RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

Last week I spent a dark, but thourughly educational and entertaining in Helsinki, Finland.

I was attending a training course for work (SGSN-Serving GPRS Support Node Op & Maint.).

The course was held in Nokia Learning Centre, located in Espoo, just outside Helsinki city.

Apart from the darkness, I woke up at 7AM it was dark, I went to bed at 10PM it was dark, it was a great week.

The course in itself was really really interesting. We got down to the nuts and bolts of one of the main pieces of equipment of any mobile data network.

The course went on for the full week. Everything was great, like I said except for the lack of light.

The Thursday during lunchtime

On the last day, I took a trip to Nokia House, to have a coffee with Jussi-Pekka Erkkola, JP for short.

I was in contact with JP from before, talking about the social tools being used inside Nokia. JP works as New Media Specialist in Nokia House, in the Nokia COMMS BU.

He was just back from the pretty successful NokiaWorld held in Amsterdam last week, where they also operated a pretty popular blog, FromTheFloor.

We had a really good chat, about the use of blogs, wikis, and other social tools within Nokia.

It was good to talk to someone who was “sorta” the same age (ok, he is younger…but I am *still* in my twenties!) about new ways of getting the message over to people.

We spoke about using blogs to talk to customers, consumers, and everyone in between. [There was one correction: I had previously mentioned that there were over 60 blogs inside Nokia, but in fact there are over 200 blogs!]

I must say, the coffee was the nicest I have had in a large company canteen area, in a looong time.

On the way to the airport, I happened to share the taxi with Thomas Leliveld, EVP Sales and Marketing, from Gate5. Gate5 were recently acquired by Nokia (Nokia PR here), obviously they saw the potential in including GPS services into mobile devices, particularly the N95 as the N95 maps and navigation application is based on the gate5 software platform.

So many of the new 3G services are location based, or at least location intelligent. I guess it made sense to have that kind of expertise in house. Now they have it.

He explained to me logic behind their platform, and gave me a pretty cool demo as we travelled to the airport. I might even get my hands on a copy to try it out.

All in all it was a really great week, very busy, early mornings, and late nights (Caalle 12-nice bar ).

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