Alec Saunders SquawkBox

One of the more talked about stories of this week in Barcelona was the appearance of Google Android at Mobile World Congress.  There were several booths showing early prototypes of the OS, and mocked up devices.  At the ARM booth, we were fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the elusive Android.  At first, the rep on the booth was only willing to point us at a prototype device behind a glass bubble.

However, soon after we managed to get a demo of the working software. The video is a little jumpy, but the software is definitely live.  According to the person giving the demo, it’s running on a 200Mhz Arm9 processor as well, which is a seriously underpowered processor.  Looks good, even so.

Serena Glover is one of those entrepreneurs who exudes enthusiasm.  Her company, Twango, was acquired last year by Nokia. At Mobile World Congress, the service was relaunched as Share on Ovi.  I had an opportunity to speak with her during the show, and use the software soon after.

Some of the goals for Share on Ovi were to:

• be able to easily share any kind of media.  Share on Ovi supports more than 100 different file types today. 
• work well with lots of other services. They provide links directly within Share on Ovi to allow content to be easily shared on other services, ranging from Technorati to De.licio.us.  In addition, they make it easy to grab embedding codes to allow users to embed content hosted on Ovi in any site.
• work with lots of devices. Clients exist for PC’s, Nokia N Series phones, and there’s even a WAP client.
• make organizing and finding media easy.  There are all the social mechanisms you might expect, including tagged searching, and more. 
• give authors control over their content. To achieve this goal, they support the concept of channels with different levels of permission.  For example, a channel could be designated private, and only accessible to certain individuals.  Or, a channel might be attached to an event, so that people in attendance at the event can upload to it. 

The service is free, with unlimited uploads and unlimited file storage.  Files cannot be larger than 100 mb, however, in keeping with the idea that this is a personal sharing service. Nokia plans to monetize it with advertising and transactional revenue.

After talking with Serena I set up an account on the service, and installed it on my Nokia N95 smartphone.  Having used it for a couple of days now, it feels something like Flickr crossed with YouTube in so far as it’s able to support sharing of photographs and video.  Describing it that way does it an injustice however.  It’s capable of sharing file types ranging from word processing documents to podcasts.  In that respect it’s a paradigm shift for social media. 

Share on Ovi is pretty easy.  Simply shoot a photograph on a compatible camera phone, press the share button, and sit back while it uploads the file (over 3G wireless, of course).  Once the photograph is uploaded, then you can do all kinds of things with it… like display it in a flash widget, for instance.

The other really cool thing you can with it is give others read / write permissions on the media channels you create.  For example, the channel I’m displaying in the widget above is the media I created at Mobile World Congress.  If you have photos or other media you would like to share from Mobile World Congress as well, you can simply add them to the channel titled asaunders66.MWC (Ovi account required). Then your media will become part of my media channel.

Share on Ovi is more than meets the eye.  I’m looking forward to learning how to exploit its unique capabilities.

One of the most exciting briefings I had at the Mobile Word Congress was with Johanna Jokinen.  Johanna heads up Nokia's environmental projects.  She showed me the Nokia 3110 "Evolve". 50% bioplastic, this phone is perhaps Nokia's most visible environmental project.

So what is bioplastic as opposed to ordinary plastic? All plastics are made from oil.  Most plastics we use today use petroleum as the oil source, whereas bioplastics are made from vegetable oil sources.  And the impact?  Well, not only are bioplastics made from renewable resources, they also produce 15% less carbon dioxide in manufacturing, and are 15% more energy efficient to produce.  

In addition, the 3110 comes with a new generation of charger which is capable of detecting when the battery is fully charged. Most of us leave chargers plugged into devices even when they're fully charged, which has a dramatic impact on energy consumption.  Circuits in the 3110's charger can reduce its energy consumption to a trickle at that point — 94% below the Energystar specification. 

And finally, the 3110 is delivered in a small box, made from 60% recycled materials.  Half of Nokia's products are now delivered in these boxes, resulting in a savings of $100 million per year to the company.  It's not just good for the environment, it's also good for the bottom line!

Johanna also informed me that many of Nokia's phones are actually designed to be recycled, including the 3110.  They meet or exceed the RoHS specification which dictates how much toxic material can be deposited in a landfill.  In addition, they're designed to be easily stripped down so that reusable components can be salvaged. Plus, Nokia has also established recycling centres through the world where you can deliver old phones to be disposed of in an ethical and environmental fashion, or recycled.

If you want to find the location of a Nokia recycle station near you, or simply find out more information of Nokia's programs, visit http://nokia.com/environment.

Nokia deserves plaudits for these initiatives. In my opinion, it's just one more reason to shop Nokia.

In today's Squawk Box, Alec Saunders was travelling but Dan York stepped in to host a session with special guests Lee Dryburgh, conference chair for the upcoming eComm 2008 conference and Thomas Howe, one of the speakers at eComm. eComm, subtitled "The Trillion Dollar Industry Rethink", is a brand new conference that emerged after O'Reilly shelved this year's ETel show that will be bringing together the leading innovators and thinkers about communication in one place in Silicon Valley from March 12-14. The eComm schedule is full of people truly on the bleeding edge of the ongoing communication revolution.

In the call we talked about the reasons for launching eComm and such questions as: With all the talk of openness, what will Skype be highlighting in their keynote? Who are the people attending and speaking? What will Google be announcing? Why is there an anthropologist on the agenda? Why is it called the "Trillion Dollar Rethink"?

It was a lively and interesting conversation that involved some great questions from the listeners. We would encourage you to listen to the show and consider attending eComm 2008.

Show notes and links can be found on the Live Wall on the Facebook page for this conference call, which was recorded using Iotum's FREE Conference Call application for Facebook. P.S. In full disclosure, while Dan York has been a regular participant in recent Squawk Box podcasts, it should be noted that his employer, Voxeo, is also one of the sponsors of eComm 2008.

 

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