Making Money From the Internet

This series is supported by RingCentral, the leading business phone system designed for today’s small businesses, entrepreneurs, and mobile professionals. Visit RingCentral.com to learn more.

Finding the right workspace is like dating — the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet has made it a lot more complex. In essence, this means more options.

Whereas the traditional office once served as the default choice for effective communication and collaboration between coworkers, today’s businesses can be just as productive by collaborating on the web, with as little as $10 and a Google account. Entrepreneurs operate from coffee shops, kitchen tables, and coworking spaces in addition to the traditional office.

We asked three entrepreneurs with drastically different office strategies for their advice on choosing a workspace. Read on for their tips and add your own in the comments below.

What Kind of Office is Best to Start In?

“When you’re starting out, you should absolutely not be spending money on rent,” says Jason Fried, the founder of web-based software company 37signals. “It’s a huge waste of money.”

After Fried started 37signals, he and the other two employees working for the company at the time shared a room with another business. “Basically we had a corner of a desk,” he jokes. Assuming you can find another company that is willing to share, teaming up on a space saves cash while still providing a place to work away from the distractions of home.

Others see value in setting up their own offices from the get-go. After a brief stint at the virtual office, Anthony Franco chose a house in Denver to set up his company, EffectiveUI. It wasn’t an ideal workspace, but he got a deal on the rent. New employees were often greeted on their first day with an Allen wrench, to be used for assembling their own desks.

“We started at home, but if we were going to handle demand, we needed to have a place where we could come and work,” Franco said. He added that the extra value of being able to work as a team (in person) more than made up for the cost of an office.

While the lease route worked out well for EffectiveUI, there’s a certain amount of risk involved with jumping into your own space too soon.

“Most commercial leases are for three to four years, and so if you’re small and you’re starting out and you’ve got a couple people, you’re making way too much of a commitment,” Fried argues. “You don’t know where you’re going to be in three years.”

Is Coworking Right for Your Business?

One modern compromise between working completely virtually and committing to a lease is working at a coworking space. These office spaces provide a work environment and an alternative to coffee shops for independent workers.

Campbell McKellar discovered the value of coworking spaces when the company she worked for left their expensive traditional office and started working virtually. The move allowed her to work from anywhere, and she chose Maine. “I was trying to do work in a cottage with family members and dogs running around,” she said. “I loved being fully mobile and independent, but I also wanted to have a platform to do my work.”

LooseCubes, the company McKellar founded in May, runs a website that matches independent workers with coworking spaces and spare desks in other companies. Quite appropriately, it’s currently being run out of a coworking space. McKellar says that working from the space has helped her launch.

“Especially if you’re in a creative business, the best way to get ideas is to meet new people,” she says. “You can get stale by talking to the same five people every day.”

Coworking allows McKellar to “unintentionally network” with the other people in the space, to seek advice from other entrepreneurs, and to host meetings and work with her team at a place that isn’t her living room.

On the other hand, coworking has its challenges and might not be a great fit for every company. Coworking spaces can be distracting, and most of them are set up in a way that requires people making phone calls to seek silence in the hallway.

“For us, quiet and privacy is very important,” Fried says. “So, coworking spaces and coffee shops don’t work for us.”

McKellar admits that on days when she’s “under the gun,” she chooses to work at home. And there is a point at which a company outgrows a coworking space. LooseCubes, for instance, plans to move to its own office space sometime in the next three months.

When Should a Company Transition to a Traditional Office?

“We need to be in a room with a whiteboard that isn’t erased every day, where we can have a conference call in an open environment,” McKellar says of her hopes for transitioning to an office space. Before she commits, however, she wants to wait to see how her site’s public launch goes. In the meantime, she’s renting a room at a Manhattan coworking space called New Work City.

All companies should do something along these lines before committing to a lease, Fried says. “You don’t know if you’re going to be successful,” he says. “And if you are, you might need more space than you have right now…You don’t want to lock yourself into anything when you’re getting started. You want to be as flexible as you possibly can.”

For some people, this means staying virtual for as long as possible. For others like McKellar, it means launching from a coworking space. For Fried’s 37signals, which is based in Chicago but has employees in 11 cities, it meant working from a variety of shared office spaces for about ten years before finally opting for an office of its own in August.

But how do you know when it’s time to make the switch?

