What does success taste like?
The big battle this year in mobile will be in smartphones. Not because of reasons many pundits and analysts now suggest, that somehow this is that everybody caught the iPhone fever or that Google somehow energized the field with its Nexus phone. No, those are overhyped views with an overly US-centric view. Remember that differing from most high tech and media industries like computers, TVs, air travel, advertising, military spending, music, movies, rocket science etc, where the US tends to reflect about half of global spending of the given industry. That is not so in mobile telecoms. US cellphone users (about 285 million subscriptions) represent only 7% of the global subscriber base of 4.6 Billion.
Also by Tomi Ahonen, an excellent write-up on what to expect from 2010 in regards to mobile phones and the companies that build them.
Excellent presentation by Tomi Ahonen about the state of mobile usage and where it is going. Eye-opener especially for those staring themselves blind on how mobile phones are used in the western world.
I don't do New Years resolutions because they hardly ever work and if they are good ideas you should start these projects when you get the idea and are in the mood. That said, if I made a resolution it would be to read less news and more facts this year. I actually began this project last year.
I used to have this link in my browser that opened up a massive list of different news-sites, based on the theory that if I read the news from enough sources I'd filter out some kind of objective truth about what is happening in the world. Of course this isn't what happens, most news comes from the same source anyway - the news site is just an aggregator nowadays so you should choose the one you feel will point out the news that is important to you. News are also sensational in nature so even if you know what events have occurred you won't get the whole story and no one bothers to get back to you if they are wrong or new information comes up. Last summer, after a friend of mine extolled the virtues of "The Economist" I bought a couple of issues from the newsstand and took the time to read each issue, realizing that this was the kind of news I wanted. I wanted intelligent and non-sensational reporting about important issues but also with analysis and background. I'm now a subscriber and read every issue with care - usually it takes most of the week. That doesn't matter because the news is old anyway, the news has been chosen to be relevant even 1-2 weeks later and comes with the aforementioned analysis and background it needs. I still want to know if something important has happened, and because of this I still read a few sites every day. I go the Helsingin Sanomat ( http://www.hs.fi ) which is our countries largest newspaper, they have a great website and good reporting. There I get finnish news and some of the most important international ones. I also skim either New York Times' website ( http://global.nytimes.com ) and/or the BBC News page ( http://news.bbc.co.uk ) for more international news. Last I go to TechMeme ( http://www.techmeme.com ) which collects the latest rumors and information in the tech and Internet-industry - mostly because that is one of my fields of interest. That's a lot less than the nine (9!) sites that I used to skim/peruse before (BBC, HBL, Google News, NYT, Techmeme, Yle, HS, Der Spiegel and Reddit). I read the news sites by skimming instead of actually reading very many articles. Yes, I am a recovering procrastinator and information addict... I have a few additional news flows too, I follow several twitter-feeds for both breaking news and news that become old faster or isn't important if I'm busy. I'm trying to cut down on those too because it's too easy to procrastinate and find some weird little tidbit fascinating when you should be doing something more important. Like study, or clean up your desk - like I had planned to today...
James Randi, the Amazing Randi, magician and skeptic has recently been through a 6 month chemotherapy-treatment and would like to tell you that medicine does, in fact, improve and that chemotherapy isn't the bogeyman that it used to be. This is great news and good advice against other uninformed sources that might have you believe differently. Modern medicine works and continues to improve and I hope we will keep seeing Randi as active as ever for a long time to come!
Once again I have been out traveling around Finland. My grandmother is too old to travel so we had to come to her in Rovaniemi. Ended up traveling almost 2000 km's for Christmas:

I spent the Christmas with my own closest family, my grandmother and my brothers wife and her parents. Christmas is more of personal time when we put away our cameras but during the travels I took a bunch of pictures with my Nokia N900. Being online via 3G all (most) of the time meant I uploaded the pictures in real time and using Flickr's geotag-support could show where I was going. Friends on Twitter and Facebook in turn could comment (and make fun) of the travels. Here are the results, click on over to Flickr for the full on geotagged and mapped experience.
Its my grandfather's "puukko" or actually "lapinleuku". It has been polished and sharpened at the Marttini factory so its ready for another lifetime of use. The lapinleuku is, as you can see, a large finnish knife but also an important tool in the North. As a child I sat in the car as my grandfather put a reindeer, injured in a car-crash (not ours, we stopped to help), down with this knife or a knife like it. It, and other knives like it (which my brother and sister got), have been his trusted companions in the wild when fishing and hunting in his beloved Lapland.

Finally getting around to post this, I spent a long first weekend of december in Oslo, Norway, visiting one of my very best friends. The weather wasn't the best but the trip was awesome nonetheless because it was more social in nature and I've seen Oslo before in a better light.
Here are some pictures taken during the trip, click to go to my flickr-page where I have described the pictures more in detail and commented on the stuff: