Paul Jacobson

Nokia has dropped a bombshell and will be offering free turn-by-turn navigation on its smartphones. This is according to a Reuters report which I found via Engadget. The report is apparently based on a release of some kind from Nokia which I haven’t been able to locate yet Update: This news seems to be part of a broader Ovi Maps announcement. There is some great coverage on GigaOm.

As the Reuters report pointed out, this is bound to have an impact on more traditional GPS device producers like Garmin and TomTom. I’ve been using Ovi Maps on my N97 for navigation and it is excellent, when it works properly. The maps are more appealing, visually, although it can be a little difficult to search for and find places. That being said, Ovi Maps just keeps getting better with each release and I have seen an update that is still being tested internally which will make Ovi Maps an even better navigation option.

Nokia has been promising some pretty interesting location-based stuff using Ovi Maps as the core application for those services. It could make a huge difference to how we use location in our day to day activities so I hope it can pull it off and execute well. Nokia is facing increasing competition from Google and Apple, both companies have arguably more compelling devices based on more dynamic and appealing user experiences. Upcoming Symbian updates could change perceptions about Nokia’s products, though.

I am curious to see what happens next. Ovi Maps look better than Google Maps but I find that I can locate places a lot easier on Google Maps on my N97. Google Maps doesn’t look as good and we don’t have turn by turn navigation here in South Africa just yet but I think that will change. When it does, South Africans will have yet another option. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google roll out turn-by-turn in time for the World Cup either.

I received a bunch of Google Wave invitations to pass around. I have posted the details on Facebook and Twitter and had to extend the offer to you, my loyal and very patient readers. I only have a few invitations left but feel free to request one. Simply fill out this form below (sorry it looks a bit squished – I had to fit it on to the page) and I will allocate invites on a first come, first served basis till they run out.

Please bear in mind that the invitations are not send directly but rather route through Google and can take a few days to arrive.

I’ve had a MobileMe account for the last year and a half (pretty much since MobileMe launched as the .Mac replacment) and the time has come to renew it. I was initially going to renew my subscription (€65 or around R730 for the year) and I wonder now if I should.

The main appeal MobileMe has had for me is the ability to sync my contacts and calendars with a cloud-based service that comes pretty close to my MacBook experience. I initially used the photo and video sharing service and stopped that in favour of my long-standing Flickr account, Vimeo and Facebook (although I prefer keeping Flickr and Vimeo as my primary photo and video sharing services rather than Facebook). I was briefly tempted to can my Flickr Pro account but quickly realised it is a far better photo sharing service than MobileMe is.

I started using iDisk to backup my data (the 20GB allocation on MobileMe is quite a bit) and although it proved to be a bit of a pain to backup to the service (connections kept dropping), it was reasonably effective as a way to gain access to key files online. I started exploring Jungle Disk and decided to use that as a primary cloud-based backup service and because it runs on Amazon S3 (I’ve linked it to my S3 account) it costs me about $2 a month for the basic service plus my data usage at about $0.15/GB stored and $0.10/GB uploaded). I currently have about 18GB backed up and intend backing up a fair amount more than that going forward. A total backup would cover about 190GB at the moment.

I have also started using Dropbox for smaller file transfers and backups and the free account I am using comes with 2GB of storage. Dropbox is pretty competitive when it comes to larger amounts stored compared to Jungle Disk. The 50GB service costs about $10/month and a similar amount uploaded and stored would work out to about $12.50 just to get the data up to S3. You still add the basic $2 fee to that for Jungle Disk. Of course once the data has been transferred the monthly cost drops to about $7/50GB which isn’t too bad. A total backup of pretty much all my media and documents would probably cost me just under $20 a month to store using Jungle Disk (not counting the initial transfer cost).

Now when it comes to my calendars and email, I use a combination of Gmail and Google Apps accounts and keep my Mac synchronized using Snow Leopard’s Exchange support. The only downside here is that I can only keep one contacts list sync’d at a time online and on my N97. I don’t see how to keep multiple Google contacts lists sync’d using my MacBook’s address book. I run my email using IMAP so my email accounts are sync’d between my phone, the Web and my MacBook.

