Slush is coming to Helsinki

Slush, a new event for startups by startup taking place in Helsinki, Finland is coming to town 24th November and I wanted to give you guys a heads up. I am organizing the event with Helene of Zipipop, Kaitsu of Floobs and Peter of Mobile Monday, but that’s not why I want you to sign up. I want you to sign up because I know it’s going to rock!

Despite the gloom and doom with the economy that Jason Calacanis of Mahalo is predicting and despite the fact that Taneli Tikka is telling everyone to go back to school, I myself am up beat about the future and especially up beat about the future in Helsinki. Slowly but surely, startup culture is starting to take traction in Helsinki (at least that’s what I believe) and people around me are starting to say ‘Hey, maybe it’s worth trying to do something I have always wanted to and dreamed of’.

If you’re one of those people brave enough to believe in yourself (or even curious to meet some of who do) come on up and meet the rest of us at Slush. You’re most welcome!

Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote about Slush for ArcticStartup weblog which I run with three great minds, namely Antti, Miikka and Karri.

And here’s a link (In Finnish) to a Digitoday.fi article about Slush, Finnish entrepreneurship and about how we entrepreneurs are building our own culture here in Helsinki. For everybody who I have the pleasure to work with on this important cause, Thank you!

Meeting Local Startups In Copenhagen, Denmark

CPH, Nyhavn by http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgoulao/

I will be in Copenhagen, Denmark next weekend (October 17.-19.) and would love to meet some local startups over a coffee or a pint.

If you’re a startup or know of the scene in Copenhagen drop me an email at ville (at) arcticstartup.com or say Hi! in the comments and I’ll contact you.

Moreover, I will be in town for the Nordic Venture Forum so do let me know if you are going and like to connect before Monday. Thanks!

Blogging less, talking more

Today I felt the urge to blog again. If you write a blog I’m sure you know the feeling when you just need to let the world know what’s up. This is a feeling which I haven’t felt in a while now. This does not mean that I’ve been keeping quiet, but rather that there has been other outlets keeping me busy.

Jaiku is the main channel I use to broadcast my thoughts and feelings although I do use increasingly a few others as well.

This behavior is something I have been hearing and reading from others as well, but even more than that I have felt it as my friends are not posting as much as they used to. Most of them have migrated to Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed and the likes.

Out of these micro-blogging services (some prefer to call them activity feeds depending on what they see as the services’ primary function) Twitter is by far the most used internationally, whereas many Finns still prefer Jaiku, including me(!).

I’m not one bit surprised by this move from blogging to micro-blogging, as the latter has a much lower threshold to let the world know what’s up: I feel pressured to come up with something earth shaking and profound in my blog posts whereas Jaiku let’s me share an instant feeling I have, a news snippet I heard or let my friends know what, where, how and with whom I spending my day with. And more importantly not feel one bit bad about it even if only thing I have to say is ‘Zipping Espresso and enjoying the lazy afternoon’.

Not only does this give me a way to have a far reaching view into to world of the community of people I use these services with as I see their respective postings throughout the day, but it also satisfies my urge to express myself the way I did before via my blog. And now I don’t have to draft and redraft my doodlings and feel bad losing out to The Economist in insight and grammar.

More interestingly, not only are we seeing a change in the blogging remit (Not all the blogging is decreasing though. If your blog concentrates on news, professional advice, etc. you are seeing more and more competition and variety as more people feel comfortable venturing outside the local daily WWW pages) but the more profound change, I believe, is still waiting to happen.

When you use these micro-blogging services you can not only post about how you feel, think, etc. but you can answer when you see someone else posting. More importantly these conversations can occur in close to real-time. You can cut through all the other conversations in the global cloud of postings of thousand and thousands of people (soon millions) by addressing the person you desire to address by starting your message with @username.

So in effect, you can enjoy a stream of postings from all the people you decide to follow, including companies, news services and other similar entities, let them know how you feel in one-to-many manner and still have one-to-one conversations with the ones you choose to engage with. Again, all in real-time! Oh, and to top it all you can do a keyword Search or ask a question from what is a massive pool of people with almost always-on laptops and mobile phones giving you 9 out of 10 times several close-to-correct answers and reasoning to back them up.

Now, when you think about this, it starts to sound an awful lot like what I’m doing with Skype/Gmail chat, MSN Messenger, RSS feeds, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and Google Search all combined. And soon I could have all this in my mobile phone in one service, with a web-like download speeds and decent pricing. I admit there are two sides to the service: One is aggregation of for example my photos I take that now go to Flickr and then there is the purely conversational aspect like one-to-one chat.

