Saturday, February 11, 2012

Sony makes stunning progress in digital cameras in 13 years, next the Social Camera

My first digital camera was the Sony DCS-505, a stunning 2.1MP camera I bought as it was launched in Japan in 1999. Now 13 years and many digital cameras, lately the Ricoh GX-200 I return to a Sony camera. The NEX5 with a 24mm Zeiss 1.8 lens. The lens & camera was a birthday present of my dear friends and family (Thank you!). I have deliberately skipped DSLRs due to their size. I have shot a lot of pictures using cameraphones. What I need is great low light photography. I shoot, food and people, everyday things. Mostly to remember. With the NEX-5N I think I will do a bit of classic protography as art, lets see. I completely dig the NEX5N in low light, it is like a dinky black hole sucking all light around it.

 

We have come a long way in 13 years, yet I find it very interesting to notice how similar the DCS505 is to the NEX-5N is general bulk. Yet in performance one is a T-Ford and the other is a Beeltle, both destined to be classics. 

It is interesting to see the raise of the Micro FourThirds, as the camera community prefers to call the category of cameras. The NEX is the emerging leaders of, if we judge it from Amazon best seller list. DPreview has the perfect review, I have nothing to add, except, the user interface of the camera is nothing less of a train wreck. It is full of features, but lack a clever UI style, one that enables creation of a mental map of how the camera works. I have now used it a couple of weeks, and I am still unsure where things are.  It has lots of image control, but if we then think that much of the post image processing, and all of the social imaging features are missing. This cannot be added without a disruption and starting over.

Imagine taking the iPhone type body and sticking on a Zeiss lens. Imagine a camera manufacturer turning the camera into an a social app platform for imaging.  I have no doubt that this will emerge, as the app platforms of Android is segmenting into smaller ecosystems like Kindle Fire. The question who is going to do this. The lenses on the one-hand and the SW apps, and services are providing both lock-in and service business models. The Recent Polaroid Android is heading in the right direction.

This is in my mind the future of digital cameras, a social camera. A type of 21^st century extension of the Brownie box. Designing this total image service experience would be a blast.

 

 

 

02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Kodak moments fading into history

My hearth bleeds yellow as Kodak is fading away. This company has been dear to me in many ways. First of all I was literally fed on it, as my father being a photographer mainly used Kodak film. As I grew up beyond my Lego camera, I used to get a roll of Kodakcrrome and always cherished the fact that processing was included and after a while  a box of vivid slides were returned in their paper frames. Kodak was my first proper summer job, when I spent time at their French factory mainly learning French, driving through Bourgogne, also doing some field tests of Kodakchrome. I remember once I got to dine in the Anselm Adams decorated guest cabinets, those black and white landscapes felt like they had vivid colours. Much later in 2002 as we were readying the first Series 60 device, the Nokia 7650 slider with a VGA camera, I remember one of the most iconic speeches by my mentor Anssi Vanjoki, where he proclaims for a packed audience at Mobile World Congress, how cameraphones would kill the chemical photography industry, and how Nokia would become the largest camera manufacturer. 

Not much later I got into the digital photo business, creating Nokia Lifeblog with my team. At the same time I met the Kodak guys, actually the folks of Ofoto who, Kodak had acquired. Ofoto was the largest deposit of digital photos on the planet. As we were readying our product we realised the power of the Kodak IPR portfolio, and decided to give an early preview of what we were doing and wanted them as printing partners. The Kodak and Nokia partnership became strong, and I even got to demo Lifeblog for Anthony Perez, the CEO of Kodak. Not much later the relationship exploded as Kodak decided to sue everyone in the industry. Grossly simplified it is impossible to make a digital camera without violating Kodak IPR.

The Kodak guys practically invented digital photography, there is a legend, that Kodak had a skunksworks where they built the first digital consumer camera, but could not launched it, so they got Apple to launch it instead. As the Kodak guys feared that it would cannibalize the film business. I do not know how much if any is true.

As Kodak sued everyone they did not win friends. I think I was personally the only winner in this relationship, as I won some wonderful friend for life.

What really triggered this post was a strategic opinion I had at the time. I was of the opinion what Kodak should have done, was to use their IPR to get back to their roots, and make digital camera's, but not the physical ones, they were making, but truly digital, as apps in the camera phones. I saw this as a fantastic opportunity to re-introduce the brand to a younger audience, and to claim single button access to the UI. The handset vendors could have protested, and given chance to pay. What is so ironic is that we now have hugely popular start-up like Instagram, which to some degree lends its name from an iconic Kodak brand the Instamatic. I am well aware that this would probably not have fed the Kodak staff of 20000 or so, but it would not have wiped them out of conscious. It would have led to a business of add-ons like digital albums, image sharing, printing, all from the camera. Maybe even Facebook would not have become the place for sharing images. Who knows, main point images of us define us, and no one knew that better than George Eastman.

