It's been a busy week in mobile handset world. Latest news is that LiPS forum joins forces with LiMo Foundation. This is a good step in preventing the foreseen problem of Linux in mobile devices: Fragmentation.

These two key players have already before made some work together to unify the platforms, but this certainly is much better. Now from fragmentation point of view, the only problem is Googlw and Open Handset Alliance.

I personally don't yet view the fragmentation as a major problem as I see that each platforms have their own purposes and they fit those very well. Maybe later on there will be need to align different platforms, but until then. Keep on developing and contributing. I'm waiting for the result eagerly...

Well, it came out and it looks good. iPhone 3G is going to be available in stores at the 11th of July also here in Finland. There will propably be "few" people lining up to get it.

I'm just waiting to see the actual price of that device. The $199 price will of course be connected with some package from operator. The real price for the whole package will be closer to $2000 (or something).

Anyways. Apple did it again. Great phone.

The hype about open source based mobile phones is increasing all the time.

- Google Android is coming, although might be a bit late
- OpenMoko based Neo Freerunner is ready to be shipped
- Symbian is about to be open sourced
- Nokia bought Trolltech that has implemented a open source mobile platfrom Qtopia as well as the highly popular cross- platform GUI application framework Qt
- LIPS forum, Open Handset Alliance and LiMo foundation are gaining popularity
- Nokia has announced to bring a Linux based device to market that has telephony sutpport

And so on. Don't even get me started on MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PC)... (Well, I have to: Atom, maemo, UME, mobilin etc. :) )

There seems to be a huge hype about these and for a reason. Open source enables smaller companies to step up and enter the markets. It enables users to customize and freely develop applications and the platform to better suit their needs. It makes open innovation possible.

Problem still seems to be that the rules and regulations (both juridical and the community rules) seem to be a bit hard for companies to gasp. Almost everyone know nowadays that open source is good thing and now we are thinking how to gain benefit from it? Someone introduced already that we are moving towards FOSS 2.0 where we really get business benefit from open source.

I'm currently working on "Benefit from open source" course and I'm full of ideas. The problem is that the course is just one day long and there won't be enough time to go through all the exciting stuff. What do you think are the most important things a company should understand when starting to do business with open source?

Finally my summer holiday started!

I had to delay the start by one week due to a bit busy situation at work (in fact, I've been working whole morning at home to get things done). Have to say that now it feels really free and relaxed. I even have time to write to blog and to read few books that I've been thinking about reading for few months already.

I also feel like I should develop at least something during the summer holiday. Just to have something to do during rainy days :). The problem is that I have had a huge number of ideas during the winter and spring about tools that should be done, but now my head feels empty. Well, maybe I should just start with open source Scrum tools project that I've been considering for ages. If you have any ideas, please let me know...

I just stumbled upon a quite nice web site called Shelfari. The idea is that you can create your own virtual bookshelf and add your own books, the books you have read and the books you would like to read in it. Shelfari also offers the trendy community features like groups, friends, recommendations, tags and reviews to help you find the best books available.

I have to say that as I like to read and I like to own books, I became right away interested about the service and decided to add my books to the virtual bookshelf. Have to say that the first impression of the service is really good. Everything works smoothly and intuitively. Also a great bonus is the widget that can be added to blogs etc. websites. So I decided to replace my current readings widget with Selfari's Now reading widget. Looks a bit better now.

I came back from a hiking trip yesterday evening. Very relaxing experience even though my neck is very stiff and it's very painful to turn my head...

All the way when were walking in the woods, I tried to find some kind of an analogy to projects and project management or at least to teamwork, but at the end I just figured out that hiking is an individual effort, even you're hiking with your friends. The only support you get is the pressure from them that keeps you from stopping and keeps you moving those feet, no matter how painful it is.

I added some new features to the blog.

1. Now reading... box on the right side. Tells which book(s) I'm currently reading and what I read previously. I have a habit of reading at least three books a month, maybe I even should list these somewhere with a short review...

2. Added Google search

3. Added work related links section, that hopefully will be quite dynamic and changing according to my situations. Now including mainly basic agile sites I use a lot.