One obvious factor is space: “We were only able to rent five or six desks in our last office,” Fried says. “We had nine people in Chicago. We were out of desks at six. So everyone couldn’t come in at the same time, and that was problem.”

Another factor is work environment. If the space you are working in is interfering with your work, it might also be time to opt for an environment you can control. “We work very quietly,” explains Fried. “So our whole thing is be as quiet as possible, don’t talk throughout the day, just have a very quiet setting like a library…You can’t impose those kinds of rules on another company, especially if it’s the other company’s space.”

What are the Benefits of a Traditional Office?

For EffectiveUI, the traditional office was always a great fit. Having grown from a couple of founders to 100 employees since 2005, the company long ago left its house-office behind. They now work from a 12,000-square-foot office space.

But both spaces fulfilled the same requirements: “Whiteboarding, talking with each other and eating lunch together: It’s part of the team culture,” Franco says.

The more traditional office, however, has given him some additional perks. “We have clients come to visit us. We’re able to brand the building and the space, and when people come they can see we’re a real business,” he says.

A lot of people associate traditional offices with being trapped in a cubicle, but Franco maintains that it doesn’t have to be that way. “Just get creative and make it fun, but also give everyone a place to go,” he says.

Can I Have an Untraditional Traditional Office?

Fried thinks of his new office as more of a home base than a traditional office. Employees are free to work at home whenever they want, and half of the company still works in other cities.

“We feel that a combination of both is the best route,” Fried says. “Because we all do want to get together occasionally, and sometimes small teams of five or six people want to get together for a while.”

The home base strategy combines the benefits of virtual and traditional workspaces. When people want to work from another city or find they work better in their pajamas, they can stay home. When they need to collaborate or want to get out of the house, they have a great place to work.

“Our office is highly customized for the way we work,” says Fried. For instance, it has soundproof walls, phone booths for people to make uninterrupted calls, and rooms for small teams.

Most employees who work from Chicago come into the new office about three or four days a week. “We want people to work wherever they work best,” Fried says.

What are your tips for choosing a workspace? Add them in the comments below.

Series supported by RingCentral

This series is supported by RingCentralclass="blippr-nobr">RingCentral. Power your business with a phone system designed to meet the needs of today’s small businesses, entrepreneurs, and mobile professionals. With RingCentral, you can take control of your phone system anywhere — using your existing phones, smartphones, or PCs. Sign up today for a special 60-day free trial.

More Startup Resources from Mashable:

- 8 Funding Contests to Kick Start Your Big Idea/> - HOW TO: Run Your Business Online with $10 and a Google Account/> - 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed/> - 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups/> - 10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, francisblack

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Last week Nokia held their annual Nokia World event, this time it was in London, and they announced 4 devices [E7, C7, C6, C3] then yelled a battle cry for all to listen, proclaiming that they’re still relevant and will come back to dominate the market. The same message has been delivered every year since what feels like forever and because of that this year’s Nokia World reminded me of the end of the Cold War, with Nokia finally succumbing to their death, similar to the USSR, because they, like the Russians, so closely held onto their belief that what they were doing was the right way to progress a nation, her people, and in this case a device portfolio.

It used to be that to become a superpower you had to achieve greatness somehow. Whether it be collecting the largest number of nuclear weapons, being the first one to go to space, to walk on the moon, to spread your political ideologies to other nations, you had to do something concrete to put points on the score board. What’s Nokia doing now? When they rose to fame in the 90s there wasn’t a huge marketing budget involved. They simply made awesome devices. Color screens when before there were none, invented SMS, shipped T9 by default, the first to 3G, the first to include GPS, 5 megapixel cameras while everyone was still making devices with 2 megapixels. Then something happened after the N95, and I don’t know if it was 1 thing or a certain set of events, but Nokia stopped being Nokia.

They’re no longer acting like a superpower either, they’re talking like a bunch of bumbling buffoons about how they ship the most devices, how their services are being picked up in emerging markets, how they’re still great even though they’ve all but lost control of the smartphone market. But Stefan, I can hear you saying, Nokia is still the leader with their Symbian platform. And yes, that’s right today, but it isn’t going to be in a few product cycles.