Ok, so putting all that into some sort of perspective, here are the options I am using:

Of course the chart is simplified. Dropbox and Jungle Disk can also serve as photo and video storage services (and do). Dropbox could also theoretically serve as a photo and video sharing service too but there are better tools. I also haven’t mentioned other media sharing services like Picasa, Zoopy, Blip.tv and others. I just prefer using Flickr and Vimeo at the moment for what they do.

Now, if I don’t renew my MobileMe subscription I lose iDisk (and along with the option of retrieving stuff stored there via a planned iPod Touch or possibly a future iPhone); the calendar and contacts synchronization that so closely parallels my desktop experience and the generally excellent level of Mac integration. I also save myself the €65 cost. I just wonder if I am being penny wise, pound foolish by dropping MobileMe.

What do you think?

Update: When it came down to crunch time I decided to renew my subscription. I am a little ambivalent about my choice but a couple considerations tipped me over the edge:

• The prospect of losing my username and having to come up with yet another one – I am trying to be as consistent as possible with account usernames for various reasons;
• MobileMe may well feature a little more prominently in my future when I upgrade either to an iPod Touch or to an iPhone (jury still out on this one although I am tending towards an Android phone one day) so it makes sense to keep the account; and
• While not a key issue, MobileMe-Mac integration is brilliant and not to be taken too lightly if there are other reasons to hang on to the account.

I haven’t seen this much hype about a Google product since Gmail launched a few years ago. Invitations to use Google Wave have been trickling out to eager users for a couple weeks now and I managed to secure one thanks to Gavin Magid who sent me one of his invites. Like many of you, I watched the demonstration video a while ago and I have been pretty excited about Wave since then although probably not for the same reasons you may have been excited about it.

Wave was touted as a replacement for email and a cure for world hunger almost from the beginning. This has created some really unrealistic expectations, more in the minds of email addicts than people fighting world hunger (unlike the email addicts, they knew immediately Wave wasn’t going to fix world hunger). I know some people have said that the Rasmussens said that Wave would replace email but I don’t remember that (Lars Rasmussen did tell the Wall Street Journal that Wave is a modern version of email though). What I do remember is how they demonstrated that Wave could revolutionise how we collaborate. Unfortunately there is so much hype about this “email replacement” that there has been a fair amount of negativity about the actual product now that more and more people have had a chance to work with it. Scoble initially took a pretty dim view of Wave (also be sure to read his follow up post about how the email metaphor is unhelpful) although I think he pretty much summed up Wave’s value (in my opinion, at least) when he said the following:

See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave.

That’s really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.

But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people.

It also ignores the productivity gains that we’ve gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

His focus on Wave as a social networking tool is representative of a number of perspectives I have come across already. A couple people I have been testing Wave with have commented on Wave’s value as a Twitter replacement (Really? Is Twitter really something every vaguely similar tool has to replicate?). I think those people are missing the point, just like their email focussed colleagues.

That being said, Wave can replace email for our collaboration oriented tasks. I see Wave as a potential Google Docs+ service. While it lacks decent text formatting tools at the moment (ok, remember Google Wave is still very much a preview version at the moment and is actively being developed and improved) I see this as being a terrific way to collaborate in a team on a document or project. Like Louis Gray, I don’t see Wave being suitable for mass communication, it just gets way too crazy and will only take more time just trying to track multiple branches of conversation threads. Here is a quick demo I made which will give you an idea how chaotic a wave can become:

I’m still messing around with Wave and the product is clearly still in early days but I can see this becoming a tremendously helpful collaboration tool in my business. I work with people in different cities and countries and having Wave available through Google Apps would enable us to collaborate both realtime and asynchronously pretty effectively. Bear in mind that Google Docs already has collaboration functionality built into it (heck, Google Docs is designed around collaboration) but Wave just does it so much better based on what I’ve seen.

