See this announcement.

If you like one of these ideas, please vote for it.  (You can vote for as many different ideas as you like.)  If you dislike it, you can vote against it – and please leave a comment, telling us why.  You can jump into a discussion on any of the ideas, or raise an idea of your own, for community review.

(You can read the ideas and the associated discussion without logging into the site.  If you want to participate more actively, you’ll need a login.  Email me at davidw AT symbian DOT org, and I’ll ensure an invite comes your way.  For more details of the intended operation of the site, see my previous article, “Looking for producers“).

Here are extracts from a few ideas you might enjoy browsing:

Multimedia Playability Database – posted by Martin Webb:

I’m sure many of you will have experienced the problems of playing multimedia on phones – much of your content won’t play, even though the phone apparently supports the format you are trying to use.

There are many reasons for this – e.g. bit rates for even SD content are too high for phones.  However, another key issue is that testing multimedia content is hard – you can test multimedia , demuxers etc individually to death, and still have problems, due to the way things work at a system level (e.g. a bad encoding – not the phone’s fault, but still disappointing for the user and not an excuse with service providers).

The solution is to test with as much content as possible, but this takes time.  Fortunately, this problem seems ideal for a collaborative community, and so I propose a playability database…

Choose appropriate licensing to better account for closed-source additions – posted by Ajay:

I congratulate the Symbian Foundation for choosing a weak copyleft license with the EPL, that doesn’t enforce open source on all authors of future modules that might be added to the Symbian platform.  However, there are two problems with this choice that I’d like to see addressed: the EPL is not very well-written in this regard and there are possible licensing conceptions that might better enable closed-source additions.  I will address each in turn…

Idea for a Sharing Application for S60 & Symbian Browsers – “Echo” – posted by Micky Aldridge:

Similar to the already familiar full sized web-based sharing extensions, such as ShareThis, Feedly, and ShareAholic, its high time that we had a mobile version for our S60, and Symbian Internet browsers, something very discrete, and simple to use to share any site’s url, with a comment, posting to one of several options, be it Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook, or email.

Basically, the already built-in Share URL, which is available by selecting the three horizontal lines in the right hand side menu whilst browsing, has potential, but it simply does not do enough.  For example, the options are “Via message”, Via Bluetooth”, and Via Share on Ovi”.  None of these do what people want…

Promotion of a Symbian applications prototyping solution – posted by Constantine Michailidis:

Making a worthy, useful mobile application with a potential to become a [commercial] success can be very difficult. As you may already know by the desktop environment, much is decided before you even start typing your code: while designing the application, its UI, its features as requested by the client, or simply by implementing the idea you had in mind. All these things have to come out perfect if maximum usability is what you are after.

I wanted to ask here: does Symbian Foundation have any official or semi-official program to help with the “design phase” of application development? Yes, I mean the initial one, while you design (maybe with pen-and-paper) the various screens and controls the application will show…

Healthcare application – posted by Suyog Vaidya:

I am starting this thread to discuss a potential application.

The application proposed is a mechanism to detect undue periods of inactivity of users (elderly or infirm) which might indicate an emergency. The app is provisioned with user specific information including the period of inactivity which might indicate an emergency.

On crossing of various thresholds, the app will throw up interaction dialogs which when attended to shall, in effect, reset the monitoring intervals. Simple movement of the device shall also reset the interval…

Adding More and Versatile Calendar Views – posted by Antoine RJ Wright:

Something that I wish were in the built-in calendar was this idea of additional views. Right now, we have day, week, and month views, but that should not be all the information, or presentation of information that we see.

One view that would come in handy is a call log view. In this view I would see a daily, weekly, montly log of calls, except it would be overlaid to my calendar so that I could do additional things with that information – make notes, send proof to others, etc.

Another view that would be suitable is the ability within the calendar to see all messages as they came in or were sent out. Again, this messages view would be overlaid to those traditional views, but it would give an alternate look to the data that we already want to manage and see…

Audible “call progress” information – posted by William Roberts:

I would like to have an audible indication of why a call has failed, preferrably a spoken one, so that I don’t miss the dialogue box which is displayed while I have the phone pressed to my ear, wondering what’s happening.

Whether you like these ideas or hate them – or whether you think you have better ideas that are worth sharing – your input will be welcome!

However, that’s Apple’s share of smartphone units shipped during Q2 2009.  But if you’re a developer wondering which smartphone platform to prioritise, you’re more likely to be interested in the share of total smartphones in use.  Your application can run on devices that were sold 3 months ago, 6 months ago, 9 months ago, 12 months, and so on – provided these devices are still in use.  This is often called the “installed base”.