Why is it that every Nokia World the company gets on stage and has to remind people about how awesome they are, when in reality they really aren’t? Don’t get me wrong. What Nokia accomplishes is outstanding from a logistical point of view. I’ve often said that if they want to get serious about becoming a software company they should spin off the unit responsible for sourcing components and manufacturing devices and letting them become the next Foxconn. But today is different from a very short 3 years ago. That’s when the iPhone came out, and while I don’t own one, nor did I ever even have one, the impact Apple made on the industry is shocking.

Google only accelerated the decline of Nokia because they gave the internet generation what they wanted: tight integration with Google services in a device that fit into their pocket. They also didn’t have the legacy of dealing with creating devices. They adopted the Microsoft model of just making the software and letting an ecosystem develop around it. Unlike Microsoft however, Google is giving away their software for free and are going to fund themselves by using the money they make from their advertising business.

But back to Nokia. What happened? I’m not joking when I say that, what the hell happened? They’ve gone from being respected to being the butt of every joke about the industry. It doesn’t matter how much money they make, well it does, but I’ll get back to that later, why are people not treating Nokia like a credible player anymore?

When it comes to the low end, everyone has caught up. Samsung and LG can give the mainstream low wage earners what they want, and in emerging countries such as India and China there are even home grown brands serving the needs of their customers better than what some guy sitting in an office chair in Helsinki can think about building. In the high end … do I really need to say Apple and Google anymore? So where does that leave Nokia? Fighting a battle with everyone in the mid range of devices based solely on price point? Is that what a former superpower does? Compete not on innovation, but on turning down the price tag?

I watched Nokia World from afar since it wasn’t I, but my boss, who was invited, and I wasn’t going to fork out over 600 EUR just to watch people I don’t respect show me a PowerPoint slideshow and then go on a 60 minute break to play with prototypes that aren’t going to hit the market for another 3 months. No, it just wasn’t worth it. But what I saw on my screen at home simply left me speechless. Nokia was calling out competitors by name, insulting them directly, and boasting numbers in retaliation in order to gain respect.

Sadly though, today people really don’t care about the numbers. The market does, and Nokia’s stock price has gone from over $30 to a hair above $10 with dips below that on volatile days. Why is that? Doesn’t a company who can reliably ship over 100 million devices per quarter deserve to be valued at a higher price? No, not when that lead is being attacked by several companies, each tackling a different segment of Nokia’s portfolio.

I can’t reliably say where Nokia is going to be in 3 years. No one can. That isn’t hyperbole about their impending death, because that’s not going to happen so soon. It’s because the rein of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and his cronies is coming to an end. The replacement is a Canadian who worked for Macromedia and then Microsoft, Stephen Elop. There’s also a new guy in charge of Nokia’s last fighting chance at a comeback, the MeeGo operating system, and he’s Peter Skillman who worked at IDEO and then Palm where he created the beautiful, underrated, and underfunded webOS project.

Those two people, who will surely bring in additional talent and get rid of dead weight over the next few years, are the only thing keeping my confidence in Nokia not imploding by the end of this decade. If it was up to people in charge who’ve been spitting out the same marketing bullshit that they have been, year after year, and pounding their chests about how because they ship more mobile phones in China and India that they’re somehow the best phone manufacturer across multiple sets of criteria, including innovation in mobile, then they’d be fucked.

Pure fucked. If they are not already.

Update: Great article by Vikki Chowney on the shenanigans Nokia played at Nokia World because HTC had a press event the same day. Choice quote: “For Nokia to stamp its feet and retaliate instead of letting its products speak for themselves is incredibly shortsighted.”

Official Google Blog: Google <b>News</b> turns eight

Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and ...

Small Business <b>News</b>: The Times They Are A Changing

In the 60's it was a song of revolution when change was just not as common. Today, it reflects a fact of life, at least for small business owners and.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs <b>News</b> 9/23 - Arrowhead Pride

We're over the hump and headed into Sunday. The Kansas City Chiefs are seeing a lot of guarded love. For the most part, people can't ignore our record and at the same time can't ignore our offensive production. Here's today's news.

robert shumake

Official Google Blog: Google <b>News</b> turns eight

Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and ...

Small Business <b>News</b>: The Times They Are A Changing

In the 60's it was a song of revolution when change was just not as common. Today, it reflects a fact of life, at least for small business owners and.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs <b>News</b> 9/23 - Arrowhead Pride

We're over the hump and headed into Sunday. The Kansas City Chiefs are seeing a lot of guarded love. For the most part, people can't ignore our record and at the same time can't ignore our offensive production. Here's today's news.

