Gary Gale

Posts about ovi

Farewell Ovi, Nokia And HERE; It's Time To Open The Next Door

2013-12-30 12:11

I left the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo! and departed from a very Californian large company to take up a new role with a very Finnish large company called Nokia. Though Nokia started life as the merger between a paper mill operation, a rubber company and a cable company in the mid 1800's, by the time I joined Nokia it was best known for mobile and smart phone handsets and the software that makes these ubiquitous black mirrors work.

In addition to mobile data connectivity, apps and GPS, one of the things that defines a smartphone is a maps app and the suite of back-end platforms that drive that app as well as all of the other APIs that enable today's smartphone location based services. Just as TomTom acquired digital map maker Tele Atlas in 2008, Nokia had acquired rival maps provider NAVTEQ in 2007, putting in place the foundations for Nokia's maps and turn-by-turn navigation products, part of the company's Ovi brand of internet services.

This may be a personal foible but when I join a new company I mentally set myself two targets. The first is what I want to achieve with that company. The second is how long it will take to achieve this. If you reach the first target then the second is a moot point. But if the first target doesn't get reached and your self allocated timescale is close to coming to an end, then it's time to take stock.

Sometimes you can extend that timescale; when reaching your achievement target is so so close and you can be happy to stretch those timescales a little. Sometimes though this just doesn't work, not necessarily for any reason of your own making. Large companies are strange beasts and a strategic move which is right for the company may not align with your own targets and ideals.

In 2010, I left the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo! and departed from a very Californian large company to take up a new role with a very Finnish large company called Nokia. Though Nokia started life as the merger between a paper mill operation, a rubber company and a cable company in the mid 1800's, by the time I joined Nokia it was best known for mobile and smart phone handsets and the software that makes these ubiquitous black mirrors work.

I spent the first 18 months of my time with Nokia commuting weekly from London to Berlin, where the company's maps division was based. The pros of this weekly commute of almost 600 miles each way was rapid progression through British Airway's frequent flyer program, getting to know the city of Berlin really well and developing deep and lasting friendships with my team, who were behind the Ovi Places Registry, but more about them in a moment. The cons were living out of hotels on a weekly basis and the strain it placed on my family back in London.

In 2011, Nokia pivoted its strategy as a result of new CEO Stephen Elop's infamous Burning Platform memo. The company's NAVTEQ division finally started to be integrated into Nokia, resulting in the rebranding of Ovi Maps to HERE Maps, by way of a brief spell as Nokia Maps and just before we were ready to ship the next major revision of the Places Registry, effectively powering all the data you see on a map which isn't part of the base map itself, the project was shelved in favour of NAVTEQ based places platform. This was probably the right thing to do from the perspective of the company, but it had a devastating effect on my Berlin based team who had laboured long and hard. The team was disbanded; some found new roles within the company, some didn't and were laid off and after spending several months tearing down what I'd spent so long helping to create, an agonising process in itself even though it was the right thing to do, I moved to help found the company crowd mapping group, driving the strategy behind the HERE Map Creator product. Think of a strategy not dissimilar to OpenStreetMap or Google Map Maker, only with a robust navigation grade map behind it.

All of which is merely a prelude to the fact that after almost 4 years with Nokia I've been taking stock and it's time to move on. The door marked Nokia, Ovi and HERE is now closed and it's time to look to the next adventure in what could loosely be termed my career. The metaphor of doors opening and closing seems fitting as Ovi just happens to be the Finnish word for door.

There's been a lot of high points over the past 4 or so years. Launching Nokia's maps and location platform at the final Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Negotiating the places section of Nokia's first strategic deal with Microsoft in a meeting room set against the amazing backdrop of Reykjavik in the depths of an Icelandic winter. Judging the World Bank's Sanitation Hackathon in Dar es Salaam.

But most of the high points have been people.

Someone who leads a team is only as good as the team and in the original Ovi Places Registry team and the subsequent Nokia Places team I found an amazing group of individuals, who made a roving Englishman feel very much at home in Berlin.

There's also been a lot of lows over the past 4 years, but I don't want to go into them here.

