Titanas

Unlike Dutch and most probably other northern Europeans and Silicon Valley residents, Greeks are more into owning than using stuff. We prefer buying a car or a house rather than leasing it. I don’t fully understand this kind of obsession but i speculate it’s associated with the nation’s recent history.

Fast forward a few hundred years. I recently moved to a new house which undoubtedly led to some important decisions. Laundry was one of them. In a nutshell i had to choose between following my DNA and breaking the tradition. Buy a new washing machine or find another way for keeping clean. I chose the latter.

Spending for a new, A+ energy class washing machine translates to €250 sans any maintenance, power, water and other bills. Outsourcing laundry is cheaper, faster and way more convenient.

Twice a month, the basket is full of dirty clothes, towels, sheets etc. This equals to 1 or 2 full 5 kg laundry cycles. Outsourcing laundry costs €9 a cycle including maintenance, power, cleaning powder and other bills which is now non of my business.

Let’s assume a 1.5 full 5kg laundry cycle every two weeks or 3 laundry cycles each month. This sums up to €27 a month, including all associated bills. Having said that, what i’m paying here is more than 9 months of outsourcing laundry. It’s 9 months of more hassle free life.

I know exactly when to drop and when to pick my laundry (service is available twice a day). I don’t have to worry for any of the associated costs including maintenance, power, water, cleaning powder, moving company (in case i move to a new place) or other bills. I couldn’t be more careless about weather conditions and air pollution. Heck, i can even have some of my stuff ironed for free and spend my time otherwise.

For all those Greeks thinking about cleaning powder quality and stuff, my answer is this: if i get a rash i can always sue them but i doubt that will be needed. For all those remaining Greeks worrying about fabric issues etc, my answer is this: these guys clean clothes for living, they know better but if you’re still in doubt, jeans can handle it, Threadless t-shirts definitely make it, IKEA and COCO-MAT (new cheap series) is your friend for sheets, towels and stuff.

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Nokia disrupted but it’s time for the Finns to disrupt others businesses as well. Here’s a humble list of 4 ideas Nokia can leverage for not only making more money but make more users happier.

Ovi Maps

Open Ovi Maps and release the API to the wild. Let developers play and integrate Ovi Maps everywhere, even out of the Symbian^3, MeeGo, Maemo ecosystem. Make it as fun, easy, silly, stupid and engaging as the other APIs out there, courtesy of Flickr, Google Maps etc. Unify the mobile and desktop experience and let people embed Ovi Maps in their blog posts and sites. Ovi Maps is brilliant, it’s accurate, it’s awesome even on a device like Nokia X6 which is more of a music device than anything else.

Other Ovi services

Remove the fat. Keep Ovi Mail for emerging markets, Ovi Maps for the whole world and that’s it. Either offer Ovi Music to every single country or kill it as well. Use 3rd party services not because they’re necessarily better or cooler but because they’ve been there before Ovi. YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter etc i’s where everyone hangs out. That’s one thing and searching, installing, using a 3rd party app on the Ovi Store it’s another.

Ovi Accessories

Or Nokia Accessories for every single Nokia phone out there. Sell license to 3rd parties to come up with whatever thy want for the hundreds of millions of Nokia devices out there. Throw in some beautiful Finn design and inspiring technology for high end user and enthusiasts / hackers. Create the Ovi Accessories ecosystem.

Hardware

Disrupt in hardware. Finns proved they can do it with the N95, the N900 etc. Bring RFIDs and tie it with Nokia Money, improved CMOS and Carl Zeiss optics for HD 1080p single tap video uploads, micro location hardware (Ovi Accessories also) etc. Make devices available a week after they’re announced. Pimp up the specs with faster CPUs and more than 256MB of RAM.

