So, Nokia and Microsoft, eh? My take, double-quick:

1. This looks weirder than it is: a great hardware manufacturer that's struggled with high-end software, and a software manufacturer that's just delivered a decent mobile OS from scratch. It only wrenches your guts when you consider who the two players are. Nokia becomes a box-shifter to a great degree. It's as unfashionable as being a bit pipe, but there's still money and dignity to be had there. Clearly the folks running the business felt it had no alternative;
2. Symbian's getting a lot of attention as it's right excised from the product line. Series 40, an underappreciated workhorse of an OS, lives on at the low end - hooray;
3. WP7 is a solid OS, particularly for a first version. Personally, I quite like it - it's fresh, bold, not as app-focused as iPhone and Android, more about supporting the lives of real people (through deep Facebook integration, good syncing, and so on). In this way it seems a worthy successor to Symbian, particularly for the mid-to-high-end devices. I can see it competing well here and bringing a modern smartphone experience to an audience lagging just behind iPhone and Android purchasers;
4. This is good news for app developers (whose voice, particularly online, is perhaps overrepresented). Nokia have floundered with developer tools, giving too many options: J2ME, C++, Python, Qt, WebSDK, probably others. The WP7 tools are good, and there's only one set of them: it's much clearer where to go and what to do;
5. The WP7 Market has a superior UI to Ovi. For app developers, this is very important. MS' experience with XBox Live has helped here - I hope they start talking more about app success stories;
6. WP7 has a single reference hardware design, so far differentiated minimally (by physical screen size, say; or the existence of a foldaway stand). It'll be interesting to see whether Nokia drop a few successful and iconic form factors (E71, Communicator), or work to bring WP7 to them, and handle resulting fragmentation;

Risks aren't hard to see: two former competitors, in different time zones and cultures, collaborating for the first time and as fast as possible on a highly visible first product on which they will both be judged... ow. And they need to deliver devices - good ones - fast.

But the wider issue for me is: where does this leave the web? Consider that content providers supporting iPhone are currently more likely to produce an app than a web site, if they want to make money from selling content or if they want the best possible user experience. This trend doesn't appear to be slowing down, if anything iPad and the surge of Android devices has sped it up.

At the same time Google are improving the Android Marketplace and adding in better billing options, which will distract content providers from distributing via the web.

WP7 has a quite different web browser to most other mobile devices.

If WP7 achieves any market share, I think this is the last nail in the coffin of the notion of web apps being used to provide a native level of experience across all mobile platforms. WP7 UI is very different, I think to the point of being infeasible to "emulate" using web technologies. And whilst the web provides a good standard means of providing (usually free) content across devices, even with JQTouch or Sencha the experiences it provides when pretending to be a native app are, shall we say, sub-optimal. It's tough or impossible to fake the level of polish (animations, transitions, responsiveness) that native apps give; you end up balancing your application on top of a precarious stack of browser variants, JavaScript libraries and native UI toolkits; and performance is usually noticeably poor, even with the demo apps shipping with some of these toolkits.

Browsers and processor speeds will improve, of course. But as they do, native UI will take advantage of them to improve too - so I don't think the gap between native and web will narrow as fast as we might wish it will. Which leaves us musing on how we might deliver native app experiences across different OS platforms...

Another year, another LIFT. I didn't blog the sessions as-they-went this year, for lots of reasons: they're streamed quite nicely nowadays; Twitter has well and truly replaced my live-blogging urges with a flow of instant pith; and I've found my ideal conference bag combo (iPad+iPhone, for 2-screen action) which doesn't let me type fast enough. Plus I thought I'd try and pay attention this year. You know, just for a change.

So, brief notes follow.