George Eastman, is one of my innovation heroes. The creation of the Brownie box and using simplification tactics referring to a popular children's cartoon the Brownies, indicating that photography is easy as child’s play is an innovation and marketing master piece. Maybe he should be credited giving birth to the gadget industry, as the camera was one of the first must have gadgets of the 20th century. Their iconic advertising targeted to women, encouraging them to capture family events as Kodak Moments. Thanks to George Eastman and his team, the 21st century was well documented from my grandfathers onward. The Brownie box was a much bigger societal transformer, up there alongside the mobile phone and the personal computer.

At some point in time there were more than 100 firms in Rochester making camera lenses. Kodak was the biggest camera manufacturer for a long time. To see Kodak seeking for bankruptcy protection does make my heart bleed yellow.  I can only think what if, we all would use Kodak cameras in our phones, this is not the case, but at least I have my friends and my memories. Long live the memories of Kodak Moments.

 

 

12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Saturday, December 31, 2011

End of an era

Most of my adult life I have subscribed to a daily newspaper. Today this ends. I have stopped my subscription to Helsinging Sanomat, Finland's largest daily. It has been a slow death, at the end I had it coming only on week-ends.

The iPad has been the catalyst. I prefer to read on my iPad, and what I read is on-line stuff, mainly using Flipboard. It is my universal destination for reading media. Most days starts in Flipboard. For me the death of the newspaper took 20 months. The key reason is its poor user interface. It commands too much real-estate on the table. It is noisy and it smells bad.

As I have saw this slow death coming, I started pondering on the content. In the past few months, the ratio of interesting to nonsense was really striking. Sometimes I only found 2-3 intersting stories, endless amount of small irrelevant ads and increasingly yesterday's news.

Does this mean end of media, death of content? I think not. On the contrary we are living in an era with abundance of content. What we have is a distribution and power control struggle. We also have a massive business model problem. Consumers are not used to pay for content, and in the digital screen real-estate is scarse.

The distribution is analogue, we live in a digital era. The user interface is analogue, we live in a digital era. With the emergence of tablets, and abundace of LCDs we have more opportunities than ever before.

I think following 6 things need to happen:

1. Think aggregation. Use your media  brand reputation as an aggregator. Aggregate anything that can be aggregated, smaller brands, bloggers, soccer mums and experts. As media you are in the timeshare business. Flipboard is a guide guide if you lack imagination.

2. Think local head global tail. People live locally and care about the what is close. Make local the hero content, a fallen tree on the neighbours house is a bigger story than a storm on the riviera. This require creation of an open source media operating system, into which people can publish. Mash-up a Instapaper with Wordpress

3. Celebrate the good journalist. Focus on quality, let journalist produce what they excel in, telling stories, rather than fill text around ads. Reward journalist based on readership, sort of performance based journalism. This is hard as requires some kind of disruption. Look at GigaOm and their network of contributors.

4. Enable micropayments. I am a believer in that people will pay for content. If users en mass has paid for ringtones, buying TV episodes, I do think they will pay for good stories. Journalist produce much more content than editors allow to be published, let the fans read and see the backstories. With micropayments this could be monetised.

5. Price for volume, price content in the digital world with a volume, I think the pricing of media on the iPad does not encourage uptake. A newspaper should not cost more than €.99, once there is usage advertisers will come and someone will invent new forms of monetisation. Before you have usrs, you have nothing.

6. Provide a personal library. Supplying a cloudbased digital library and clipbook would over time create an incredibly powerful lock-in. I would not mind subscribing to a media library of all the stories I have read. Look at Evernote, once one crosses a certain amount of content one is hooked.

I know this are all tall orders to achive, but eventually the force of disruption will act. Newspapers are dead, long live News.

 

 

 

01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, October 31, 2011

Nokia Lumina 800 meets the iPhone 4s. Magenta trumps black glass.

 

The Nokia Lumina 800 is like a fresh breath of air in the black world of smart phones. I got a Magenta test unit from Nokia and it feels very good. In the past 3 years I have not really used much else than an iPhone, every time I switch to Android I get disappointed, the experience is simply too unpolished in the details, and then it has typically too much customisation whipcream, so that you cannot taste what the flavour is. I hope Motorola/Google will clean it up.

