The Cloud hits the Ground

When email storage space was limited users had to keep their inbox small, messages organized to folders and delete every message that wasn't absolutely important. Now you can use services like GMail that have (practically) unlimited storage space in "the Cloud" and let you search your messages so quickly it makes organizing just a waste of time. When using GMail I just don't organize nor archive messages - search is enough.

Nokia's S60 phones have an email client that can regularly login to your IMAP mail account and load new messages. When you enable that feature, it will disable the setting that limits the number of messages in your phone's email account (why is it like that?). Tried this automatic refreshing feature with GMail, decided to disable it and left other settings untouched.

Later I began to wonder why the email access has become very slow in my phone and why some applications either crashed or displayed clearly wrong information about my mailbox status. Then I checked the message count from my terminal's email application and there were 3900 email messages listed! Having all messages in your inbox is not a problem when processing happens in the Cloud, but then (fattish) clients like S60 email application will hit the Ground.

I know there is a GMail application available for my phone, but I rather use the native messaging application because that way I can have all my SMS/MMS/Email messages stored in the same place and I can access those without switching the applications.

Having all messages in the same place, hmmm....

Why my SMS/MMS messages are only in the phone? I'd like to have those archived in the Cloud, too. When I work with the messages, I'd like the changes to be replicated to my GMail account - that way I could also use GMail application to access my messages from the Cloud and messages would also be stored in a safe place. If all my messages were replicated like that, there could be just a new folder available in the GMail mobile application to access my SMS messages. That would also allow me to do search from all of my messages, no matter what media was used to deliver it. As far as I understand, it is no rocket science to create a solution like this to upload messages automatically to the Cloud. Anyone interested to try?

//Harri

S60 / Google synchronization almost here

Today I understood that Google has just added ActiveSync support to their portfolio to let users sync contacts and calendar events to their ..... iPhone! Wait a minute, doesn't that mean that I can also use Nokia's Mail for Exchange (MfE) to sync the data to S60 device? I made an experiment and here are the results.

First install MfE, and then set up the account:

• Server address is m.google.com
• Your username and password are the ones that you use to login to your Google account
• Domain name is mandatory but you can type to that field whatever you want
• Your email address is also mandatory but not really used, just put your Google email address there
• Your new MfE profile includes task and email synchronization by default. Disable those, they are not supported by Google.

If you managed to fill up all the fields correctly, you can now synchronize calendar events and contacts between S60 terminal and Google account. My first impression was "Wow, this works!", but unfortunately there seems to be a strange problem with the user credential management. 

It looks that I can synchronize data once and then there must be about 5 minute delay before that can be done again; if I try to sync too soon MfE will display an error message that tells my password is not correct (the same password that just worked fine!). There is probably a problem in Google's authentication module, as MfE synchronization also disables Apple's iCal application from syncing with Google (remember my family calendar?). Soon after MfE sync iCal prompts me to enter the password again and sync fails every time. Just wait a couple of minutes and sync is OK again. 

Before you get too excited, remember that Google officially states that syncing with MfE is not supported. But when this gets official support, we will have a superb mobile service for individuals and small companies - with a very reasonable price tag.

//Harri

Family calendar tip for Mac users

This is a tip I must share with you!

Everyday problem for any family is how to organize hobbies, daycare, who is where with whom, who picks kids from nursery and so on. In business environment this is easy, because everybody is using a groupware calendar (at least in perfect world). However, I haven't been excited about buying an Exchange server for my family, for example.

So far we have been using a shared Google calendar, but I just saw an announcement that makes this easier than before. At least if you are a Mac user with a Nokia phone. Story goes like this:

1. Make a Google calendar for your family and share it as needed
2. Get the calendar to your Mac's iCal by following this guide
3. Sync your calendar from Mac to your Nokia phone as instructed here

It works. Now you have a family calendar that can be used with browser or directly from your Mac desktop and you can also carry it with you in your terminal. Next time you book a meeting to evening, you can see immediately if you should be nursing kids at the same time. Nice.

P.S.

I wonder when S60 terminals add support for CalDav. After all, S60 3rd edition  fp2 has added support for WebDav and CalDav is an extension to that. Finally we could get an alternative for SyncML.

//Harri

S60 optimized Picasa

Remember by old rant about iPhone getting all the attention and nice optimized application versions whereas the rest of the mobile community must beg for support? Now it appears that at least Google's Picasa has become S60 optimized. This can be a good start, I wish. 

//Harri

What if phone could speak?

Lately I have been reading Alexander Manu's excellent book The Imagination Challenge: Strategic Foresight and Innovation in the Global Economy and I must say I like his idea to imagine what would happen is familiar things could speak - what would you ask from your toothbrush? To summarize the idea of the book: try to create strategic innovations that really change the way we live our lives and disrupt familiar patterns. As a contrast to strategic innovation Manu identifies tactical innovations that are merely about doing same things as before but only better. If you want to know more - and you really should - read the book.

So, let's try this method. What would you ask from your phone if it could speak? I'd like to make a very generic question: "Can you help me?". While I'm in the middle of a conversation with a friend I'd like to ask help from my phone, for example to get information about the local services. To make this service feel even more personal, I'd like to give my phone a name, "Jim" for example. Now we can imagine following discussion:

Me: "Let's have a dinner tonight, where could we go?"
Friend: "There is a new restaurant in Helsinki I'd like to visit, I think it's called FooBar."
Me: "OK, sounds great. Let's ask Jim if they have a table for us. Jim, Helsinki, FooBar."
Jim: "FooBar found. Do you want me to connect?"
Me: "Yes"
(FooBar joins the discussion)
FooBar: "FooBar, how can I help you?"
Friend: "We'd like to have a dinner tonight at 8 o'clock, do you have a table for two?"
FooBar: "Yes, that's OK. You are welcome."
Me: "Thank you"
(FooBar leaves the discussion)

---

So, what happened here? I took the opportunity to jump over the "innovation gap" which is the distance between what we have today and what we believe is possible. Here I assumed that phone could have speech recognition (I guess some phones already have that support, but is it available to 3rd party developers, don't know) and that can listen an ongoing call. If that was possible, teaching the speech recognition solution to find keywords ("Jim" in my example) should be fairly simple. Then the new solution could initiate a conference call to some voice guided search service and here you are, there is a bridge over the innovation gap and solution becomes possible. If you are located in US you might want to take a look at Google's solution (unfortunately only available in English at the US) and try to create this solution.

By the way: why Goog-411 is free, wouldn't it be just fine to have a premium priced number to collect some revenue from the users? Latest issue of Wired magazine has the answer: by letting the service run free Google will loose $144M revenue by 2012. But because the service is free, people will use the service now and Google can collect data from usage patterns, different voice accents and phrases. When they are ready, they can start selling ads to the service and that way the projected revenue from this service in 2012 becomes $2.5B. Nice.

//Harri