This is a clip of Nokia’s Brett Murray (from their Technology Inside Promotions Team) talking about Indoor Positioning, which is a technology that picks up where GPS lets off: indoors. It can be used to both better target mobile users with relevant advertising, as well as help those users figure out where they are within larger complexes such as offices, malls, stadiums, or even urban cores. More importantly, however, all the indoor positioning services offered by Nokia are opt-in sytstems: through Nokia’s “privacy-by-desing,” users can decide just how much of their personal information they are willing to share with a larger, mobile network.

iPhone Version

Image: "Newspaper dispensers" by MY Montreal

Maybe what’s plaguing so many local newspapers these days is that they aren’t so “local” anymore. I mean, one of the ideas that Tom Foremski had about how newspapers, especially local ones, could reinvent themselves was by owning their local stories — from community reporting to business and political stories that originate within their beat. The crux of this approach is that it’d allow newspapers to offer wholly original content, something that people might be willing to keep paying for (whether through subscriptions or their eye-balls).

After all, most of what online media has done to over-saturated the content market has been through regurgitation. Even though the mainstream media (MSM) has lost revenues, it’s not like the up-and-comers have captured their marketing sure. These up-and-comers are costing the MSM more than the up-and-comers themselves are worth (i.e. generating in revenue).

So there’s still a demand for oringinal content if only because it seems even scarcer on the high-seas of content-up-chuck. Consider a recent AdAge interview with Nick Denton , the founder of Gawker Media:

On his way to the bunker, Mr. Denton sold two non-core blogs, Consumerist and Idolator; folded Valleywag and Defamer into Gawker itself; and shed some staff. Now he’s hired some new journalists at Kotaku and Gawker, and while they’ll still live and die (or at least dine) by their page views, Mr. Denton said he believes traffic rewards scoops and original reporting over snarky reheats. [emphasis my own.]

Why should we listen to Denton? Well, because he seems to have pulled up Gawker’s boot straps and gotten its head above the water while the undertow was pulling a lot of other publishers down by those very same boots.

So how does a local paper focus more on original content? Well, maybe by becoming more verticalized. And since no media does “vertical” better than blogs, maybe successful blogs offer a clue on how to save local newspapers.

Blogs have verticals. Well, so do local papers. Their veritcal is the municipality. And where blogs have categories, local papers can also learn a lesson. Instead of categories, local papers could have neighbourhoods.

Right now, the majority of local papers syndicate their national/international news to cut costs, and they are failing there because news off the wire doesn’t put it into the context of the community. Providing that “community context” will be an integral part to becoming news media organizations rather than mere “papers” (as Tom suggests), and will make it all that more viable to reinvent their revenue model for an increasingly mobile and personalized web.

So Mike Maddaloni tells me that it’s been six whole months since Nokia brough a rag-tag bunch of geeks (including me) in Helsinki by Nokia for Nokia Open Lab 2008. Toward the end, I remember someone saying that if only we had had another couple days, we could’ve mapped-out Nokia’s entire strategy for the next year. Well, I think that if we had had any idea of what to expect, we wouldn’t have needed another few days to do that.

For one, I wish I’d known what to expect so that I could’ve scheduled a few video interviews in advance. It’s not every day that you get access to a pool of both Nokia execs and some really forward thinking bloggers from around the world. Then again, with everything that went down, I imagine that scheduling more than a couple interviews would’ve been hell.

All in all, the experienced really changed the way I think about social media and the web. For starters, it taught me that the web and desktops/laptops are not inextricably linked. More importantly, though, it made me realized that, insofar as social media is about people connecting and sharing with other people, the mobile web is going to be a hell of a lot more important than I think most of us realize. In a word, the mobile web will merge the internet and physical world, making for a much more tribal web:

The social web [...] made it possible for people to transcend a physical divide and come together to form a community. What it didn’t do, was afford them the physical experience of community participation.

The mobile web is going to close much of that gap. It will enable to transcend the physical divide when forming and joining communities, but still have some physical experience by including our physical environment in our community interactions.

Other things I learned included (1) don’t trust baggage handlers at Charles de Gaul with your luggage, (2) no matter how Irish you think you are, never try to out-drink a Finn, and (3) keep a close eye on your drink when Estonian hookers are lurking in the club (Nick Bouton can back me on this one).

In any case, here’s the official video diary of the event produced by Nokia. And if you have troube getting it to load, you can always check it out here.