I of course got an iPhone 4s when it came out and upgraded to it. It was more painful than before. I ended up using my iPad back-up to restore, it took a whole evening, and I was not happy. The iPhones 4s is better, but marginally less better than the 3gs was at the time. The 3gs felt like a big step for an upgrade. The 4s feels like a small step. I understand that much has changed under the hood and particularely in the cloud. But doing the whole iCloud, and being a paying MobileMe user, filling up my iCloud with BackUp got me simply to say no thank you to iCloud. Please let there first be some iSunshine. Only the camera got me excited. Despite fighting back, I got bored, very bored. I think we will see some iPhone fatigue creep in this holiday season.

 My last hope was to get Siri to fall in love with me, but when introducing her to the family thought she was well - blond… I just do not have that much to tell her, and when I do she does not understand me. I do have an accent, sort of Finnish, Scandinavian, Swedish, some people think Dutch. It is not as strong as many other non native speakers of English and yet she has problems with it. I think she would learn over time, but in this relationship there is not much time, when I am bored.

Just as I got bored I got a hot looking Magenta Lumina, it does illuminate my everyday. I was really jazzed up after Nokia world, not since the N95 have I seen the Nokia guys as fired up. Stephen Elop has been like a fresh breath of simplicity at Nokia. Less of that big word mumbo jumbo delivering next year; simply more of less everywhere. I really liked the new service strategy of calling the services, by the natural language name. Music is music, drive is Drive. No more branding, just deliver the stuff that matters.

The phone is very responsive, the basics work. The camera is great. We did a bit of comparing of displays, loaded the video cover for Coldplay’s Paradise, which essentially has all colours in a picture, and the display outshines the iPhone display in every way. The iPhone on the other hand is louder. The kids liked the new Nokia, particularly to videos on, 15 seconds to get to a video on YouTube got a spontaneous WOW. This comparing led to a spontaneous family focus group on what phones kids desire, at this point we had two 16 old boys, 14 year, 10 year old and 7 year old girls. One of the 16 year old boys was a guest The conclusion was unexpected. No one craved these new hot phones, and I sold hard. I even offered to give them, but gave them the chance to get €700 and use it as they wish. They opted for a ZTE Blade, which was what our guest had. It does the essentials, rest would be spent saving, partying, buying stuff for the moped, buying dolls. One of the iconic quotes, ‘I want a HTC Galaxy’. Seems it is not only me who gets confused about black phones with touch screens. Or is ‘ZTE and HTC not same company’. Or ten year old saying phones are not interesting. Time to step up innovation, the phone industry is in an incremental phase if there is any insight to be drawn from the family focus group. 

11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Moved back to Finland after 6 years in London

 

On October 1st I moved back to Finland to be closer to the family and to Fjord Nordic team, our largest studio with fantastic buzz from the 24 different nationalities, it is like a buzzing United Nations of Innovation and design. I took on a new role of Chief Innovation Officer of Fjord. Commuting from one place to the rest of the world is easier, the biggest benefit with Helsinki is simplicity of life, and fastest access to Asia. The drawback is the darkness and the lack of people, there are only 5M people, making Helsinki a gigant village, but that has distinct benefits. Most livable city according to Monocle. What exicites me most is the reboot of the country that the country got forced into through Nokia's new strategy. There is a fantastic pool of experienced talent that learned to think global through Nokia and its subcontractors, combined with a very international generation of students, not afraid to change the status quo. We have a bit of a Hippie movement emerging around entrepreneurship. The government fused the the three leading schools, the Technical university, the Business school and the Design school into Aalto University, fostering cross functional education, a bit similar to what I carved out for myself 15 years ago. The students created Aalto Entreprenurial Society and is building top notch relationships globally. There is an increasing amount of start-ups funded with clever early stage government support and internally savvy investor entrepreneurs. This enabling very interesting start-ups to emerge. There is world-class mobile, gaming, wearables, design and embedded SW talent in the area. I am sure we will see some amazing companies emerge that will change the world. In short it is great to be back, let the reboot continue.

02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Nokia Swipe UI perfects the Menu UI

Nokia today unveiled their latest creation, I'll call it the Swipe UI, it is the fourth incarnation of their Linux platform that saw the light in the Nokia 770 six years ago. Then you add a typical 3 years to that, which is what it takes to build a new mobile OS from scratch and you have nearly a 10 year labour of love.

This incarnation is finally polished, clever and interesting. As we all know it it comes late, hopelessly late. It is more statement of: Yes we can make cool stuff things at Nokia, now we just have to figure how we can manage the products, the priorities and make decisions so that they ship when they are still hot and desired. Management, get out of the way and let the rockstars play!