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Unless i am missing something, i really wish i do, Google Webmaster Central error message doesn’t make any sense at all. Google Webmaster Central > Site Configuration > Settings > Preferred domain. Google is asking me to first verify the owner of the domain. I did. Then Google is asking me to verify the owner of the domain again. I did. Google lets me know that the domain is verified using two different methods but it wants me to verify the owner of the domain again and again. It just doesn’t work. Bug or what? Continue reading »

WordPress admin post search functionality can learn a thing or two from Gmail by adding a “Go back to search results” link. Until now, when searching for a WordPress post you click on Posts > Search Posts > Keyword(s) > Edit post > Update post > Done. That’s all nice and good when editing a single post, not multiple posts. In that case, sans the “Go back to search results” admins or editors have to repeat the aforementioned process time after time till they’re done with editing all posts. Adding a “Go back to search results” link in WordPress 3.x will be a life saver.

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It’s scientifically proven that telling others about your goals trick the mind into believing it’s half way already there or accomplished it. Motivation is gone, the brain gets lazy and the body follows. Sharing your goals it not helping at all. Just keep your mouth shut and get down to work.

Redirection WordPress plugin manages all your 301 redirects and monitors 404 errors. Skip the monitoring part and focus on 301 redirections using regular expression or regex. Here are a few examples on the kind of Redirection regex you can use if you want to massively redirect traffic from an older permalink structure to a newer one.

Old permalink structure: http://yourblog.com/2005/05/12/blog-post-title/
New permalink structure: http://yourblog.com/blog-post-title/

From WordPress Admin Panel navigate to Tools > Redirection > Add new redirection and fill in the appropriate fields with these values

Source URL: /(d*)/(d*)/(d*)/(.*)/
Target URL: /$4

(d*) is a number variable. In the case of the old permalink structure, (d*) substitutes the year (2005), the month (05) and the date (12) numbers in a URL like this: http://yourblog.com/2005/05/12/blog-post-title/
(.*) is a wildcard variable. In the case of the old permalink structure, (.*) substitutes the string (blog-post-title) in a URL like this: http://yourblog.com/2005/05/12/blog-post-title/
/$4 is the fourth variable in the row which will be used in the new perlamlink structure. In this case /$4 will read (.*) which is blog-post-title and echo it

Visit Google Webmaster Tools and check your 404s. It is highly possible that you will need to add an extra redirection similar to the previous sans the slash at the end of the URL. The new redirection will look like this:

Source URL: /(d*)/(d*)/(d*)/(.*)
Target URL: /$4

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You don’t need to swim at 5300m altitude in a dead cold water lake to radically change your attitude and strategy. Just change the mindset. What ever worked in the past will not guarantee future success.

Ovi Maps in offline mode is probably the best thing you can get when in the middle of an area where signal bars are nowhere to be seen. The accuracy of the GPS, at least on my Nokia X6, when using Ovi Maps’ navigation mode is more than outstanding. I love Google Maps on the iPhone but i think i’m falling in love with Ovi Maps on my X6.

Running the latest version of Ovi Maps 3.04 on the latest X6 firmware 21.0.004 is great but leaves room for improvement. Here’s a wish list for the Ovi Maps engineering team:

1. Make the position dot in the map smaller, maybe the same size of the dot found in the left upper corner button (those two dots must have the same size anyway or else different functionality is implied) or at least change the dot’s size accordingly when zooming in and out

2. Update new position faster in cases when the phone is just unlocked

3. When searching create a drop down menu and show the last 3-5 search keyword used, offer the option for a new search right after the recent search list

4. Enable touch events on navigation. For instance tap once to get voice info about the destination (time and distance remaining etc), double tap to change between night and day mode etc

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The proposed Google – Verizon deal about net neutrality will either be Google’s new China mantra or a good reason for a 180 degrees mentality shift in Google’s executive team with someone leaving the company. In a nutshell, Google is either pushing forward the Verizon deal in order to do the “don’t be evil” thing following an a la China route or it’s whitening the first signs of cultural silos within the company.

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Disruptive innovation is a term used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by lowering price or designing for a different set of consumers.

Disruptive innovation, a term of art coined by Clayton Christensen, describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.

This is how Apple and the iPhone is killing Nokia and how Android will kill Apple.

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