Day One: Lady Gaga, Moustaches and Lossy Translations

• Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott: a good run-through of "social software is changing the world" examples and a beautiful video of a murmuration but I didn't take away much of a conclusion from this one;
• Jean-Claude Biver was up next. I'd not heard of him but a few locals later apprised me of the high standing he's held in Switzerland. Like Don, I noticed he was using lots of technical language in his analogies (where Don spoke of "rebooting our institutions", Jean-Claude talked about education "formatting" children and wiping away their creativity). Like Don, rousing but I didn't feel I learned much: "failure is the only learning process" is a great soundbite, and I happen to think it may be true, but hearing it doesn't help me build a creatively strong organisation;
• David Galbraith gave what I felt was a strong talk, looking at 4 trends he'd identified: drawing a line from Rudolph Valentino to Lady Gaga, he put forward an economic model for celebrity (marred only by his insistence on financial valuations for data traffic built on the value-based pricing of SMS); real-person recommendations replacing algorithmic ones of Google et al (I wasn't convinced by this - it plays well to the "humans will also be superior" gut feeling our race naturally shares, but Dunbar's going to impose a limit on what you can achieve here IMHO); people-powered design (products designed for consumers outpacing those designed for enterprises, which we see with GMail vs Outlook); and the rise of separate public and corporate internets (the needs of financial services and markets meaning long-term we'll either lose net neutrality, get government-controlled networks, or have a separate corporate intranet);
• Ben Hammersley and his amazing moustache followed up with a talk entitled "Post-Digital Geopolitics": we're societally confused because the factor which we used to use to differentiate ourselves from others, distance, is less relevant nowadays. I didn't quite agree with his assertions that the Cold War fight against Russia was fundamentally different to contemporary battles against Al Qaeda (in both cases it was the West vs an ideology, manifested in many places), or that September 11th changed everything; but his conclusion that my generation's role is to translate between the worlds of those older and younger seemed reasonable... just as I suspect it has been for every such generation in the past.
• Alexander Osterwald (whose recent book I later realised sits, sadly unread, on my work-related reading pile) gave a sensible and solid talk about the need for startups to model a variety of different business models. Seems sensible, but I'd be horrified to think most people weren't already doing this.
• Then Dorian Selz, on virtual organisations. I was frustrated by this talk: clearly Dorian has managed to do what a few others (MySQL, 37signals) have managed, and many others have tried and failed to do. That said, I found his advice unhelpfully simple - "get rid of project managers" is a good rallying cry for anyone who's been badly managed or resents management, but I can't help feeling there's more to his success than this, and that perhaps he's internalised his lessons or is just innately really great at running an organisation;
• Couple Alexandra Bau and Birgitta Ralston followed, with a very personal story of building companies and a fantastic-looking home. I'm ashamed to say my notes are limited here, I was fading a little.
• Yasmine Abbas was next, on designing for transients - digita neo-nomads. It sounded interesting, and most of her subjects were probably watching in the room...
• ...and finally Jennifer Gay gave a 5-minute and deeply personal look into the world of professional translators; arguing that automated translations are naturally lossy and therefore not a huge threat to the high-end professionals, whilst confessing that cheap/instantaneous/approximate might present a threat to elegant/accurate/slower/costly human translators. I never knew the first simultaneous translations happened at Nuremberg (and threw the profession into turmoil); and I hadn't thought about the unique problems an event like LIFT might pose her trade, consisting as it does of constant shifts into the jargon of different domains. Respect due.

Day Two: Niche Communities, Understanding User Needs, and RoboMusic for Dyslexics

• Argh! I overslept and missed most of what looked like a really interesting and practically-focused talk from Tiffany St James. I'll need to go back for the video...
  
• Chris Heathcote took second spot, talking about those communities which tend to fall into the shadow of Facebook: USenet, mailing lists, and especially Grindr and Gaydar. Really nicely put together (especially the lavishly-gathered map of Grindr search results volume, put together over what was clearly a hard Saturday nights work). Everything becomes a community, it turns out; people want to talk and will duct-tape a conversational service like PingChat onto the likes of Grindr to help them do so. Oh, and a lovely soundbite: "Maps are the Hello, World of data";
  
• Azeem Azhar spoke next about online reputation and its importance for communities. The financial crisis (referenced by many speakers) gave us an opportunity to see what happens when the web of trust which supports a market-based economy is taken away: when Standard & Poor ratings no longer counted, governments had to step in. The notion of brands as proxies for personal trust had, annoyingly, not occurred to me before;
  
• Then, Steve Portigal. I've been a fan of Steve ever since reading an excellent article he wrote on personas and how they're frequently abused in the design process, and he didn't disappoint. His talk focused on research activities: how to understand user needs, particularly latent ones, and he gave a huge range of practical advice here: role-play, logging, homework, stimuli, participatory design (explained nicely as "people thinking they're talking about solutions whilst actually expressing needs"), and so on. He called for greater comfort with ambiguity (something we've noted is more important if you head down an avenue marked "agile"), and for researchers to reframe how organisers think by creating new stories, freeing designers up to manifest these stories. All good stuff;
  
• Having surfed on endorphin through Steve's talk, I crashed and missed most of Nick Coates on co-creation, and Thomas Sutton of Frog Design. I surfaced again in the afternoon, jolted awake by Yuri Suzuki and his "music for dyslexics" project: gorgeous stuff linking visuals to sound generation, often with a side-order of home robotics.
  

Day two ended with the ALP Venture Night, a presentation from 8 startups. Two stood out for me - Atracsys, who do interactive surface and projection displays, and NViso who do real-time emotional analysis of faces. Both quite interesting businesses, but I was struck by how many of the startups focussed on their product and features whilst giving little indication of how they would sell it or make any money. I didn't get much out of Scoble's closing talk - it was a walkthrough of a load of Valley startups, but with so many mentioned none of them benefitted from any depth of analysis.

