Toastmaster Icebreaker: lessons learnt

Last week I had my first speech as a Toastmaster. I think it went OK considering it was the first time I was speaking in front a group of people that are relatively new to me. I thought I would summarize a few notes based on the feedback I have received from my peers and an analysis I did of my speech.

Reserve and use enough preparation time

Although the allotted time for your presentation will be something between 4 and 6 minutes, it will take a significantly larger amount of time to plan, draft, practice and finalize it. You should not wait for the last day but make sure you start as early as possible.

Pick the right combination of things to talk about

Although the icebreaker is typically about you, you will find out that having to present something about yourself in front of an audience is not that simple. You will need to consider what are the aspects of your life and your personality you will want to discuss about and how they make sense when you put them together into a speech. Make it interesting, funny and don't be too afraid of opening up beyond the typical lines about yourself you use when you meet someone.

Consider using visuals, like photos

I used a PC to project photos of my kids, wife, etc. as a support for my presentation. I felt that I would not have had enough time to tell enough about people who are important to me and that using photos I would have been able to bring the message to the audience. This worked out well based on the feedback but it complicated a bit the delivery as I had to control also the photo flow plus I had little time to set up the PC once my time started. I was also told that I was blocking part of the view for some of the audience. In summary, make sure you carefully check your setup before the start of the meeting.

Prioritize few topics to reserve enough time for them

Based on my speech but also on that of some of my peers, I can say that often it is better to select a few key topics to talk about and dive deep enough into them in your presentation. Having too many items will force you to rush through all of them and at the and you will leave your audience with basically nothing more than a list. Leave out less important topics and consider using them for your next speeches.

Create a script, but do not use it at the speech.

I did write a script for the things I wanted to talk about. It was a very useful exercise because it helped me with thinking more carefully of what to say, how to say it and what flow to use. I used it to practice the speech and it helped me realize that initially I had planned for too much to be said. However, I now realize I should have left it behind when keeping the speech. After all the icebreaker is about you so you should know what to say. At the beginning of the speech I found myself paying too much attention at saying the same words I had in the script instead of the overall aspects of the performance. I guess it would have been enough to have some key points written down just as a reminder of the flow. I will try that next time.

I will stop here. In the toastmasters kit you will find other type of hints that you should consider. Above all, try to be as relaxed as possible and do not take it too seriously. This is your first speech, you are there to learn and have fun.

Contacts on Ovi in Nokia Beta Labs

Nokia released today Contacts on Ovi. If you have read my previous post Real-time web to your mobile, you can now download Contacts on Ovi to enable the IM notifications from FriendFeed to your mobile. This application now supports also S60 3.2 devices.

Have fun!

Real-time web to your mobile

A few months ago I have linked up Nokia chat to my FriendFeed profile to experiment a bit with the idea of real-time web. After using it for all this time I can say that the experience is quite interesting as it enables instant notifications to your mobile of activities your friends are sharing on FriendFeed. If you like FriendFeed and want to try a new way of getting it to your mobile, this is something you might want to consider.

If you decide to try it out, just follow the instructions below:

1. Install Nokia Chat on your phone (e.g. E71). You can find Nokia Chat for Nokia S60 3.1 devices (update: now also for S60 3.2) on Nokia Betalabs (Make sure you follow the installation instructions).

2. Sign in with your Ovi account or create a new account following the wizard on the application.

3. Go to FriendFeed and add your Ovi ID as your IM service (use GTalk profile)+ enable the IM notifications.

4. Follow the instructions on FriendFeed to complete the activation.

Leave Nokia Chat client running in background. You will start getting mobile instant notifications to your mobile whenever your friends are sharing something on FriendFeed. You can also update your FriendFeed status and like/comment your friends’ posts. Here you can find more instructions on the commands to use.

I have my e71 connected via 3G/GPRS. With a flat fee data subscription I don't need to worry about the data costs and I can be always connected. The UI is not great as it gets delivered to you as an IM but the "command line" like interface is somehow pretty practical especially if you have a QWERTY keypad and does the job quickly.