4. Added links for the events I'm taking part. Maybe I should use Upcoming for this... Hmm..

Haven't have time to write anything on this blog for a while. Quite much has been happening since XP2007 and my summer vacation. I have been quite busy at work with promoting our agile trainings and trying to build some kind of network. At the same time I have been giving a large number of different kind VB.NET, Symbian, C, C++ and Java programming courses. Well, at least these keep you in touch with the development.

I'm quite excited about our new agile courses and hopefully people will find their way in them. To help this we have been working with my colleagues to publish articles (few examples at the company website, in Finnish only), create workshops and keep seminar presentations. Latest of these happened during ELKOM 07 fair at Helsinki in last month. It was very nice to see that almost without marketing (from our side at least), we got room full of listeners eager to find out more about agile software development and its suitability to embedded world.

What makes me also enthusiastic is the Agile seminar arranged by Agile finland yesterday evening at Helsinki. Good seminar where all of the speakers gave me something.

Craig Larman presented the Lean ideas and even though these were familiar to me, I at least got a reassurance that there are probably a lot of people who think that Lean has a lot to offer. I feel like Lean thinking plays key role in solving the problems of large-scale offshore projects.

Petri Haapio gave a valuable data how agile development is implemented in Nokia Networks and later in NSN. A lot of few interesting points to share people on courses.

Finally Lasse Koskela guidelines for facilitating change in form of 15 excellent points. Lasse's ideas seem to be a bit aligned to my thoughts about learning through failures and retrospectives. Making better developers by forcing them to think. Very good stuff all in all...

Well, those were the topmost things on my mind today. Hopefully I'll have time to come back with new ones as soon as possible.

I'm quite excited currently. Only a bit over week till the start of XP2007 conference. The program looks great and I'm hoping to hear lots of new ways to adopt agile methodologies in to different kind of organizations.

Also I'm looking forward to meeting new people all over the world and discuss the cultural differences between different countries and how these differences affect the SW engineering. Who knows what kind of new ideas pops into mind when you're with such people like in agile conferences. Lots of professional people with creative and exploratory mindsets.

A colleague of mine had found a great case study about how Scurm and XP are used in anonymous SW company in Stockholm. This paper called Scrum and XP from the trenches - How we do Scrum by Henrik Kniberg is a good introduction to usage of XP and Scrum and a great example on one way to use these together.

I found it especially useful because the down to earth grip on methodologies, practical insights and taking in to considerations both the technical and the business side. This all in about 100 pages of easy to read and entertaining text. Also Henrik's blog is a blog worth visiting.

I got a slight push to my own project when I gave a few days advanced course on Java programming. The topics on this course included Swing UI programming, JDBC database connectivity and many other interesting techniques. So during this course I came back to my application adding some user interface and doing this of course test-driven.

The normal JUnit framework wasn't enough for TDDing the UI, so I found JFCUnit that is an extension to JUnit and provides mechanisms for this. Using it is fairly simple and you can get started with quite small amount of effort. The documentation found on the website guides newbies nicely to the world of GUI unit testing.

Well anyways, the first version of the UI has been set up and the application is pretty close to being almost usable. Strange how a nice UI makes the application feel a lot more professional...

I've just started a new project for automatic generation of article reference list website. As I've been reading, studying and teaching agile methods for a while already, I felt that I should try some practices in my own project too. So I started doing this Java application in test-driven way and I also created my own build server for continuous integration. The first impression on TDD is great: The software is building up almost by itself, refactoring is easy, Test & Profiling Tools Platform is smashing and everything works nice.

However the next step on the model is to create some kind of view. UI development in Java is not my strongest side and I guess test-driving that is not so easy. If someone knows how to do this, please drop me with a comment or an e-mail.

Well, I'll report on the progress of the project later on and we'll see if I'm able to get it out with some open source license. But before that, it should have some more functionalities and a clear direction where it should be developed to.

P.S. The Agile forums is a place to be in case you have questions about agility.

As a natural next step for Google online office suite, the rumours of the Google's alternative to Powerpoint are fueling. Few evidences have been presented in Google Operating System blog and its hard to doubt them.

Instead I thought of few things why I feel like this is not the perfect solution. At least the first and most important thing is that the software is online. Presentations are given in all kinds of places, and extremely often without any network available. So will there be a feature to dump the presentation into an executable form that can be used offline?

