To introduce and advertise the Nokia Nseries, the company sent out four bloggers equipped with N82’s, obviously, and tracks them on their website.
Image taken from the urbanista diaries website
They blog and upload pictures and all the information accessible on the website. Visitors can closely follow the four participants journeys. Their journeys is logged by the device internal GPS and accompanied by a mobile blog. There are also images and videos added. Examples from Jen in India
The project is called The Urbanista Diaries. When accessing it now the project seems to have come to an end. It must have taken place about a year ago (very late blogging). It appears to be technically based on the Nokia SportTracker application. A quick look at this application gives the impression of a no-so-much used offer. It should be online for quite some time now but in the London area there is only one publicly visible track log to find. Not much for an area of 8m with at least 40% Nokia market share.
But the diaries are interesting because built on the experience Nokia has later in 2008 finalized their development for a public location-based-content-sharing platform Nokia viNe.
Nokia offers its own maps pre installed to be used on the device. The Maps contain way-finding options and can guide users through the environment. The developers at Nokia (maybe the marketing guys) must have come up with the idea to also add information but not only to receive. This is what the cool slogan refers to: THE WEB. NOW MADE BY HAND. So it is a hand job again!
Nokia has created a web platform called Nokia viNe where users can upload their journeys to share with others. It was introduced in late 2008 after a rename from Nokia LiveviNe to Nokia viNe. For anyone wondering what viNe might bear in meaning check this out: “A viNe is any plant of genus Vitis (the grape plants) or, by extension, any similar climbing or trailing plant.” (Wikipedia here) The remaining question could be whether the name dives from the graphics for the product, ranking line with styled leaves, or the other way round? I would say this is good marketing!

Image taken from Nokia viNe website
The trip data is displayed on a (Nokia) map. The track data can also contain additional information such as images (the Nseries models are equipped with state of the art mobile phone cameras), video (the devices are capable of capturing videos - hello iPhone) and musik (well they can play music too) alayed during the trip I assume.
After clicking in to the viNe page (it takes some time to load with my as it seems slow broadband connection) the first task is fiddling with the map and zooming in to a level that actually unveils some useful information. This appears to be a rather local level. But at the same time this level is not detailed enough and one would like to zoom in as we are used to from Google Earth or Google Maps. The level of detail is probably adjusted by the Nokia technicians and has to do with privacy and exact location identification.
I am surprised that the London area again (as with SportTracker above) is not densely cluttered with lines and colour full (the project colours appear to be Pin, Blue, Green) “leaves” It really is surprising that there seem to be not a single track around Bloomsbury. UCL campus with about 15’000 students and not a single Nokia Nseries viNe user?
Images show up as “green leaves”, videos are shown in pink and tunes in blue. Images are great to look at, videos buffering is not very good and this make it horrible to look at. Very annoying to me was that the blue leaves, music tracks do not play the music. How boring is this? I am one of these persons who cannot memorize words, names have no meaning to me. I want to look at things or in the case of music listen to it. (This is mot likely a copyright problem, I know, but what is the point of showing the information then?)
Image Screenshot Nokia viNe – London
Image Screenshot Nokia viNe – Bloomsbury
Exploring the map is fun though! There are some points I think do not work very well but actually I think the whole project is pretty cool and stylish as Nokia graphics usually are!
(Here used to be a viNe widget, but it looks like Nokia is not supporting this any longer. Was a nice little app to display data from viNe.)
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