I also recommend that you consider filtering the notifications using a FriendFeed list where you add some people you want to follow realtime (otherwise you might be overloaded with notifications).

Yes, there are big margin of improvement in terms of the UI on the mobile, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what real-time web could be in the future. Watch-out! It may be addictive!

I think this is real-time web for real. The first step of making it happen.

Update (28Jan2009): If you have problems with clicking on the verification URL from friendfeed on your Nokia Chat/Contacts on Ovi mobile client, consider performing this step via a PC IM client. Info on how to set up your favourite IM client for Contacts on Ovi can be found here (click on "learn more" button.

Give me a more relevant web please!

The web is a great source of information and ideas but if you spend a lot of time on it you might sometimes feel overwhelmed from the noise you are exposed too. At least I feel. It is not the problem of knowing that you will not be able to read everything that is out there and could potentially be of interest to you, but more the fact that with this noise you know you might well miss some of the gems that you should instead be able to find.

Search (and especially Google) have been revolutionary to the way we use the web and
continue to be "the way" you find things you are looking for at any particular point in time. However, what about things you are not actively looking for but you should still notice? And what about the things that you should know about immediately when they surface? There are many of those like a great job opening you should apply to or freshly released news about a company you have invested in. Although we are constantly connected and information spreads very fast across the world thanks to the interenet, the noise is so significant that we miss lots of things we should not miss.

Many people have a browsing behaviour that drives them to news sites and portals as the first thing they do once they open the browser. Next thing they do is check into their webmail. I guess that is why traditional webportals such as Yahoo.com are that popular. There is some degree of personalization on those portals, but basically users are exposed to a one-size-fits-it-all collection of information like they get in traditional media. In order to get more relevant information, users are then forced to go and visit multiple sites (read magazines), typically niche sources of the information one is possibly interested in. It's a time consuming and expensive exercise to do every day. Some users (I assume that's a small minority of web users) subscribe to RSS feeds so to get an aggregated view of the sources they normally check. RSS works OK, it's still too geeky I think and still does not really solve the problem. You get some of the noise out, but you still have plenty of it in the feeds you subscribe to.

So how do you increase relevance in your web experience? You can use your friends and/or like minded people to help you with the filtering. That's what services such as FriendFeed can help you with. They aggregate activities you and other people perform across the web and generate a feed out of it that users can consume. Services such as FriendFeed are repackaging certain concepts like RSS into a more understandable product that the masses can digest. Example: you subscribe first and foremost to a person, not to a feed. I think FriendFeed has a lot's of the basic in place to make the web more relevant but they still have a big challenge ahead of building the most amazing recommendation/relevance engine. And for what I can tell, it sounds like they are working on it.

Note: FriendFeed recently added "realtime" feature so that new items are posted to the user as soon as they become available and made the realtime API available to developers. I will write about the realtime web in the next post.

Sonera and iPhone: why esclusivity is not good for consumers

Sonera Finland is the only operator with rights to distribute the new Apple iPhone 3G in Finland. And this is not good for Finnish consumers.

Sonera is offering 3 different pricing levels (small, medium, large) for the iPhone+service combination. They also offer an extra option that gives people the chance to personalize more the subscription package they are buying from. As part of the deal the customer gets an iPhone at a certain price that depends on the package and the model (8 or 16 GB), but in all cases the phone will be operator locked so will not work with any other operator service than Sonera.

The agreement is 24-month long and with an iPhone 16Gb the basic level (called Small) it costs 31.69 Euro a month plus 245 Euro for the device. Over the entire duration of the deal the total cost will be 1005.56 Euro. The customer isforced to use Sonera cellular service as long as she wants to use the iPhone that came with it.