This UI is in my mind a perfection of the past. It perfects the menu UI, all apps are in same hierachy, multi-tasking works much like apps, you see an app in a minature state and you have a rolling structure of integrated notifications and then you rotate between these views by Swiping. Simple and clever.

What about Here and Now, two core elements of context? What about mashed up experiences? What about atomised tasks? It does not simply scale to this. It feels like the Criterion Boy boy of UI's, which by many art historian was the perfect sculpture of a human. Just as artist learn to shape marble to that level of perfection, the progressive folks had moved on.  Is Nokia looking for perfection of the past or smashing the barricades to the future, if you ask me, I want to see the latter. Swipe is done, now start over.

We now have one more UI to compare. Comparing iOS, Android, WebOS, Windows Phone 7 and 'Swipe'. I still think the Windows phone 7 is the most scalable concept towards the context era. What makes it so scalable is that Microsoft has taken ownership of the square in a rectangle. As long as displays are square then owning this is very powerful. These things are simple in the end, but getting to this level of simplicity requires mastering many disciplines and making brutal choices. I can certainly see how the Live tiles could be deviced into 4 and even 9 adressable segments over time as display still grow a bit.

Imagine taking the N9 HW with the Metro UI (The Windows Phone 7) UI and you see that if these giants can figure out how to execute, some cool stuff will enter the market. Axel and his team has done an amazing effort with the industrial design, I want one!

 

 

03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (37)

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Nokia-Zeiss just rocks - cannot wait for my mobile imaging renaissance

In the darkest of hours, what better than a bit of optimism. Many Nokian's see me as a massive Apple fanboy. This is true, but what I am really a fanboy is of awesome product innovations, elegant simplicity, things that just works.

At present there is simply very little written that is good about Nokia, but one thing which is amazing is the partnership with Zeiss. I remember how excited I was when I first heard of this deal, being the son of a photographer, Zeiss was a brand I knew from childhood. This deal was one of Pekka Rantala's finest moments, he had a massive impact on making happen, and I do think it is one of the best deals both companies have made. I am sure that the Zeiss folks are a bit dissapointed now, but I am sure that once Nokia brings out new phones with an OS and experience that works with that amazing Zeiss technology, imaging will be back in focus bigtime. I loved my N90 'Liferecorder' and I loved the N8 camera. Now with the contextual nature of Windows Phone UI, I can easily envision some amazing imaging experiences. Look at this video and you get a sense of the sheer knowledge that exist in this partnership. Remember that great people make great products. So Nokia, Zeiss and Microsoft go make magic together. 

12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Open Mobile Summit is soon here again

Open Mobile Summit has been a favorite of mine in the mobile conference scene. It is one of the only conferences that glue bluechip top management, with hot start-up CEOs around interesting themes. This year we will have Stephen Elop on the stage. The lineup is pretty stellar again. I also like the fact that Robin Batt,  is able to get the product guys on stage, the folks who actually make the stuff we use, who delicately balance the business needs, with the UX and the scarse engineering resource. Their stories are superbly interesting. Last year she had Gustav Söderström from Spotify on stage, sharing how they plan to make Spotify more sticky and social, now you can see the fruits of that work. 

To show our appriciation of the conference, we are rolling in the designers to document the event into a conference conversation. If you attended the event in November in San Francisco, you could not have avoided seeing the gigant murals we created at the back of the conference room. 

Open Mobile Summit pages can be found here. If you leave a comment, and are interested in joining, I do have some specials, that Robin kindly let me pass on to readers.

12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Breakfast with iPad 2

Two weeks ago the iPad 2 came home and I decided to have a breakfast with it. The cutlery has not changed, menu similar to last year, but I am now reading Flipboard instead of Time. Time was a bit symbolic last year with Steve Jobs on the cover. Noe I decided to honour the one app that has captured most timeshare in this classic still life. Maybe this becomes a tradition.

What has happened in the past year. One big change is that I stopped liking papers, their UI is just plainly inferior, noisy, big and not up to date. I find that I buy FT occasionally during week-ends, but I do not read it, just brush through it. It's format is way too big.

I also thought I would read more books on the iPad, I don't I prefer Kindle. I thought I would dwell in
magazines, I don't and now my few copies of Wired are flushed into cyberspace. Do I care enough to get in touch with customer care, probably not, rather keep few extra GBs free. I also miss my Economists. I would love to have an Economist app that allows me to extract articles, by the
Magazine, and get recommendations for articles from friends that they could occasionally gift me or that I could buy. I would over time get very loyal to my Economist library. Happy to
design it for you if you want to do it Economist quality.

