LONDON, UK – The whole Nokia Conversations team is in London today banging our heads together as we look at how we’ve done in the past four months, what’s been working and what hasn’t, and planning what to do for the next few months to heat things up here.
That doesn’t mean, though, that we’re not finding interesting things to show you. James wrote an article summarizing the findings of the NFC trial in the UK. Good news there. Mike wrote about the changing landscape in music. And Carita has been making the final edits of an interview we did with one of Nokia’s industrial designers.
As for me, I just want to point out something that happened over the weekend that I found quite funny, but also revealing of who we are, what we like, and how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A little known fact about politics today
Being an American, I’ve been sort of keeping an eye on what’s happening in terms of the presidential race. I really don’t want to talk politics here, but it’s been really interesting to see some of the stuff happening around the election race.
I had mentioned before that politicians are not only using social media tools to communicate with their constituency (not unlike us at Nokia Conversations), but they are also using Internet-connected mobile phones to broadcast and share things from anywhere and, instantly too.
My wife pointed out, also, how at the Democratic National Convention there were folks posting videos, posting to personal websites from the convention floor, and sharing photos (a lot of these from mobiles, I’m sure). The extent these social sharing tools are being used for such an event is amazing. And, of course, the politicians understand that it helps them tap into the crowd in getting the message (and vibe) out to those who aren’t there. Huzzah.
On the other side of the aisle, Debi Jones had a good line-up for the Republican National Convention. For example, she was running a social media workshop and was going to interview people and stream the video live via a Nokia N95. Alas, over the weekend a wee hurricane stormed up thataway and basically messed all the activities at the convention.
At the same time, Twitter was, uh, a-twitter over the announcement of Republican John McCain’s choice for Vice President, Sarah Palin. Palin was quite unknown, so people started twittering ‘Little Known Facts’ about her. In short time, thousands of real and fake ‘little known facts‘ were streaming through Twitter.
It was amazing to see a meme blast through a network of people, hopping all over the place as people passed on the link and notified their friends of what was going on. Yes, it was absolutely hilarious, but made me note, once again, how easily we connect across the world with each other.