Day Three: Rent Your Clothes, Algorithmic Feedback Loops, Robots and Space Travel

Day three kicked off extra-early for me. I managed to get a place on the workshop Christian Miccio ran, "Let's create a product again". It was a repeat of the same format he'd used the previous year, which I'd also wanted to go to - but he had clashed with my own repeat of Mobile Mountains (which I think is similarly themed: "let's make something, quickly").

I and a few other volunteer Product Managers arrived 45 minutes early, and brainstormed some ideas for products. Unlike most brainstorms I've run, Christian started out with no constraints at all... which was liberating if initially quite daunting. Our little group managed to come out with a diverse range of ideas:
everything from an ATM finder through a Kindle-for-sketching (which I note someone has done), through to travel assistants. We settled on a rental business for clothes: as a traveller, arrive in a city and you can have the clothes you need for your trip ready and waiting for you. The rest of the group arrived, we presented the idea to them... then listened to their reactions, answered questions and gathered feedback.

They had a ton to say: hygiene was an issue for some (though we felt this was a problem the hotel industry had successfully dealt with), as was clothing-as-identity. Could they buy clothes they liked? Buy locally appropriate outfits? Would this be appropriate for men and women? And was it, as one person noted "like James Bond"? We noted this all down, sent our erstwhile customers away to caffeinate, and Christian gave us some feedback on our performance so far: rightly chiding me for selling the idea to the audience rather than presenting it, steering us away from thinking about pricing so early, and discussing the key issues of hygiene, identity and gender.

We reconvened, and presented a more focussed product: a convenience-oriented version stocking suits, tuxedos and shirts in major European business cities. Feedback from customers was correspondingly more specific, around product details and pricing. They generally preferred this version too.

An interesting exercise: in 2 hours we'd dreamed up a product, run 2 rounds of simplistic customer research, and come to something we and they were happy with. We had no idea of feasibility or the cost structure of the business of course, but left thinking that it might be worth looking into... and overall the session was really enjoyable. In my head, I likened it to a less tactical and more strategic complement to Mobile Mountains, though I think that may have been a function of the idea we had decided to work on (which was more of a business than a specific product), than the format Christian was using.

Talks followed:

• Hasan Elahi gave an entertaining talk about his choice to expose every aspect of his life online as a commentary on the US terrorist watch list;
• Tara Shears updated us on the latest from the Large Hadron Collider;
• Kevin Slavin did a phenomenally interesting presentation, drawing a line from techniques for stealth aircraft to frustrate radar (by making themselves appear to be many smaller objects, like a flock of birds) to black-box trading (where large financial transactions are broken up into tiny untrackable pieces). With 70% of trades apparently being either algorithmically driven trades or attempts to flush out the same, financial markets are dependent on network topologies: an office 200ms nearer an Internet hub can bring serious trading advantages. And with the financial crisis providing an example of the consequences of algorithmically driven supply and demand, where else might we see these closed loops appearing? In Hollywood, say, in a world where 61% of Netflix video rentals are rented on the basis of algorithmic recommendations, and where companies can algorithmically decide what films to make - implying our entertainment industry is due a banking-style flash-crash (if it isn't already in one). Fascinating;
• Sabine Hauert followed later with a great primer on the current state of robotics: both the hype the field receives ("I read robots can feed on dead bodies") and the reality of the Roomba, Google Car, and modern warehousing robots from the likes of Kiva Systems... stopping by gliding robot-swarms bringing ad hoc comms networks to disaster areas, the Google Lunar X prize, and ending in a call for Roboethics committees;
• ... and then I stopped taking notes, sat back and watched a quad of incredible presentations: Honor Harger of Lighthouse in Brighton, presenting her work on the sound of space; Lucie Green on the sun, Jennifer Magnolfi of Herman Miller on the problems of designing habitats for long-term life in space, and Claude Nicollier showing us his holiday snaps ("me fixing the Hubble telescope", "me in my space ship", etc.) - in an endearingly humble and fantastically uplifting fashion;

Summing up

One of the things to love about LIFT is the obvious effort that Laurent and the organising team put into it. They're overtly self-critical and actively ask for, then act on, feedback from attendees. This year in his opening remarks Laurent talked about the need to balance far-looking stuff with more practical sessions, and I think they spent more time working with speakers to hone talks than normal.

The event had a really good hit rate of talks: David Galbraith, Steve Portigal, Kevin Slavin, and Claude Nicollier all really stood out for me, as did Sabine Heurt and Chris Heathcote. I took a lot away from the workshop Christian Miccio ran too.

Much of the more near-term stuff seemed to be around social media and reputation, which both felt a bit more mainstream than I'd expect from LIFT; they're the kind of things which get covered well elsewhere. But that's a minor quibble - there was plenty of amazing content, my head was stretched in new directions, and I left LIFT, as ever, already impatient for the next one.