The basic package is pretty lame. It includes 100 minutes of voice calls, 100 SMSs and a ridiculously low 100 MB of data transfer. Maybe that is OK for browsing but once one starts streaming video or downloading podcasts, the data cap will be easily reached. The extra charge for the data over the limit will be 1.49 Euro/MB. Sonera offers free access to their WiFi service in Finland but with a 3G device supporting high speed downloads, one just wants to feel free to use it anyplace and anytime.
There is an option to go for the more expensive packages. The package "Large" includes 1GB a month of data transfer but comes at a 89.99 euro a month + 85 Euro for the iPhone. Total over 24 month period: 2244.76 euro!

When considering that operators in Finland are already offering unlimited data plans starting at 9.99Euro, I wonder why Sonera did not offer that at least on the more expensive packages. Asking customers to make a 24-month commitment on these conditions just to get an operator locked device seems quite unreasonable to me.

Operator locked means also that all people who are not Sonera customers will be left out of the possibility of using an iPhone in Finland. I guess non-sonera customers account for at least 50% of the Finnish population of cellphone users, and that is quite a big group.

Exclusivity agreements are not good for consumers. Like in this case, they often end-up with customers paying more or being left out from the possibility of getting something they would want.

Twitter drops feature, becomes less mobile.

Twitter has communicated that they have disabled their sms notification service for users outside of North America and India. This is obviously bad news for people like me who have been relying on sms as the way of giving more visibility to some people I follow on the service by getting their updates and direct messages delivered instantly and directly to my mobile.

I have been wondering for a while how long they would have been able to pick up the sms costs as no new agreements with operators were announced since last year and no revenue generating features were added to the service.

Twitter has justified this change with costs (up to 1,000 USD per user per year). I think that is understandable and acceptable, but it is a cold shower for users who found value in this feature. It is always hard to remove free features from services, almost as hard as changing the business model and making users pay for that feature.

Maybe twitter could have tried (and maybe they have tried) to find ways to monetize this feature indirectly by attaching adverts to the SMS notifications the same way as full RSS feeds are nowadays distributed. How would have users reacted to it? And would advertisers go with it? How would that have impacted the cost structure and level?
Another option they could have tried is making users pay for it, but again that is easier said than done.

Anyway, I will keep using twitter and I am still looking for a replacement solution to this feature. Checking the m.twitter.com on regular basis does not work too well, you cannot access direct messages via it and you cannot select specific friends you follow and look them up their feed. Mobile email is a partial replacement (I have gmail inbox configured on my E71, twitter forwards direct messages to my email inbox). I also tried twibble (a java app for mobile) but did not particulary like it as it is an overkill compared to what I need...so I am still without instant mobile twitter notifications.

Beginners golf: online videos as best training solution

I have started to play golf last year and since then tried to learn the basics so to feel comfortable on the course. I did not find it easy and requiring a lot of practice and learning. On the other hand golf is nowadays one of the activities I like the most. It is simply a great experience.

I did attend a "golf for beginners" course at Tammergolf in Tampere (Finland) right at the start. The course lasted about 2 weeks with 5 sessions. It provided some basic introduction to the rules and basics of golf but I must say that it did not really teach me much. I don't think it was good value for the money. At the end of the course I could swing pretty much as well (or as poorly) as at the beginning but at least it gave me the chance to understand that I liked it.

I then went into the internet and looked for books and other material that I could use to learn more. I picked up a couple of books that turned out quite difficult to use for basic technique training. I turned then to videos.Videos are the best solution for me.

There is plenty of videos online that aim at giving basic golf training, some are good and some are not. The good ones are quite valuable as you can watch them when you want, at the speed you want and as many time as you need. You can concentrate on the different aspect of things like the swing, learn them and then go and put them into practice.

After some amount of searching and screening, I have been consistently following the videos from Shawn Clement on Youtube. He has posted more than 100 of them and they are all of excellent quality, covering most of the aspects of playing golf. I do certainly recommend those videos to anyone who has recently started playing and to people who are looking for things to improve in their game.

Most recently I have purchased Shawn's DVD series and I am now in the process again of going through my game to reach the next development level. This is really fun! More on this process soon on new posts.