I mentioned the debate about Wave as an email replacement earlier in this post. I don’t agree with that characterization when it comes to run of the mill email. Email is built on well established standards and is pervasive. Wave is built on a mix of open protocols and what seems to be a new set of protocols (I could be wrong here) and while Wave is meant to be federated, you’re basically asking people to roll out support for a new infrastructure to replace email where the benefits for certain types of email are not clear.

On the other hand I do see Wave as replacing email for some forms of collaboration. Just like wikis had the potential to change email behaviour by presenting opportunities to collaborate on documents and projects on the wiki rather than using loads of emails, Wave has a similar promise. In fact it is probably more useful to think of Wave as being more like a combination of a wiki and a document service than email per se. Email is really a means to communicate ideas, changes to documents and so on. Wave is where you can actually do all that work without using email as an intermediary.

Now what Wave may have been intended for and what people actually use it for are two very different things. Twitter wasn’t meant to be a chat service and yet that is exactly what we have been using it for (well, in addition to the other stuff). If you are planning to use Wave to replace Twitter or have rampant email conversations with loads of people you are going to become pretty frustrated pretty quickly. If you are planning to use Wave for focussed collaboration then you are on to something.

Ultimately we are going to have to wait a little longer to see how Wave impacts on our activities online. The “new, shiny” quality will fade soon enough and if it doesn’t help us become more productive it will quickly fall by the wayside. I don’t think it will but I do think that, despite all the hype, Wave will probably become a little like Gmail and Google Docs and part of our workflow wallpaper. Its probably better that way too. I don’t want to focus too much on the tool but rather on the work it helps me get done that much better.

I have been given an opportunity to chat to David Rivas, Nokia’s Vice President Product & Technology Management about the Symbian operating system. There has been quite a lot of talk about how shoddy the series 60 user interface is and it got me wondering about the operating system itself, under the UI, so I asked Tania Steenkamp at Nokia SA if I could chat to someone about that and she kindly arranged for me to speak to David.

I thought I’d use FriendFeed to make notes as I chat to David and possibly wrap up with a few thoughts afterwards (experimenting a little, so please bear with me). I’ll publish the FriendFeed channel here.

My discussion with David was fascinating. He called me on a regular landline so I don’t have a recording of the call (which would probably be very interesting to developers and consumers alike). I was typing as we talked so any comments which don’t make sense or misrepresent what David told me is really my fault. David is clearly very knowledgeable and passionate about Symbian and at the same time recognises where Nokia and the Symbian Foundation have work to do to improve users’ perceptions of Symbian as an operating system.

Symbian’s main challenge seems to be more about perceptions of the underlying operating system based on its dated UI rather than anything to do with the operating system’s capabilities. My take on what David was telling me is that Symbian is a robust, powerful and effective operating system that was designed to work well on a wide range of devices from basic models to the N97.

I have Google’s Friend Connect integrated into this blog and you can sign in and comment using your Google account, OpenID, Twitter credentials and one other set of credentials. It works pretty well and when I comment here it integrates nicely with my blog credentials.

I’d like to add Facebook Connect integration to the blog too and I have the Sociable plugin loaded and just need to configure it. What I’m not sure about is whether the Facebook Connect plugin will co-exist with the Friend Connect plugin and give you the option of which service to use to sign in to comment.

I’m certainly seeing Facebook Connect being used far more widely as a sign-on service on blogs and other sites (I’m using Facebook Connect to authenticate on Digg rather than my original credentials) and I’ve read some positive posts about how Facebook Connect integration helps boost awareness of the blog (although there are also reported problems). At the same time Facebook Connect integration seems to be a little more difficult to implement than Friend Connect. Compare these two demos, for example. The first is Kevin Marks, formerly Google’s Developer Evangelist, demonstrating how to add Friend Connect to a static to Robert Scoble.

The second video is Facebook’s Luke Shephard demonstrating how to add Facebook Connect to a similarly static site on Building43.