I’m not sure if there are analysts who estimate the share of installed base for the various smartphone software platforms.

I guess that any such analyst might start by reasoning something like the following:

1. On average, handsets are typically in use for about 18 months (6 quarters);
2. A first order estimate of the installed base of Symbian-powered handsets can, therefore, be found from the total number of these units shipped in the last 6 quarters;
3. Taking the same Canalys figures as used by the mocoNews article (see chart below – taken from the Canalys website), we can estimate this figure as roughly 6 x 19.4M, namely 116M.  (This assumes that sales of Symbian devices have been, broadly, constant over this period of time.)

Next, the analyst would have to consider the second hand (and third hand) phone market.  A proportion of the handsets which were sold a lot longer ago than 18 months will still be in use – not by the people who originally purchased them, but by relatives, friends, and other people who bought devices from exchange marketplaces.  I’ve got no idea how to estimate that proportion.  Given the outstanding longevity of some classic top-selling Symbian devices such as the Nokia 6600, I might push up the previous estimate by (say) 30%, to approaching 150 million devices.

In other words, the installed base of Symbian devices could be around 7 to 8 times the recently quarterly unit sales.  The corresponding figure for Apple is, almost certainly, a lot lower.

(Not that I’m encouraging anyone in the Symbian world to become complacent!)

Footnote: Symbian Ltd used to issue figures, ever quarter, giving the total number of Symbian devices shipped to that time.  By the time of the announcement of the formation of Symbian Foundation, this figure had reached around 250 million.  The corresponding figure will be significantly larger by now.  However, what’s being estimated above is something different: not the number of devices shipped, but the number still in use.

Disclaimer: I’ve almost certainly got aspects of this calculation wrong.  Like everything else in this blog, it’s not to be taken as an official Symbian pronouncement.  Instead, I offer it as a set of ideas, which others can correct, refine, and improve.

In this article, “legacy smartphone platforms” means “BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60″.  Michael’s conclusion about these platforms is:

…legacy smartphone platforms do a decent job in their respective “comfort zones”.  Nonetheless, when taken out of their natural environment they fall far behind in comparison to iPhone and Android.  These modern platforms were designed for new market requirements without constraints of legacy code or backwards compatibility considerations.

Here’s his summary of Symbian/S60:

Nokia’s decision to open Symbian/S60 source has stalled development of the platform. It will be very difficult for Nokia and its partners to make major improvements to the platform in parallel to moving the platform to an open source model.

The analysis is interesting.  For example, I agree with Michael that speed of implementing new market requirements will be a core differentiator between mobile platforms.  However, you won’t be surprised to hear that I reach a different conclusion.  I have two points to make.

First, the move towards an open source model has not “stalled development” of the Symbian platform.

Plans for open sourcing the platform were announced in June last year.  The release of Symbian OS that was made to device manufacturers and development partners, by Symbian Ltd, towards the end of that same year – Symbian OS v9.5 – broke all internal records in terms of low defect count, keeping the agreed release schedule, and delivering the agreed release scope.  That’s not what you’d expect if the development was “stalled”.

The 9.5 numbering belongs to the world when Symbian OS and S60 were created separately – each with their own version number.  With the Symbian Foundation, these two entities become architecturally unified, into what’s now called “the Symbian platform”.  This new entity has its own new numbering system.  The first version of the platform built from the new code structure – from code kept in Symbian Foundation source repositories – is denoted Symbian^2.

PDK (Platform Development Kit) builds for Symbian^2 have been available to Symbian Foundation members for several months.  PDK builds for Symbian^3 will be available from September.

You can find more details of the contents of Symbian^2 and Symbian^3 releases from the Symbian Developers website.  For example, highlight features of Symbian^2 platform include

• UI Makeover Step 1: Web Runtime offers web design on mobile;
• Personal: All-new home screen supporting user customization, embedded widgets and internet content;
• Adaptable: Support for multiple form factors and input methods (touch, non-touch, flexible aspect ratios and resolutions);
• Dynamic: Location based event framework that allows apps to take action in response to the user’s changing location.

And highlight features of Symbian^3 platform include

• UI makeover step 2: Graphics support for advanced layering and effects (eg semi-transparent content layered over video, complex animated transitions between apps);
• Sounding clear: A new high performance networking architecture enabling broadband speeds, ideal for streaming high definition video and high quality VoIP calls;
• Movie time: Support for files >2GB in size, enough for full length HD movies; Full HDMI support with HDCP;
• Simplifying internet access: Adaptive WLAN background scanning, energy efficient.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.  If you follow the links on the Symbian platform roadmap page, you’ll find there are huge amounts of package-level development taking place.  So, again, I dispute the claim that Symbian platform development is “stalled”.