Instead, I want to close the door on the Nokia chapter with a brief mention to five people who made my time in Berlin so rich and rewarding. There's Aaron Rincover, HERE's UX lead, who taught me so much about the user experience in a relatively short period of time. There's also four members of the Places Registry team, Enda Farrell, Jennifer Allen, Mark MacMahon and Jilles Van Gurp, who made me welcome in a new city, who it was an absolute pleasure to work with and who will, I hope, remain close friends. Enda and Jennifer are still both at HERE as Senior Technical Architect and Product Manager and a damn fine ones at that. Mark and Jilles were amongst those who moved on when the Places team was disbanded and are now the founders of LocalStream. Thank you all of you.

So where next? My last two companies have been large multinational affairs, but to open 2014 I'm looking to keep things a lot smaller and more agile. I'm going to take some time to do some freelance consulting, still in the maps, location and geo space of course; this industry continues to grow and innovate at an astounding rate, why would I want to work anywhere else?

For the first quarter of 2014 I'm going to be joining London's Lokku, consulting for them as their Geotechnologist in Residence. Since 2006, Lokku have built up an impressive portfolio of geospatial and geotechnology assets under the lead of Ed Freyfogle and Javier Etxebeste, both alumni of Yahoo! like myself. Through the success of their Nestoria and Open Cage Data brands and the #geomob meetup, Lokku are in a great position to take their expertise in open geospatial data, OpenStreetMap data and open geospatial platforms to the next level. My role with Lokku will be to help them identify where that next level will be and what it will look like. It's going to be a refreshing change to move from the world of a large corporate, with staff ID badges and ID numbers to a world where everyone fits into the same, albeit large, room and where everyone literally knows everyone else. So say I'm excited by this challenge would be a massive understatement. If you want to know more about Lokku, check out their blog, Twitter feed or come and say hello.

As for the rest of 2014 and beyond, it's time to follow up on all those conversations that you tend to have about the next great thing in maps and location. Who knows precisely where 2014 will take me, but no matter where, it's going to be geotastic and I can't wait.

Mapstraction, Maps and Me

2011-07-14 20:57

Nokia has been taking up almost all of my time and what little time has been left has been spent with my family. But in between day job and family time there's evenings spent in a hotel room and hours spent on a plane, mainly between London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports. It's in these periods of time that a combination of my MacBook Pro, running a combo of Apache/MySQL/PHP with MAMP and TextMate has allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of what I used to do for my day job before Yahoo! and before Nokia ... and that's to write code.

It's been a while since my last blog post; my day job at Nokia has been taking up almost all of my time and what little time has been left has been spent with my family. But in between day job and family time there's evenings spent in a hotel room and hours spent on a plane, mainly between London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports. It's in these periods of time that a combination of my MacBook Pro, running a combo of Apache/MySQL/PHP with MAMP and TextMate has allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of what I used to do for my day job before Yahoo! and before Nokia ... and that's to write code.

As a fully unreconstructed maps nerd, I love the variety and richness of the mapping APIs available on today's internet. One of the best books on how to use these mapping APIs is the "does just what it says on the label" Map Scripting 101 by Adam DuVander. While the book touches on the power of the APIs from Google, from Yahoo, and from Bing (amongst others) its main focus in on Mapstraction, the JavaScript mapping abstraction library.

As the name suggest, Mapstraction abstracts, or wraps, the differences between the variety of approaches that each JavaScript mapping API uses into a single consistent interface. With Mapstraction, the API methods to create a map, to change the zoom level, to centre the map, to add a marker or push pin to the map are the same, regardless of which underlying mapping API you use.

Mapstraction allowed you to use the mapping APIs from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Cloudmade, GeoCommons, Cartocuidad, Yandex and MapQuest. But not Nokia's Ovi Maps API, which was released in February 2011. This is where my local Apache installation, TextMate and the aforementioned hotel room and flight time comes back into the story. Cue a frantic crash course to reacquaint myself with JavaScript, some trial and error, some swearing and some background reading to convert my slightly outdated knowledge of CVS into how to use git and Mapstraction now supports the Ovi Maps API. No, really. It's on github right now.

There's a demo of some of the major features of both Mapstraction and the Ovi Maps API over at maps.vicchi.org and, in the spirit of social coding, the source for that is on github as well.