Yet, I believe that as long as the number of feed subscriptions we bring to these conversations from all over the web do not suffocate the one-to-one conversations, they can live nicely together only re-enforcing the conversations and bringing in new talking points (or social objects if you will). Either way, choose any political system, educational institution or business and pick up a piece of paper to mind map your thoughts on it for 10 minutes on what possibilities the reasoning I outlined above might entail and you’re bound to put the pen down in awe and excitement. I think we’re soon seeing much bigger chances than a slight decrease in frequency of personal blogging.

See you in Jaiku!

Edit: The main point is not Twitter or some other micro-blogging service in itself, but the market that can now gradually evolve around an open platform. This is possible because of the open API, XMPP as a standard and the push model to distribute the user data that for example Twitter is gradually supporting. Thus, it will no longer be up to the respective service itself (Twitter in this case) in terms of what is possible to do with the data, but more up to our imagination. Twitter is one good, timely and very important example, but I believe only the tip of the iceberg on where we’re heading. This is THE big possibility that is starting to take shape, so get your thinking on.

Blackboard wall

Here’s a great post about the guys at Carsonified that built a web app in four days(!). They have great tips for developers of any kind. Here’s the bits that I really liked …personally I’d love to try to adopt the tips in one way or another when the time comes.

[...] Limit meetings to one 10 minute chat in the morning and one 10 minute wrap-up at the end of each day. Meetings are the best way to kill productivity and crush creativity so keep ‘em short.

[...] Get people away from their machines at lunch. Go for lunch together and maybe throw the frisbee or play Wii. The excitement and creativity will quickly deteriorate if you don’t have a break during the day.

[...] Coordinate how your designers and developers are going to work together. Our designer creates static HTML and then passes it to the developers who use the HTML as a basis for creating templates. These templates are then committed to a Git repository and from then on, the whole team works from that one repository.

[...] It’s not enough to just have a designer and a developer. You need a dedicated person who’s focus is solely spreading the word about your application and working to get media coverage. There’s no way we could get the kind of coverage for Matt that we hope to achieve without several of us working full time on it. However, do not hire a PR agency for this – there needs to be an authentic passion for the app that can only come from your team. (For instance, I asked TechCrunch to cover it, and Erick came back with the suggestion to write this post).

[...] Printers, chalk boards and meeting space. People need the physical space to throw around ideas. We’ve painted an entire wall with blackboard paint so the team has room to sketch ideas

I seriously though about painting my room’s back wall with blackboard paint. Until I realized I’m renting.

Layout

I’m playing around with the CSS files and trying out different layouts for the blog, so haven’t lost it quite yet even if the blog might have a different look and feel every time you visit. Also, would love to hear what you prefer and what kind of blog layouts you generally like and dislike. Cheers!

Cultural Branding is king!

My good friend and a natural born branding enthusiast Henri Weijo just finished a hefty analysis on branding. If you’re interested in the topic I recommend browsing through the PDF. Good stuff!

My day job

I was reading another gapinvoid blog post the other day. Hugh MacLeod has coined another great observation of our era in his simple yet powerful way …it’s just that this time it was my day job he was talking about. got to love it =)

“[...]What is a Web 2.0 marketing guy, anyway? Somebody who gets paid to have “Ever-Fragmenting Conversations about Ever-Fragmenting Conversations.” Compared to tarring roofs in Texas in summer, it’s not a bad job, but… Whatever.”

It’s not rocket surgery

David Heinemeier Hansson (from Ruby on Rails fame) has a very healthy perspective on making money online which is often lost when running circles around buzz words and reading popular press articles speculating Microsoft acquiring Yahoo for billions of dollars.

Making money online by setting up your own startup and giving a well thought out shot might be a lot less magical, yet still as rewarding as getting those billions would be. Aim high, but it’s healthy to remember that there’s more to life than Wired’s front cover. Well, at least to some =)

Tesla test drive

Jason Calacanis is taking Tesla for ride. Cool stuff! I mean really cool stuff.

Finland’s population: 5,238,460 (July 2007 est.)

Joi lto’s post caught my eye. Time to re-evaluate our immigration policy and rethink whether we could offer some real carrots to foreign workers to come live&work in Finland or do nothing and continue business as usual?

Before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the GDP share of the world was in ratio to the population of each country.

However, due to the rise of ideologies such as capitalism and communism and differences in technology development have significantly influenced the GDP share over the past 150 years.

Nowadays, thanks to IT that allows high propagation of technologies, as well as the commingling of ideologies, the GDP share is moving back to what it had been before the Industrial Revolution.

Not that I think we could get half the China to move to Finland, but that’s no excuse to do more than we’re doing at the moment. Even though I believe shaking things up in the academia and trying something new is a good development in itself, I hope the powers that be won’t be blinded by the Innovation University as an answer to all the challenges for the years to come.