(For lots more news about items in the Symbian platform roadmap, I recommend attending the Symbian Exchange and Exposition, at the end of October.)

Second – and more significant in the longer term – the open source model provides the means for Symbian platform development to accelerate (as opposed to stall).

This is something that’s becoming increasingly clear to me.  Even though the platform remains, for the time being, only partly open source, some of the benefits of the overall changes in process are already becoming apparent.  These benefits follow from the fact that the ability to build versions of the platform is becoming much more widely distributed than before.  This in turn is due to:

• The creation and distribution of the PDK (Product Development Kit);
• The pending availability of hardware reference platforms.

As development teams throughout the Symbian community reflect on this opportunity, more and more people are warming to the option of a new way to demonstrate the value of experimental new software they have been creating.

Previously, any such software needed to pass through a number of “review tollgates” before having the chance to be integrated into a shipping product.  Product managers are, naturally, often risk-averse when it comes to making time and space on a busy product development schedule for untested new software components.  That can be bad news for developers who have a hunch that their new software could trigger a novel breakthrough, but who don’t get a chance to prove their case.

However, the new Symbian Foundation processes open the possibility for teams (such as research groups inside device manufacturers or network operators) to more easily install their software on specially adapted reference environments.  They can do this without having to queue up for permission from hierarchies of product managers, middle managers, programme managers, and the like.  Instead, they have a new route to demonstrate the suitability (or otherwise!) of their experimental software.  They’ll be able to test this software, get feedback from a sample of real end-users, modify it, test it again, modify it again… and then make the case to product managers to include their work in commercial devices.

In other words: the new Symbian Foundation processes allow more development to take place in parallel – which means that the overall flow of innovation in the platform will be accelerated.

This is in line with something I wrote a few months back – stating the reasons for Symbian moving to open source:

Involving more people will allow more opportunities to be addressed and challenges overcome:

• The number of smart and capable people outside an organisation will always far exceed the number on the inside
• It’s not just about the sheer number of people, but the number of different perspectives.  People in the same organisation are often constrained by common thinking patterns.  By encouraging and enabling contributions from many organisations, we’ll benefit from the fact that there will be many different kinds of approaches
• Freely available standard programming interfaces are an important first step to involving more people – but they only go so far
• Freely available source code, that is open to modification and experiment, enables deeper and more substantial collaboration: collaboration in the evolution and refinement of the underlying software platform, rather than only on the edges of the platform.

• ideas about new or improved mobile applications, services, tools, devices, experiences, alliances…

People frequently seek my support for their suggestions on all aspects of the future of mobile technology, the future of the mobile industry, and the future of Symbian.  “Why doesn’t Symbian invest some time and money to improve such-and-such…” they ask.  “Surely you agree it’s a good idea?”

There are big limitations in my own personal ability to discern the most significant and deserving of this rich brew of ideas.  Happily, help is at hand, via the evaluative skills of the Symbian community as a whole. Indeed, it’s a core part of my job, not only to encourage and support the Symbian community to propose ideas, but to encourage and support the Symbian community to collectively review and prioritise ideas.

We are using the site ideas.symbian.org for this purpose.  This site is being developed as a place where people can:

• Propose and assess ideas about Symbian (technology, services, strategy, initiatives…);
• Weigh up the community’s best thinking about Symbian;
• Guide Symbian management in decision making;
• Establish reputations as leading thinkers about Symbian;
• Participate in Symbian’s philosophy of Open Management.

As you can see for yourselves, the site still has some rough edges.  But it already contains (to my mind) an intriguing set of ideas.  If we get the design right, I expect that the site will attract regular visits and contributions from participants who cover the entire mobile value chain – including end users, analysts, researchers, designers, developers, and employees from companies both inside and outside the Symbian Foundation.

Ideas progress through stages

A key aspect of the design of ideas.symbian.org is that ideas pass through stages.

Usually, an idea starts in Stage 1 – “Seeking support” (also called “Being defined”). Other people viewing the site are able to comment on that idea, and cast votes either in favour or against it. They can also comment on previous comments made against the idea.  In this way, good ideas spark useful discussion.  To make cases for or against ideas, people can provide links to research data and other market findings.

