On the 24th of July it has been officially announced that Nokia is about to acquire cellity, the company I am working for.
cellity - social address book
I feel honored that Nokia took cellity to strengthen its competencies in the social address book field. We developed at cellity an unique approach about how the future of contacts (on the phone and the web) could be and I really look forward to keep working at Nokia on this topic.
Here are some articles about this story:
Posted in mobile business
Tagged address book, cellity, exit, nokia, phonebook, social
On the 29th of June it has been announced that the major handset manufacturer are using Micro-USB as the Standard phone charging port. This is a big step for the customer since this would mean that any phone of these companies can be recharged with the same phone charger. This step hasn’t been taken voluntary, because it was planned to enact a law in Europe that was targeting the same goal.
Some people are still arguing that this doesn’t result in any reduction of waste, but in my opinion this does have two implications – one for the environment and one for the customer.
1. Customer
The customers just have to care less on carrying the phone charger with them as they have to do today. Hotels will supply chargers and you just can ask anybody for one. Furthermore does no one have to buy new chargers (mine are getting lost, damaged etc. quite often) since there should be always a spare one.
2. Environment
In the short run this won’t make any difference, but I predict some changes in the long run. Handset manufacturers might not offer a charger when selling a phone anymore since anyone will have chargers from their previous devises. This makes it not only cheaper to produce a phone it also means less waste, less package and less weight/space to transport.
I couldn’t figure out how large the ecological footprint (CO2 etc.) of a phone charger is, but these figures indicate that their footprint might be not to little:
“There are currently between 350 million and 400 million active mobile phones in circulation in the European Union, the Commission said. People are replacing their phones at a rate of 180 million per year.” source: Paul Weller, computerworlduk
Is this enough?
I really want any mobile device to use Micro-USB, so even my Nintendo DS could work on this standard. Furthermore should the manufacturer think about a plug in like Blackberry offers (see the picture) which make the chargers even more universal.
Hopefully the manufacturers will become even “greener” in the future and the customers demand handsets with a less harmful environmental impact.
I had the chance to be part of the private beta of a new twitter service called sumtnsumtn. Basically this service allows me to tweet directly about a particular website. To do this all you have to is to log in on sumtnsumtn.com with your twitter account (This should be only necessary during private beta) and to place a bookmark in your browser. Once you are on site you would like to tweet about all you have to do is to press the bookmarked link and a sidebar of sumtnsumtn will show up (see the picture).
Within this bar I can write my point of view into the tweet and publish it. The software automatically adds the URL to the tweet. I also can see what other persons were tweeting about this particular URL (this feature will make more sense as soon as more people will use sumtnsumtn)
To sum it up: Quite useful when you want to share your view on URLs directly on twitter.
Posted in internet business