We've just launched another iPhone app. It's called CNBC Davos Pulse, and it'll help delegates of the World Economic Forum organise their time in Davos, when it comes to finding fringe events to attend, good bars and restaurants, and keeping up with conference info.

To that end we've launched a few sets of features:

• Event listings (for both public and invitation-only events), with the ability to share events with friends by email (and soon, Twitter);
• You can build a personal itinerary of favourite events;
• A searchable database of bars and restaurants in Davos and Klosters, with links through to Google Maps to get directions;
• Blog articles from CNBC journalists throughout the event;
• A Twitter feed live from Davos;
• Regular video updates from CNBC anchors;

There's a few nice little details in there too. The events-searching feature is slightly fuzzy, so that if you mistype a search term there's a good chance we'll find it for you; you can retweet official tweets from the CNBC Davos feed with a single click; and the whole app is designed to sync events and venue details down to your phone when you're online, and work seamlessly when you're out of coverage or have data roaming turned off.

Technically, we built the app using JQTouch and Phonegap; it's the first product this team had launched using these technologies and the learning curve has been interesting (though shallower than some tools we've used). Behind the scenes, we're using Google Docs as the back-end of a content management system: a method we'll be using again on future projects, as it's worked quite well for us here.

Structurally, the project was very much by-the-book: FP did all the design, development, testing and project management of the product, working directly with CNBC. We kicked off with a 1-day workshop with CNBC staff and the whole development team, then spent a month going through a sketch/wireframe/visual design process whilst functional development occurred in parallel. The last couple of weeks, we've brought the two together and introduced styling and visuals into the live app; we put a first version through the Apple approval process before Christmas to get early notice of any problems, and a second version went through in the first week of January - followed by an update last week including all the Twitter features.

Whilst the app itself is probably only useful to delegates of the World Economic Forum, you can download a copy here.

Torsten de Riese, the Digital Director at CNBC, said: "It has been a great experience working with Future Platforms. Tom and his team have shown real expertise and exceptional enthusiasm throughout the project – from the design phase to build and support. Building an app that is going to be judged by top CEOs and world influencers is a nerve-wrecking project at the best of times, but if you have to deliver within 10 weeks it can be the cause for sleepless nights. However, right from the beginning I felt reassured by the calmness and clinical efficiency of the team. During the late stage of the project they always went that extra mile when it came to change requests and tweaks. These guys are brilliant! Thanks Future Platforms!". Then we untied him and sent him home.

Credit due to the team at FP who've worked on this one: Thom Hopper and Adrian Bigland built the product, Ali Driver and Trevor May did all the UX and visual design, Tariq Tamuji did testing. Thanks to Torsten, Bryn, Katya and Ed at CNBC for all their help and input too, and to the Chelsea Apps Factory, in association with whom the product was launched.

1..I’m not a man. I’m dynamite. (Friedrich Nietsche)
2..Laissant derriere lui bruler Moscou fumant. (Victor Hugo)
3..Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?
4..No this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine.
5..If you wish to win a man’s heart, allow him to confute you. (Disraeli)
6..If you are idle be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle. (Johnson)
7..Money is like muck, not good except it be spread. (Francis Bacon)
8..Raise the stone and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and I am there.
9..St. Mary and St. Nicolas College was founded in the year of revolutions.
10..Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. (Matthew Arnold) Sohrab and Rustum.
11..C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre. (Marechal Bosquet)
12..Le travail eloigne de nous trios grands maux, l’ennui, le vice et le besoin.
13..He was not of an age but for all time. (Ben Johnson on Shakespeare)
14..Neither do thou lust after that twwny weed tobacco. (Ben Johnson)
15..Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. (Horace)
16..Dis moi ce que tu manges et je dirai ce que tu es. (Brillat-Savarin)
17..The First World War ended at 11 a.m. on 11th November 1918.
18..Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requires. (Catullus)
19..A man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.
20..Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. (Samuel Johnson 1775)
21..It doesn’t bark and it knows the secrets of the sea. (de Nerval)
22..French poet gives his reasons for leading a lobster on a blue ribbon.

These are the lines we were given to write out as punishment, when I was at school. Some memories tied up with these...

The simplest phones are open to "SMS of Death"?

I seem to recall (though can't find a reference, and Google is very mute on the topic) a talk at WAP Wednesday in 1999 on this exact topic, from some folks who went into a lot of the technical detail of how to do nasty buffer overflow things through binary SMS. It's pretty poor that 10 years on these exploits still exist, I suppose.

And I do like the conclusion of the article: that making firmware updates straightforward is the answer, as it'll allow vendors to patch such bugs after a handset launch. It's another win for the gentle divorce of mobile software from hardware.

P.S. Yes it has been quiet here. No I haven't stopped thinking.