Another thing, coming from the same reason from previous one, is that I usually use Powerpoint mainly during my work trip in train. I also have a tendency to do things at the last second, so I may sit down in a small cafe and write my few thoughts about the customer down on a slide or two. Does this mean that with this Google Presently tool, I have to get connected to Internet through my mobile phone and after that I can write down the few lines?

Well, I'm not sure but this feels like the most trickiest question around the Presently. I love Docs and Spreadsheet, but I feel that I use these in a bit different way, than I would use Presently.

Well, iPhone has been introduced as the rumours told, but from wrong manufacturer. LinkSys iPhone is a VoIP phone used with Skype and similiar VoIP clients. Apple has not commented the release of iPhone in any ways. It will be interesting to see what cards Apple has in its sleeve.

Well that's it. Time's up and its time to leave the managing dynamics part of the blog alone. More pictures would have been nice and a new navigation system. Well, I'll just put the posts in order from the earliest and show them on one page for easier browsing experience. Hopefully I'll have time to come back to this blog soon, maybe in some new thoughts about creative commons and open source. Or maybe related to a J2EE dilemma I'm facing currently at work...

I have been gathering some more or less interesting links at my del.icio.us list for the Managing Dynamics: Creative Content Business course. Looking back to the links I've remembered to save shows the way I've been going through the course. At the beginning I've saved some definitions related to the early topics. I felt unease with the new things and didn't yet know what to think about the cases and the whole course.

While the course progressed, I felt that I made some progress too. I started to save things that interested me: Creative commons, open source, mobile phones and even Christo's and Jean-Claude's installations...

Well here's few top picks from the link list in case you don't have time or interest to browse them through:

Creative Commons comic: A Spectrum of Rights
A nice comic explaining the ideas and usage of Creative Commons license.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar
A great book about open source and the differences between commercial "cathedral" way and the open source "Bazaar" way.

Lawrence Lessig
A homepage of a person who has contributed a lot on Creative Commons license.

Website of Christo and Jeanne-Claude
An artist couple that creates temporary environmental installations. Nice looking pieces of art and interesting business model behind it

OpenLife.cc | Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source
An open source book about open source. Extremely interesting!

As two of my individual readings mainly concentrated on open-source, I'll try to reflect on my own ideas of it after reading some of these books. The Creative Economy by John Howkins takes a very traditional view on the creative content business with explaining different viewpoints. On open source Howkins mainly explains the basic licenses behind them and just touches the brilliant business and social models behind the whole thing.

The most interesting book of these three was Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. It consists of many case reports about free culture, copyrights, open source and public domain. Interesting cases, some of them were already familiar to me, some of them were interesting smaller cases. All in all, the practical view and cases was just what I could think people would need to see the benefits of open source and creative commons. Also seeing that even open-source or public domain can make income to you. I must agree on Lessig on the potential of open source, but the time it takes for open source to grow will take long. As Lessig states in his conclusion:

"I’ve told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy.We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. It will take some thought, and more importantly, it will take some will to transform the RCAs of our
day into the Causbys.
Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized."

Creative commons seemed to be a license of choice for individual writings and open-source for small trivial software. Should I write something down every time I'm learning something? Should I publish software written for my own aid or just as an aid for learning? I can't think a reason why not. So I guess I'll license this blog under creative commons.

Back to the readings: The open life by Henrik Ingo was mainly chosen because I haven't had time to read this through before and this would force me to read it. :) The main point in this book is that it also concentrates on the social aspects of open source. It describes the actions of open source community and tells how the open source software projects are carried. Everything has a person centric start point and the results seem to be promising. The different business models in different cases are also a nice way to tell the reader that this "free open source thing" doesn't mean that you don't ever get paid for your job. The little practices for every day jobs from open source projects could benefit almost any academic worker.

Interesting readings and more thoughts on mind. Open source and creative commons feel natural choices right now. I'll guess I'll change this to Creative Commons right away.

The last case study was about an artist couple who create huge environmental installations. The brilliance of this case is still just opening for me. Christo and Jean-Claude create fabulous installations and as a side project the get some income from the preparatory works and documentation of installations.

This showed that art that breaks barriers may be also good business. The only way to make a living from art is not to paint paintings and sell them. Another thing that this has creative is the activity of the Bank Leu. They get an image boost, additional value to customers and publicity from the relatively unrisky line of credit they give to Christo and Jean-Claude.