I'm not suggesting for one moment that if the current geo day job falls through I can happily pick up a replacement role coding JavaScript, or coding anything for that matter, but it's oddly reassuring that I still have the vague ability to continue the profession of coding software that earnt me a living for almost 25 years.

Photo Credits: Infidelic on Flickr.

Through The (New Office) Window

2010-11-17 07:04

Mitte district of Berlin to a new office in Schönhauser Allee in the Prenzlauer Berg district. While the office coffee hasn't improved, the view from my desk certainly has.

From left to right the view takes in the Fernsehturm, (East) Berlin's TV tower, Schönhauser Allee, looking towards Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz U-Bahn station on the U2 line and the dome of the Berlin Cathedral, better known as the Berliner Dom. I could get used to this view.

At the weekend myself and the rest of the Ovi Places team found ourselves re-geolocated from the Nokia office in Invalidenstraße in the Mitte district of Berlin to a new office in Schönhauser Allee in the Prenzlauer Berg district. While the office coffee hasn't improved, the view from my desk certainly has.

Berlin, Graffiti and Maps

2010-10-24 13:22

Tacheles on Oranienburgerstraße, complete with a giant cockroach emerging from the wall.

This grand painting style, part graffiti, part mural, part art seems to be iconic to a lot of the Mitte area of what used to be East Berlin. With this in mind, it's good to see that Nokia has decided to join in with this peculiarly Berlin trait with its own contribution, telling visitors walking along Invalidenstraße towards Nordbahnhof precisely what goes on in the Nokia Gate5 offices ... Ovi Maps, made here.

Like most cities these days, there's a lot of graffiti in Berlin. Some of it is just the mindless repetitive tagging where someone feels the need to display his or her tag over as much surface area as possible. But some of it aspires to art, especially the large displays found on the sides of buildings and high up on walls. A great example of this is the massive question (or maybe it's a statement) of How Long Is Now, found on the side of the Tacheles on Oranienburgerstraße, complete with a giant cockroach emerging from the wall.

Two Weeks In; Of Dog Food, Mobile Handsets and Finnish Doors

2010-06-17 21:04

Chris Osborne ... "severe drop off in @vicchi's bloggage and tweetage levels, means that maybe, just maybe, he is actually doing some work these days". Quite.

Two weeks into the Nokia and Ovi experience and I can finally pause and catch my breath. It's been an intense two weeks and asking me what my impressions are of Nokia are akin to putting someone at the top of a very large, very steep and very fast roller coaster, watching them plummet down and then, before they're even out of their seat, asking them to comment on what the scenery was like. So I won't even try to comment on the scenery and will instead merely record the four things that have stuck in my mind.

I've been busy. I've been very busy. I've also been at home for all of two days in the last two weeks and whilst video chatting with my family over Skype is better than a plain old fashioned voice call it's no substitute for being at home more; but things will settle down into a more manageable routine over the coming weeks. Being busy has meant that I've kept my head down and tried to assimilate all the new information with which I'm being bombarded, a fact that's not gone unnoticed by Chris Osborne ... "severe drop off in @vicchi's bloggage and tweetage levels, means that maybe, just maybe, he is actually doing some work these days". Quite.

I learnt today that Ovi is Finnish for door, proving for once the adage that you learn something new every day.

At Yahoo! we used to talk about eating our own dog food a lot; thankfully meaning that a company should use the products that it makes rather than that the employees develop a predilection for Pedigree Chum. Although it took me the best part of the first week to notice, Nokia certainly eats its own dog food; apart from the ever present starfish style conferencing phones in meeting rooms, there's no desk phones at all. None. But everyone has a mobile, and uses them a lot, either over the cellular network or hooked up to the internal VOIP system through the office wifi. Actually everyone seems to have more than one mobile handset, two, three and even four handsets doesn't seem to be unusual.

In a previous role I seemed to spend a lot of my time talking about why location and all of the many geo facets it encompasses is important. Many was a meeting with a senior exec which started with the depressing question "so .. location ... is it really important?". Nokia gets location; there's absolutely no doubt about that. The question is now how do we deliver real value and real market share with location ... and that's half the fun and half the challenge.