Russia’s dual-screen Yota crowdsources ideas

Two winning ideas on how to best make use of the dual-screen YotaPhone were chosen from more than a dozen generated at YotaPhone’s Idea Camp, a crowdsourcing event attended by smartphone users, developers, creative directors, and journalists in Moscow.

Active Note, which was judged the “best” by the jury, generates notifications based on location. For example, if you know you need to buy something for your car, it will remind you when you are in the garage. It could also be used to inform parents when their children arrive at school, among many other possibilities. The audience winner was Back Scrolling, where you can use sensors on one display to scroll on the other, which would facilitate active scrollers of social media or RSS feeds.

Yota Devices said it will evaluate and pursue many of these ideas for both the first generation YotaPhone, currently on sale in Russia, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, and the UK, and the next generation YotaPhone, which goes to market in Q4 2014.

“I’ve always believed that two heads are better than one. There’s power in collective thinking, brainstorming and problem solving. I also believe that two screens are better than one, particularly when one of the screens is always on. And, my third belief is that the future of mobile communications is always-on displays,” said Yota Devices CEO Vlad Martynov. “Today’s Idea Camp challenged us to think differently about how the dual-screen, always-on YotaPhone can help us communicate even better while distracting us less.

“From the beginning, Yota Devices realized that we had to do things differently, including building a direct dialogue with our fans and active users. In fact, many of the current use cases and applications are due directly to input, suggestions and ideas generated not by Yota Devices, but from our users and our partners. ” Martynov pointed to YotaPhone’s FitnessTracker, an application that streams information from health monitoring devices to YotaPhone’s always-on display, and TeachMe, an application created with ABBYY for learning new words and phrases in six different languages, as two examples of ideas that have emerged from Yota Device’s crowdsourcing approach.

The event featured presentations by Daniel Sieberg, the bestselling author of “The Digital Diet,” and Tim Olsen, who is a leading international expert in the field of crowdsourcing and Associate Professor at the WP Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

“My message to everyone is to go ahead and love your technology, but not unconditionally,” Sieberg said. “Innovations like YotaPhone can help you be more mindful in the use of your devices and to find a balance with your technology.

“Collaborative technology has enabled the power of the crowd to help develop new products, ideas and solutions,” said Olsen. He noted that more and more companies, like Yota Devices, are employing crowdsourcing for the development of consumer products and devices.

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