To progress to the next stage, the idea must

1. Have received a certain number of “page views”
2. Have generated a certain amount of discussion
3. Have sufficient approval votes and not too many negative votes
4. Be approved by at least one designated Expert in the category applicable to that idea
5. Be complete and clear enough (administrator’s & expert’s judgement).

In some occasions, the relevant category expert may instead decide that the idea, as proposed, is insufficiently actionable.  The “idea” may simply be saying, “something needs to be done about problem A or opportunity B”.  That can still be a good topic for discussion, but it’s not ready to receive votes and progress higher up the ladder of stages.  In that case, the idea can be demoted to stage 0.  It can come back to stage 1 once a specific concrete idea has emerged.

(Aside: In the current implementation of the ideas site, there isn’t a formal “Stage 0″.  Instead, there’s a separate notion of “discussion threads” for topics that aren’t yet ready to be progressed.  People can still cast votes in these threads, but in this case the votes indicate whether they find the topic interesting or uninteresting.)

Stage 2: Finding a producer

Deciding that an idea has sufficient merit is the business of Stage 1 discussions.  Stage 2 discussions are different.

By this time, the idea is clear and well understood, but nobody has stepped forward to make it happen.  Discussion now revolves less around the idea itself and more around how to find someone to take it forward and get it implemented (the “Producer”).

This may also mean that the idea is changed to make it more attractive to a Producer.  In some cases this may change the idea beyond the originator’s intention – this should be discussed between the originator and the producer, but ultimately the decision lies with the producer (who is, after all, the person or organisation who will be putting the work into implementing it).

In some cases, the producer will be an employee of the Symbian Foundation, and the idea will be implemented as a project (large or small) inside the Symbian Foundation.  However, in other cases, a producer will emerge from the community at large.  He or she will say: “this is a good idea – I will make it happen”.  And the resources used during implementation may come from far and wide:

• Established companies;
• New companies;
• Open source projects involving developers with some free time available;
• University research projects.

Finding gems

The ideas site supports many ways of viewing the different ideas it contains.  The “view all ideas” page allows viewers to list ideas by modification date, post (origination) date, popularity, author, and so on.  Further, it allows filtering of ideas – by category, by stage, etc.

For example, this filter lists all ideas that are currently in “Finding a producer” stage.  I urge you to take a look!  At the time of writing, there are 30 such ideas to consider.

Of course, it’s not just in the “well trodden path” of Stage 2 ideas where you can find starting points to set your own thoughts racing.  There are (at time of writing) some 145 ideas in Stage 1.  Some of these are, in my view, unduly neglected.  It’s well worth dipping into these lesser visited parts of the site.  There are some gems of ideas waiting to be unearthed and developed.

Footnote: Implementing the ideas site

Symbian’s ideas site is provided by Spigit – a general purpose social networking tool for idea and innovation management.  You can read more about Spigit from their website, which is well worth browsing.  Spigit’s offerings contain many features, suited to different contexts.  Symbian is still in the process of choosing and customising which of these features we want to be prominent on our ideas site.  We even have a category of ideas reserved for suggesting improvements in the implementation of the site itself: “Operation of this website“.

For the time being, the Symbian ideas site is open to general viewing, without need of user registration.  However, if you want to vote, comment, or raise an idea of your own, you’ll need a formal login.  Anyone who is already part of the site can invite you to join (they do this via the “Invite” button in their “My profile” page on the site).  If you’d like me to drop you an invite, let me know your email address (for example, you can DM me on twitter).  I look forward to seeing your own ideas, and your comments on other people’s ideas.  Most of all, I look forward to seeing a blossoming and productive matchmaking between ideas originators and ideas producers.

This is sometimes called “a good kind of problem to have!”

I’m anticipating many tough choices at SEE09, the 2009 Symbian Exchange & Exposition, on 27th and 28th October. More details of the agenda for this event were made public today.

One example of a tough scheduling clash occurs on the early afternoon of Day One:

• Application Development stream: Next Generation Hybrid Applications – Utilizing your Web Development Skills with Qt based Solutions, speaker Pekka Kosonen, Head of technology Development, Forum Nokia;
• Open Source Business Models stream: Don’t be afraid of Free: Why Open-Source Symbian makes sound Financial Sense, speaker Matt Asay, Alfresco;
• Device Creation and Contributing to Symbian stream: Symbian^x Platform Overview: How to achieve HW abstraction and Faster Device Creation, speaker Daniel Rubio, Chief Architect, Symbian Foundation.

