Oh, Maemo, the promises you bring to nerds like me…

Mobile programmable computers have a new meaning now.

When I was a student in Mexico, in order to help my parents pay for my education I also had a scholarship/financing deal with the school, which meant I would do some assistant work in one of the departments.  A friend of mine was working in school administration, and I joined in.  There I had was trained on a technique that has helped me throughout my career.

Instead of just thinking of managing a project solely through deliverables, reviews and milestones, this focuses on the human component and the conversations that you as the project owner have with your stakeholders and contributors.   Therefore, you focus bit by bit on closing (completing) those simultaneous conversations to get closer to your specified goals.

It probably sounds obvious and even a little bit simplistic, but turning its tables on the process to work through the people rather than focus on the task on its own is an approach that has proven time and again to be effective in the ocassions when I’ve used it.  It also helps us “touchy-feely Latin types” to use our strengths to deliver, and builds strong personal relationships with your team.

So my N86 got a software update, and Panorama mode works better with dramatic light changes as you can see above.  Even better, now the camera has face detection as well.

The 8 megapixel sensor with wide-angle lens was already there

Full disclaimer: this is related closely to my work.  Don’t expect me to be fully impartial.

It is still a beta and currently only works with N97, but I’ve been using it for the past week and it’s not only nice but useful.  I can’t wait to have this available for Twitter as well, but don’t expect me to divulge publicly where I or anybody else I care for exactly reside.

Even though I love my work, one of the things that makes it a little heavier is the need for interaction with different timezones.  When I wake up I already have e-mails from Singapore (Finland +6 hours), around noon I’ll be chatting with colleagues from the UK, in the afternoon it’s the turn for the guys in New York and before going to sleep every once in a while I have to have a chat with my colleagues from the west coast of the United States (Finland -10 hours).

No wonder I sometimes feel I only stop working during weekends .  At least the kind of workstyles and input are very diverse.

One of my colleagues posted online the model we’ve been using for planning our digital marketing.  If you are involved in this kind of activities and don’t know where to start, it is an excellent tool.

All of this of course relates to spreading the word, participating in & enabling  conversations. That’s one of the reasons why I love my job.  We are building the future one day at a time.

You may have noticed that the rate of new posts in this blog has slowed down a little.  Most of it is simply due to the fact that I’m spending a hell of a lot of time working these days (a common joke with my buddy Phil is that we see more of each other during the week than of our wives), so I don’t have that much time to share certain things as when I was studying my masters.

Furthermore, most of the impulses and insights that I have nowadays are related to work, and as you may have noticed I don’t feel comfortable blogging about it externally unless its public, live and water under the bridge (a not-so-uncommon problem).  For that reason I have started a Nokia internal blog where I post my thoughts on services, devices, marketing and industry shifts as I see them happening.  If you also work for the company and would like to read it, tell me and I’ll send you the link).

This doesn’t mean that this blog will whither and die (on the contrary, I plan to give it more attention now that it has finally moved to its own server and I was able to clean all 800-plus entries), but that I’m still trying to evaluate what focus to give it.  Let’s see what it brings, and hope you want to continue reading.

My work, of which I usually don’t talk about in this blog, can sometimes be great, sometimes frustrating but in the end one of the things that makes it worthwhile is the people.

To have an idea, you can check some of their public blogs:

• erkkola.net
• danielgoodall.com
• finlandforthought.net
• artojoensuu.wordpress.com
• digiantique.wordpress.com
• cognitions.typepad.com
• activefreemedia.com