This shows clearly that the traditional businesses have a lot to learn and gain from creative industries and creative content business.

The third case study was about Atom Films, Shockwave and the merged AtomShockwave. The case descriped how the AtomFilms was founded by Mika Salmi and how the business model and business environment of AtomFilms and later on AtomShockwave evolved. The case was interesting example showing that just great creative content isn't enough, but also the management side and business model are important. Where to get profit?

Problem in this case was that Atom Films heavily depended on the income from advertisements. The advertisements markets have been down since the IT bubble and the Atom Films doesn't seem to have very good alternative business models. The Shockwave part seems to have potential. What should be done in order to make the whole company very profitable and maintain the growth?

I guess all of us on the course were thinking about breaking up the company and selling the Atom Films part. I agreed on this, but when coming back to the case for reflections I realised that one short film market has been existing only few years and will start growing rapidly: Mobile multimedia. Nokia has started its own line of products called Multimedia computers. This can be taken as a sign of time, effort and money that is currently put to make multimedia content truly mobile. Could this be one answer for the Atom Films?

Former CEO of Atom Films, Mika Salmi, has already made his own decision and has started his new work as president of Global Digital Media for MTV Networks. This really makes me think that which one is more important: quality content or good business model. An example on working business model with lower quality content is YouTube.

Atom Films was very creative business, but it failed to stay creative and adjust to constantly changing business environment. One creative burst isn't enough to create anything more than a fairly successful product on some niche market.

The second case study about Apple iPod felt completely different than the first one. I personally can't find the point that makes the iPod so creative. In our portfolio workshop we were chatting about this and an idea about product not being creative but the ways the customers use it are. Well, I still can't think that this is the case with iPod. I more think iPod as an attractive looking product that has a certain image. The image has not been created by only Apple and its marketing department, but more by the customers who have bought iPod, or in fact any other Apple product.

Apple has large challenges ahead as the mobile devices are converging and the markets for plain digital music players are slowly fading away. I still feel that the only way to Apple keep its current pace is to broaden its product portfolio and in order to make this, it needs technology partners. Apple can't afford to do bad or mediocre products, because losing its image as a reliable high tech company with stylish and easy-to-use products would be a serious blow for Apple.

I also mentioned that I don't believe that Apple is yet able to develope a mobile phone. Soon after that there rumours about iPhone got stronger and it seems that Apple is going to introduce the new iPhone in next January. These will be interesting times for Apple. I'm looking forward to see what kind of mobile device Apple is able to deliver and have they done it all by themselves.

As I said in the beginning, this case was a bit harder than the first one. This was because I couldn't locate the creative parts as easily as in the first one and as the case itself wasn't very high quality. Well anyways, in my opinion, the strong image of Apple has been created by cretivity from customers and the marketing.

The first case study was something that I felt comfortable with. The case was about creative performing artist doing things in a new way, or in a creative way. For me the new way of working seemed at the beginning to be the result of the conditions of the circus business. However, thinking back to it, the new way of doing circus was something unique and the performances with more artistic touch transfers circus from average family thing to entertainment for more cultured adults.

The case study gave me a look about creativity as a merchandise (in form of performances) and as a way to sell the merchandise in a new way. This seemed to broaden my look on creativity and give a practical example on creativity in business.

Finally, I have to say that I was thrilled when I saw that the new Beatles album is used as a soundtrack for the Vegas show of Cirque du Soleil. They seem to continue creating new interesting shows with very entertaining soundtracks.

The last case study seemed hardest for me, mainly because the idea of making huge temporary environmental installations with loads of money felt like a total waste of time and money. Well, maybe I somehow understood part of this, and in fact, it already seems like a pretty good business. The case study is available here.

The first thing that felt strange in this, was the actions of banks. How could the artists acquire a line of credit for this kind of things? But after I started to think the case more, it seems like the banks were the winners. For example, The Bank Leu, that financed The Gates installation, gave a lot of additional value to its clients and gained a lot of fame in addition to polishing its image.

Well anyways, the artworks look nice and the installations are breathtaking. Some of these can be seen from Christo's and Jean-Claude's website.