets and voice commands allow us to at least have our hands free it’s still not optimal, and this is an area where I project a lot of future development to take place (not only self-driving cars, as is being researched by our friends at Google). Driving, currently, can be said to barely fulfill a single one of the three needs we have when traveling.
In my view, those needs are:
1) Being connected [to the Internet]
2) Having available attention [to act upon events]
3) Reciprocating information [about the travel itself]
This third need is barely being tapped into at the moment, and this is where I see very fertile grounds for new ideas and new business opportunities. One of the first well executed solutions I came in contact with was Waze, the crowd sourced navigation service. It feels quite natural that it’s the current speed with which you can travel on a specific road that’s important – not the speed limit or historic data. The current road conditions being easily crowd sourced from the very ones currently traveling on that road, and easily collected through their Internet connected mobiles.
But what about all the other dynamic conditions around us when traveling? Seatguru helps me select good seats when flying, but how can I find out where the currently shortest queue is for the bathrooms? Is there fresh coffee in the bistro on this train right now? Do I know the persons in the car in the other lane up ahead?
Let’s call it social. It’s either the perfect use of an otherwise overused term, or it’s at least the best one I could find. I want traveling to become more social, dynamically, at the point of need, where everybody reciprocates.
This is what I want to discuss in my panel at Telematics Munich. I’m currently on the first leg of a train-flight-car trip to get there.
The Android force was strong at last week’s CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2010 event in San Francisco, CA, USA. Almost a dozen Android devices were showcased – some with large touchscreens, qwerty keyboards, and dual cameras – along with the latest in mobile applications and services.
The show’s Android Bootcamp, hosted by SVAndroid, further provided a broad range of technical and business information from Android experts, solution leaders, and developers, and included an opportunity for Android startup companies to demo apps live in front of the audience.
Read about the CTIA event in more detail on the Developer World site. And remember to check our Event Calender for upcoming events.
Erik Hellman.
Ever wondered how a manufacturer goes about to implement Android on a phone? Interested in how Sony Ericsson works with the Android platform? Erik Hellman from Sony Ericsson will present his experiences from working with Android at the Android Only event in Stockholm, Sweden, on Sept 29-30.
APPNATION 2010, Day 1
I recently had to opportunity to attend the APPNATION Conference in San Francisco, CA, USA on Sept 13-14. My main purpose for going was to provide general media coverage on behalf of the Sony Ericsson Developer World for this two-day event. The show was comprised of over 1,000 app developers, media companies, mobile ad networks, venture capitalists and other players in the app ecosystem. One interesting estimate came from Drew Ianni, chairman and founder of APPNATION, who reported recent research that there will be one million mobile apps available for download by the year 2010.
![Showing HTML5 device orientation on Xperia with Ice Cream Sandwich [demo]](http://img.youtube.com/vi/Q4CTkjaYumM/default.jpg)