Another example occurs on the early afternoon of Day Two:

• Application Development stream: Tools roadmap for an open source mobile platform and next gen web apps, speaker Paul Beusterien, Manager Development Tools, Symbian Foundation;
• Open Source Business Models stream: Adapting to the Open Source Ecosystem, speaker Tim Ocock, Symsource;
• Device Creation and Contributing to Symbian stream: Enabling Symmetric Multi-processing for Symbian Mobile Devices, speaker from ST-Ericsson.

It’s much the same through both days of seminars and workshops.  Throughout, there’s a striking range of sessions that look both interesting and important.  That’s before any mention of the exhibition hall and the countless formal and informal meetings that are likely to be taking place.  I expect participants will be hurrying between the different parts of the conference venue.  It’s going to be a busy time, with a huge range of ideas being exchanged!

For people who want to find out what happened in a session they couldn’t attend, there will be a chance afterwards to view at least the highlights of all the sessions.  There will also, no doubt, be plenty of twittering.

Registration and attendance at all these sessions is free.  There are still a few opportunities left for exhibitors and sponsors.  It’s a chance to make your mark on the event that will be defining the future of mobile.

Asking readers for suggestions can easily be misconstrued.

Here’s an example.  Back in April, an idea emerged inside Symbian that perhaps we should change aspects of the annual ecosystem get-together, previously known as the Symbian Smartphone Show.  Various aspects of this idea were discussed internally.  I decided to surface aspects of this discussion in a blog posting, Redesigning the Smartphone Show.  I wrote,

The date and venue for the 2009 event has already been set: it will take place on 27-28 October, at Earls Court 2, in central London (the same venue as the 2008 event).

But there’s a lot that is not yet set for the 2009 event:

• The name
• The principal themes and content
• The event branding…

If you have views on what you’d like to see at the 2009 event, please speak up!

For example:

• Which aspects of previous events would you like to see carried forwards, and which changed?
• Which speakers would you like to see at the event?
• What features of the show would make it more likely (or less likely) that you would take part?
• And – last but not least – What should the event be called?

These questions resulted in lots of useful feedback – in blog comments, and via email.  But the questions also resulted in some ridicule.  Bill Ray from The Register (“Biting the hand that feeds IT”) wrote a good-humoured but biting piece called “Symbian show struggles for identity – Just needs name, theme and branding“.  To quote from the article:

This year’s Symbian show has a date; October 27th, and a venue; Earls Court, but is looking for suggestions from the crowd when it comes to a name, theme, branding and content.

The news comes in a blog posting from David Wood, who … explains that the new Foundation has no idea what to call the show-formerly-known-as-the-Symbian-Smartphone-show, or what kind of content would most attract the open-source community that’s going to be vital to Symbian’s future.

Openness in conversations means avoiding reaching and locking in conclusions prematurely.  Even if you’ve already got a good answer in mind, the open approach will push for better answers.  The fourth and fifth answers may well be much better than the first and second answers.

That was the thinking which led us to widen the discussion about the naming and the contents of our annual show, to accept input from the community as a whole.  As we reflected on the feedback and comments we received, we realised that the theme of “Symbian Exchange” was particularly strong .  This eventually turned into SEE – Symbian Exchange and Exposition – with the tagline of “come to SEE the future of mobile”.  It’s a name with a great potential.  And it can be traced to comments to the original blog posting (here and here).

Ridicule is just one of the hazards of an open conversation.  Another risk is that you hurt people, who think that a matter should already be decided, and there’s no need to keep the conversation going.  You can also hurt people by failing to censor comment responses that have all the appearance of being destructive, spiteful, trolls.

Yet another risk is that, in adopting a brainstorming approach, you will say something tentatively and/or provocatively that gets (wrongly) interpreted by readers as a new statement of corporate policy.  For example, a statement such as “if xx and yy don’t happen, then it might be best that zz happens” can be taken out of context and mis-interpreted as “Symbian official spokesperson wants zz to happen”.  Woops.

Given these hazards of open conversation, here are two possible responses:

• Take great care in everything that’s written – to avoid all chance of misunderstanding, but at the cost of slowing down the conversation;
• Seek to explain to the wider audience that a new mode of conversation is happening.

There’s a role for both response.

One reason for creating this new blog – Symbian pathways – is to separate off some writing that is more personal, tentative, opinionated, and provocative; and to generally keep the main Symbian corporate blog for shorter and less contentious items of news.

I’ll continue to try to be clear in my writing, but no doubt I’ll fail from time to time.  That’s a price that’s worth paying, in my view, if it encourages a quicker and fuller exploration of innovative possible pathways to a better mobile future.