This series is supported by RingCentral, the leading business phone system designed for today’s small businesses, entrepreneurs, and mobile professionals. Visit RingCentral.com to learn more.

Finding the right workspace is like dating — the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet has made it a lot more complex. In essence, this means more options.

Whereas the traditional office once served as the default choice for effective communication and collaboration between coworkers, today’s businesses can be just as productive by collaborating on the web, with as little as $10 and a Google account. Entrepreneurs operate from coffee shops, kitchen tables, and coworking spaces in addition to the traditional office.

We asked three entrepreneurs with drastically different office strategies for their advice on choosing a workspace. Read on for their tips and add your own in the comments below.

What Kind of Office is Best to Start In?

“When you’re starting out, you should absolutely not be spending money on rent,” says Jason Fried, the founder of web-based software company 37signals. “It’s a huge waste of money.”

After Fried started 37signals, he and the other two employees working for the company at the time shared a room with another business. “Basically we had a corner of a desk,” he jokes. Assuming you can find another company that is willing to share, teaming up on a space saves cash while still providing a place to work away from the distractions of home.

Others see value in setting up their own offices from the get-go. After a brief stint at the virtual office, Anthony Franco chose a house in Denver to set up his company, EffectiveUI. It wasn’t an ideal workspace, but he got a deal on the rent. New employees were often greeted on their first day with an Allen wrench, to be used for assembling their own desks.

“We started at home, but if we were going to handle demand, we needed to have a place where we could come and work,” Franco said. He added that the extra value of being able to work as a team (in person) more than made up for the cost of an office.

While the lease route worked out well for EffectiveUI, there’s a certain amount of risk involved with jumping into your own space too soon.

“Most commercial leases are for three to four years, and so if you’re small and you’re starting out and you’ve got a couple people, you’re making way too much of a commitment,” Fried argues. “You don’t know where you’re going to be in three years.”

Is Coworking Right for Your Business?

One modern compromise between working completely virtually and committing to a lease is working at a coworking space. These office spaces provide a work environment and an alternative to coffee shops for independent workers.

Campbell McKellar discovered the value of coworking spaces when the company she worked for left their expensive traditional office and started working virtually. The move allowed her to work from anywhere, and she chose Maine. “I was trying to do work in a cottage with family members and dogs running around,” she said. “I loved being fully mobile and independent, but I also wanted to have a platform to do my work.”

LooseCubes, the company McKellar founded in May, runs a website that matches independent workers with coworking spaces and spare desks in other companies. Quite appropriately, it’s currently being run out of a coworking space. McKellar says that working from the space has helped her launch.

“Especially if you’re in a creative business, the best way to get ideas is to meet new people,” she says. “You can get stale by talking to the same five people every day.”

Coworking allows McKellar to “unintentionally network” with the other people in the space, to seek advice from other entrepreneurs, and to host meetings and work with her team at a place that isn’t her living room.

On the other hand, coworking has its challenges and might not be a great fit for every company. Coworking spaces can be distracting, and most of them are set up in a way that requires people making phone calls to seek silence in the hallway.

“For us, quiet and privacy is very important,” Fried says. “So, coworking spaces and coffee shops don’t work for us.”

McKellar admits that on days when she’s “under the gun,” she chooses to work at home. And there is a point at which a company outgrows a coworking space. LooseCubes, for instance, plans to move to its own office space sometime in the next three months.

When Should a Company Transition to a Traditional Office?

“We need to be in a room with a whiteboard that isn’t erased every day, where we can have a conference call in an open environment,” McKellar says of her hopes for transitioning to an office space. Before she commits, however, she wants to wait to see how her site’s public launch goes. In the meantime, she’s renting a room at a Manhattan coworking space called New Work City.

All companies should do something along these lines before committing to a lease, Fried says. “You don’t know if you’re going to be successful,” he says. “And if you are, you might need more space than you have right now…You don’t want to lock yourself into anything when you’re getting started. You want to be as flexible as you possibly can.”

For some people, this means staying virtual for as long as possible. For others like McKellar, it means launching from a coworking space. For Fried’s 37signals, which is based in Chicago but has employees in 11 cities, it meant working from a variety of shared office spaces for about ten years before finally opting for an office of its own in August.

But how do you know when it’s time to make the switch?

