Having been to Nokia in Oulu, I have met some of the most amazing people I know. And it is one of them who has come up with a rather nifty idea. Kristian Luoma, Product Manager turned Entrepreneur decided to do something about this situation.

What would happen if an extreme incubator would be set up in Oulu, where these bright minds can work together on the next big thing. Nokia started out as a small Finnish company and became the world’s leading mobile phone manufacturer with an annual revenue of €42.45 billion. What would stop the Finns from reclaiming former glory?

If there’s something that every Entrepreneur I’ve met has said to me, it was: Dream big! Achieve the un-achievable! “Oulu Fifty” is a vision for a programme with the insane goal of producing fifty start-ups in twelve months. That’s roughly 1 start-up per week! It would be a programme giving these talented people all the tools they need, such as shared office space, legal advice, exposure, chances to get in touch with VCs and much more. The goal is to create a vibrant community that fosters innovation and spins out seedable companies.

“Oulu Fifty” would run innovation and idea exploration sessions which would be open to anyone to attend. It would regularly have hackfests to perform rapid prototyping. It would seek out to consumers to vote on the best ideas – every week. It would educate its members on technology and other necessary skills – by mentoring and by leasing inspiring speakers to visit the campus occasionally.

This could be an amazing opportunity for both the Finnish government which is strongly encouraging entrepreneurship and the Nokians. But such a programme requires a few things to be successful. On one hand, “Oulu Fifty” would need support from the industry. Getting Entrepreneurs and VCs involved that would be willing to visit. On the other hand, this programme would need financial support to pay for facilities as well as a limited staff running the programme which would approximately be €0,5 million for 1 year of operation.

I personally love this idea, but all the credit has to go to Kristian Luoma who dreamt up this idea. This programme could bring Oulu back to the forefront of technological innovation and save the by Nokia abandoned local community. I sincerely hope that there is a future in this idea, but we will see what happens in the next few weeks.

Just in case you have €0,5 million lying around, and want to support this programme, do contact me: florian at florian jensen dot com

Nokia E71

Finally! The phone I have been waiting for has been released! About a year ago I bought the Nokia E61, and I have been extremely happy with it. It’s a great phone, and there are a lot of cool applications that run on it.

But now, Nokia has released the E71! If you haven’t heard of it yet, you should definetly read the full report over at boygeniusreport.com.

In short, it has all the features you could ever dream of. A 3.15 Megapixel camera with autofocus, flash, a secondary video call camera, built in gps, MP3/AAC/MPEG4 player, a normal headphone Jack…. it’s a dream phone!

Now, you might think, thats nice, but I will never be able to afford it. And thats where you’re dead wrong! Nokia.de officially sells it at 459€. Thats quite ok! I will try to get one for less ofcourse, but 459€ is very ok for that phone!

The full phone specs can be found over at gsmarena.

Over and out!

yesterday I acquired an Nokia E61, which turned out to be one of the best investments I ever did.

It’s a great mobile phone. You can install a ton of applications, and it has WiFi. Here is a small list of the things I currently do with it:

E-mailing

I have setup my E-mail account on it, using IMAP. It even supports IMAP IDLE, which is a really great feature if you have to pay for the data connection traffic. I use my WiFi mostly though, so I don’t really care.

Jabber-ing

I installed Talkonaut 3.0, which is a great Jabber client for Symbian OS. It supports alot of features, such as File Transfer and Jingle Audio. The key feature though is, that it supports data compression. This is very nice if you use it via 3G.

As you can see on the last screenshot, Jabber is the perfect IM Platform. Thanks to Jabber data compression, you can chat for nearly nothing using GPRS or 3G! That was actually the result of 1 day chatting.

Vodafone Live! and Proximus Mobile TV

You’re bored? Well just go onto the Vodafone Live! portal and watch TV on your E61! The screen is big enough, and it is quite cheap. Just 0,49€ per session. You have a choice of 30 live TV stations and alot of on demand content. I just watched the Looney Tunes! Great fun.

VoIP!

I call quite alot to foreign countries, which leads to a very high phone bill. But now I can call via my VoipStunt account on my Mobile Phone. The quality is as good as via the GSM Network. All that routed via WiFi means that you don’t pay anything for the calls. If you want, you can also call via VoIP over the 3G network. Haven’t tried that yet, but I will in a bit. Atleast VoIP calls via WiFi are that good quality, that you don’t notice any difference! And it is integrated seamlessly into the general OS.

A Keyboard!

You actually have a nice Keyboard on the E61. I hate writing SMS with these numbers, like on the normal GSMs. Now I have a full keyboard on it. Very easy to type. Even with my fingers.

A really good Webbrowser

There actually is a very good webbrowser on the E61. It’s based on Webkit, and even runs complicated JS. It’s very nice to browse the Web from your mobile phone.

As you can see, it displays perfectly!

iPod Video without stupid iTunes.

I wanted an MP3 player with Video support. That was why I was thinking of getting an iPhone, but that is not available in Belgium at the moment. A hacked one, would be a possibility, but it’s also quite expensive. But now, with the E61, I have a MP3, OGG Player and Video Player.

As you can see, I still love The Simpsons I need to tweak my encoding quality though, as in Fullscreen it isn’t that nice.

Google Maps & GPS

I also installed Google Maps on the E61. It is a really great app. The next thing I am going to buy, is a TomTom GPS adapter, so that I can use it in my car as a GPS.

What other application would you like to see on your Mobile phone? For me, I have everything I want on my E61. I can just recommend it.