I know that there are people who are somewhat skeptical about Facebook (I have certainly been skeptical in the past) but given Facebook’s moves towards a distributed model and what seems like pretty widespread adoption on the social Web, it looks like a really good way to go.

I’m going to get the Sociable plugin configured properly and see what happens. What I am already wondering about is what to do if it doesn’t co-exist peacefully with Friend Connect and give you a choice of which way to go? Which option do I go with?

Google just pushed out what some may regard as the Holy Grail of sync … if it works. Here is the customary tutorial video:

Google Sync offers two way synchronisation for a variety of mobile devices ranging from the iPhone to Series 60 devices to Blackberries (and a couple in between). It offers the ability to keep your Gmail contacts and Google Calendars in sync although not all devices support Google Calendar just yet. Installing the service on my Nokia E71 involved creating a new synchronisation profile which was easy enough. The first time I attempted to synchronise the 1 796 contacts in my phone the processed bugged out with an “Invalid host address” error. Hopefully second time is a charm.

The one big challenge with these services is handling duplicates so I hopefully won’t have too many duplicates jamming up the works because what Google Sync doesn’t seem to have is Plaxo’s De-Duper technology which is, for some, enough of a reason to subscribe to Plaxo’s $49 a year premium service.

Google Sync will also give MobileMe a run for its money. MobileMe has very limited device support and costs about €65 a year (in SA the currency switches to Euros and works out more expensive that the quoted $99). Compare that to broader device support, offline access to Gmail and Gcal and $75 to add double the amount of storage space to your Google Account (20GB on MobileMe versus 40GB on Google).

The next contender is Nokia’s Ovi service. I have seen Ovi as a MobileMe competitor, at least a potential competitor mainly because it creates that link between my Nokia phone and an online service.

Ovi supports contacts, calendar, files and media although synchronising with a desktop is limited to a Windows PC. The interface isn’t quite a slick as its competitors but it does present an alternative to Apple’s beautiful yet limited offerings. Ovi’s pricing is a little high ($80 a year for 10GB or $150 a year for 30GB storage for files), especially when compared to MobileMe but a tussle between these two offerings is more a tussle between the iPod/iPhone/Mac combination and Nokia/Windows PC devices.

Google’s Sync has the potential to overtake these other services very quickly. Gmail and GCal are already widely used and even if you don’t have some level of integration between your desktop apps and these two services (already possible on the Mac due to Google Sync integration into Address Book and a script or something for iCal), all you really need now is a browser and a supported mobile device to keep your contacts and mail in sync and, if your mobile device supports it, your calendar too.

My one big concern, even more so now than before, is whether it is desirable to have a single provider so involved in so many areas of our lives and pretty much in control of this key data we run our lives on? I took a look at my Google Account profile and saw this plethora of Google services I subscribe to:

I didn’t realise I was subscribed to so many Google services. Thankfully my daily work and personal lives only rely on a couple of these but those few key services include my email! That already is a lot of control I have given to Google and even more trust I have placed in that foreign organisation to respect my data and “do no evil”.

Leaving aside the Big Brother fears, Google is fast becoming part of the wallpaper. Google Sync makes my Google Account a pretty compelling alternative to its closest competitor, MobileMe, and at a lower cost. I am already a Gmail user (Google Apps too, several times over) so there is no change of email address there. I can probably switch my extensive photo albums from MobileMe to PicasaWeb when my MobileMe subscription ends in October (which would unfortunately involve needing to introduce my mom and other family members to PicasaWeb just when I had them used to MobileMe’s Galleries) and otherwise carry on as usual. It would cost me a lot less to pay for the extra storage for my Google Account that it will to renew my MobileMe account and should the rumours about the GDrive prove true (after a couple years in the making), that would take care of basic file storage to compete with iDisk (which I rarely use anyway).

I can easily see a day when Google is everything on the Web. It will effectively be the Internet for a great many people and those same people should spare a prayer for its leaders and the hope that they never lose their way and turn on us. That could be very bad. We may have to go back to Yahoo! Mail (I still have my account there … just in case).

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