One obvious factor is space: “We were only able to rent five or six desks in our last office,” Fried says. “We had nine people in Chicago. We were out of desks at six. So everyone couldn’t come in at the same time, and that was problem.”

Another factor is work environment. If the space you are working in is interfering with your work, it might also be time to opt for an environment you can control. “We work very quietly,” explains Fried. “So our whole thing is be as quiet as possible, don’t talk throughout the day, just have a very quiet setting like a library…You can’t impose those kinds of rules on another company, especially if it’s the other company’s space.”

What are the Benefits of a Traditional Office?

For EffectiveUI, the traditional office was always a great fit. Having grown from a couple of founders to 100 employees since 2005, the company long ago left its house-office behind. They now work from a 12,000-square-foot office space.

But both spaces fulfilled the same requirements: “Whiteboarding, talking with each other and eating lunch together: It’s part of the team culture,” Franco says.

The more traditional office, however, has given him some additional perks. “We have clients come to visit us. We’re able to brand the building and the space, and when people come they can see we’re a real business,” he says.

A lot of people associate traditional offices with being trapped in a cubicle, but Franco maintains that it doesn’t have to be that way. “Just get creative and make it fun, but also give everyone a place to go,” he says.

Can I Have an Untraditional Traditional Office?

Fried thinks of his new office as more of a home base than a traditional office. Employees are free to work at home whenever they want, and half of the company still works in other cities.

“We feel that a combination of both is the best route,” Fried says. “Because we all do want to get together occasionally, and sometimes small teams of five or six people want to get together for a while.”

The home base strategy combines the benefits of virtual and traditional workspaces. When people want to work from another city or find they work better in their pajamas, they can stay home. When they need to collaborate or want to get out of the house, they have a great place to work.

“Our office is highly customized for the way we work,” says Fried. For instance, it has soundproof walls, phone booths for people to make uninterrupted calls, and rooms for small teams.

Most employees who work from Chicago come into the new office about three or four days a week. “We want people to work wherever they work best,” Fried says.

What are your tips for choosing a workspace? Add them in the comments below.

Series supported by RingCentral

This series is supported by RingCentralclass="blippr-nobr">RingCentral. Power your business with a phone system designed to meet the needs of today’s small businesses, entrepreneurs, and mobile professionals. With RingCentral, you can take control of your phone system anywhere — using your existing phones, smartphones, or PCs. Sign up today for a special 60-day free trial.

More Startup Resources from Mashable:

- 8 Funding Contests to Kick Start Your Big Idea/> - HOW TO: Run Your Business Online with $10 and a Google Account/> - 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed/> - 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups/> - 10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, francisblack

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Last week Nokia held their annual Nokia World event, this time it was in London, and they announced 4 devices [E7, C7, C6, C3] then yelled a battle cry for all to listen, proclaiming that they’re still relevant and will come back to dominate the market. The same message has been delivered every year since what feels like forever and because of that this year’s Nokia World reminded me of the end of the Cold War, with Nokia finally succumbing to their death, similar to the USSR, because they, like the Russians, so closely held onto their belief that what they were doing was the right way to progress a nation, her people, and in this case a device portfolio.

It used to be that to become a superpower you had to achieve greatness somehow. Whether it be collecting the largest number of nuclear weapons, being the first one to go to space, to walk on the moon, to spread your political ideologies to other nations, you had to do something concrete to put points on the score board. What’s Nokia doing now? When they rose to fame in the 90s there wasn’t a huge marketing budget involved. They simply made awesome devices. Color screens when before there were none, invented SMS, shipped T9 by default, the first to 3G, the first to include GPS, 5 megapixel cameras while everyone was still making devices with 2 megapixels. Then something happened after the N95, and I don’t know if it was 1 thing or a certain set of events, but Nokia stopped being Nokia.

They’re no longer acting like a superpower either, they’re talking like a bunch of bumbling buffoons about how they ship the most devices, how their services are being picked up in emerging markets, how they’re still great even though they’ve all but lost control of the smartphone market. But Stefan, I can hear you saying, Nokia is still the leader with their Symbian platform. And yes, that’s right today, but it isn’t going to be in a few product cycles.

Why is it that every Nokia World the company gets on stage and has to remind people about how awesome they are, when in reality they really aren’t? Don’t get me wrong. What Nokia accomplishes is outstanding from a logistical point of view. I’ve often said that if they want to get serious about becoming a software company they should spin off the unit responsible for sourcing components and manufacturing devices and letting them become the next Foxconn. But today is different from a very short 3 years ago. That’s when the iPhone came out, and while I don’t own one, nor did I ever even have one, the impact Apple made on the industry is shocking.