The iPad 2 is better in many ways, but it is incremental, what I like most is my beige leather cover that ages and gets patina. It is my first gadget that gets patina and that ladies and gentlemen is huge. Next I want smarter covers, like I explained in my previous post and a proper AirTunes or and AirPhoto.

10:46 PM in Technology | Permalink | Comments (15)

Sunday, March 13, 2011

iPad 2 – Approaching creator's perfection point.

The iPad 2 is ordered and on its way. Like many times before with Apple products the second version is a considerable step forward. Its rapid progress must have scared lots of people working on tablet projects around the industry, I am sure many projects got killed. What surprised me most was the massive diet it went on. I did not expect that they would be able to make such a leap. For those of you who read my original post, my main criticism was with the size and weight of the device. Having used the device more or less every day the past year, weight is my primary criticism. I am really looking forward to the lighter version.

 

The iPad 2 sparks very interesting thoughts on the future of tablets. I think never before has a product category matured so fast. The iPad 2 is in two generations a very mature product. Yet as we know things never stay constant in technology. Current products are simply inspiration for future products.

 

There are some obvious improvements; the borders between screen and device needs to shrink, but it would eventually introduce a software challenge how to hold it. The battery life could be extended maybe 30% as there are days where I can empty the battery, most days I cannot. The camera can be improved. These are all incremental and natural and will improve in due course.

 

The iPad has approached a concept I would like to call perfection point. This point is an imaginary point where the innovation focus moves from hygiene to luxury. This is exemplified by the smart cover. The Perfection point is different from Abernathy and Utterbacks point where innovation moves from Product Innovation to Process improvements. The Perfection point is a state many products never achieve, competition is too stiff. I was incredibly intrigued by one section of the keynote, namely that moment where Steve talks about the Rotate Lock vs. Mute key conflict. I found it very interesting that in the original SW it was used for Rotate Lock and in 4.2 the default was mute, making the Rotate Lock approach close to impossible usability by having to double tap the apps key slide all the way left. A completely unusable solution. Now in 4.3 it is a user setting, not a solution by any measure. I find it amazing that even Wall Street Journal is discussing this type of issue. The classic solution is to add a key, which I am sure the people inside of Apple has suggested, but Steve has refused to put more keys, which is exactly the right decision. More keys will turn devices into hedgehogs that no one wants to hold.

 

It is time to create smart keys, keys with more than a binary function. Keys that react to clicks like traditional keys, but also to touch and pressure. This kind of keys are possible to build with our Tech21 Sensor technology. One could easily keep the rotate screen lock as one key and make mute function on the volume keys with a touch swipe smart key. This kind of innovation is for most companies to insignificant, to be a first mover, but once it becomes hygiene everyone wants it. The first mover has to innovate close to the perfection point. Therefore I suspect it is only companies who are operating close to the perfection point that can lead this kind of transformation of how for example keys work. When the others have to grapple with hygiene factors such as battery life and weight, Apple can solve problems, the others have not yet encountered, or if they have, been forced to de-prioritize.

 What really inspired me in the iPad 2 was the smart cover. It provides a wonderful tool for device transformation: ‘Protectivecover’, ‘Writingstand’ and ‘Video stand’. The most important feature is however in my opinion the impact it has on SW. I love the fact it powers on and off, when opened and closed. It would probably not be difficult to make power available to the cover, like the Mag-Safe connector. This sparked an idea, which is the classic problem with these electronic devices providing multiple types of utility. The fact that one needs to show a menu, as the device is used for multiple things. This is not needed in single purpose devices, like a paper notebook, one is instantly in writing mode. This 2 second time saving has not been captured in multi usage gadgets, like computers and tablets. Now one could with some type of technology, sense where the user is touching the cover and fire up a relevant app. There could be three hotzones along the first sector of the smart cover. If user opens up from top, browser is fired up, from middle a notepad and from bottom, a third app. This could be designed to live outside the password wall. So that get access to input, but not reading without entering passwords. This would speed up usage as a data collecting tool enormously. The good news with this idea, is that it could probably be patented.

The efficiency of data input has been a key problem in mobility, now the smart covers bring us few seconds faster, there are few seconds to shave off, and once we have gained them, we probably will see a demise of paper based solutions.

I think these kind of smart hardware with elements of service or software could become a big business in the future, imagine a smart cover that is an app and paid for service. This could be offered by Mount Blanc, but most likely by a start up, the incumbents are typically too conservative. I think the simple idea that HW is the service has so much legs. Let me know if anyone of you readers discovers sensors and other technologies that could trigger this.

 

 

 

 

01:46 PM in Technology | Permalink | Comments (16)

Technorati Profile

Syndicate this site

Powered by TypePad
Member since August 2003