Google only accelerated the decline of Nokia because they gave the internet generation what they wanted: tight integration with Google services in a device that fit into their pocket. They also didn’t have the legacy of dealing with creating devices. They adopted the Microsoft model of just making the software and letting an ecosystem develop around it. Unlike Microsoft however, Google is giving away their software for free and are going to fund themselves by using the money they make from their advertising business.

But back to Nokia. What happened? I’m not joking when I say that, what the hell happened? They’ve gone from being respected to being the butt of every joke about the industry. It doesn’t matter how much money they make, well it does, but I’ll get back to that later, why are people not treating Nokia like a credible player anymore?

When it comes to the low end, everyone has caught up. Samsung and LG can give the mainstream low wage earners what they want, and in emerging countries such as India and China there are even home grown brands serving the needs of their customers better than what some guy sitting in an office chair in Helsinki can think about building. In the high end … do I really need to say Apple and Google anymore? So where does that leave Nokia? Fighting a battle with everyone in the mid range of devices based solely on price point? Is that what a former superpower does? Compete not on innovation, but on turning down the price tag?

I watched Nokia World from afar since it wasn’t I, but my boss, who was invited, and I wasn’t going to fork out over 600 EUR just to watch people I don’t respect show me a PowerPoint slideshow and then go on a 60 minute break to play with prototypes that aren’t going to hit the market for another 3 months. No, it just wasn’t worth it. But what I saw on my screen at home simply left me speechless. Nokia was calling out competitors by name, insulting them directly, and boasting numbers in retaliation in order to gain respect.

Sadly though, today people really don’t care about the numbers. The market does, and Nokia’s stock price has gone from over $30 to a hair above $10 with dips below that on volatile days. Why is that? Doesn’t a company who can reliably ship over 100 million devices per quarter deserve to be valued at a higher price? No, not when that lead is being attacked by several companies, each tackling a different segment of Nokia’s portfolio.

I can’t reliably say where Nokia is going to be in 3 years. No one can. That isn’t hyperbole about their impending death, because that’s not going to happen so soon. It’s because the rein of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and his cronies is coming to an end. The replacement is a Canadian who worked for Macromedia and then Microsoft, Stephen Elop. There’s also a new guy in charge of Nokia’s last fighting chance at a comeback, the MeeGo operating system, and he’s Peter Skillman who worked at IDEO and then Palm where he created the beautiful, underrated, and underfunded webOS project.

Those two people, who will surely bring in additional talent and get rid of dead weight over the next few years, are the only thing keeping my confidence in Nokia not imploding by the end of this decade. If it was up to people in charge who’ve been spitting out the same marketing bullshit that they have been, year after year, and pounding their chests about how because they ship more mobile phones in China and India that they’re somehow the best phone manufacturer across multiple sets of criteria, including innovation in mobile, then they’d be fucked.

Pure fucked. If they are not already.

Update: Great article by Vikki Chowney on the shenanigans Nokia played at Nokia World because HTC had a press event the same day. Choice quote: “For Nokia to stamp its feet and retaliate instead of letting its products speak for themselves is incredibly shortsighted.”

robert shumake

Official Google Blog: Google <b>News</b> turns eight

Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and ...

Small Business <b>News</b>: The Times They Are A Changing

In the 60's it was a song of revolution when change was just not as common. Today, it reflects a fact of life, at least for small business owners and.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs <b>News</b> 9/23 - Arrowhead Pride

We're over the hump and headed into Sunday. The Kansas City Chiefs are seeing a lot of guarded love. For the most part, people can't ignore our record and at the same time can't ignore our offensive production. Here's today's news.

robert shumake

Official Google Blog: Google <b>News</b> turns eight

Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and ...

Small Business <b>News</b>: The Times They Are A Changing

In the 60's it was a song of revolution when change was just not as common. Today, it reflects a fact of life, at least for small business owners and.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs <b>News</b> 9/23 - Arrowhead Pride

We're over the hump and headed into Sunday. The Kansas City Chiefs are seeing a lot of guarded love. For the most part, people can't ignore our record and at the same time can't ignore our offensive production. Here's today's news.