Recently, I asked on ReadWriteWeb: should European entrepreneurs aim smaller and within their comfort zone, take greater risks in the Valley, or try the hard way in the old continent? I decided to put my money where my mouth is and move to San Francisco. This might seem like a sudden move for some, but those close to me know it’s not. I’ve been thinking of moving to Silicon Valley since 2007. For various reasons, I decided to stay in Finland, work on my startup from here, and help the ecosystem.

 
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I’ve written on ReadWriteWeb 3 times so far, with hopefully more coming. I’ve put a lot of effort on these posts, I believe they are my best analytical posts yet. I’m really happy to have contributed to a top blog, especially in a way that supports Nordic entrepreneurship.

How I Became the Robert Scoble of Buzz

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Finland

10 Lessons From Finland’s Summer of Startups

Update: You’ll find all of my posts on RWW here.

I’ve known Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, Editor in chief of Siliconangle for a few years now. He asked me to do a series of high quality analysis pieces on gaming for Siliconangle. I enjoy writing about gaming as it is a life long passion, and gives me something different to think about!

Luxury Paid For in the Currency of Privacy

How Heavy Rain Delivers and Fails in the Process

Kinect Changes the Game

Nintendo Marks the End of the Graphics Race with the 3DS

Why I’m More Interested in the Next iPhone than the iPad
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For a few months, I decided that blogging about the Finnish and Nordic ecosystem would be more effective on Arcticstartup than doing so on my blog (this is why there was such a big gap in my posts here). I recently left Arcticstartup, but keep good contact with them.

7 Ways Nokia Can Win Again, which was republished in Kauppalehti

5 Questions to Stephen Elop

Lithuania Steps Up its Game

The Unsung Hero

Finland Gets its Startup School this Summer

Disco Empire Grows

 
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Early this year, I made a series of video interviews of Finnish startups for Nerdstalker. The style resembles Robert Scoble’s work. I find filming such videos very fun, but getting them edited is rather time consuming!

Iron Sky – Interview with Timo Vuorensola

Aaltoes – Finnish Entrepreneurship University

Lost in Japan – Augmented Reality Japanese Reading iPhone

Finderbase – The Lost and Found of the Internet

Videolla, Like YouTube But Money

Get Your Euro Shop on with Shobble

Scred – A Cool Money Manager for Groups, Bands and More

AaltoVG Bootcamp Demo Day videos
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One month ago, Proacademy organized a TEDx in Tampere, Finland.

We prepared a series of 3 talks together with Lauri Jarvilehto (Dr in Philosophy) and Jaan Tallin (co-founder of Kazaa and Skype), that discussed the topics of the Extended Mind theory of David Chalmers, and the Singularity (Ray Kurzweil etc). It was interesting to prepare our talks this way, because it allowed us to get around the TEDx limit of 18 minutes.

It was a great honor to talk at this event, and to have an opportunity to talk about technology and futurism, which is something I look forward to doing more.
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Last September, during my talk at the Finnish Internet Forum, I mentioned the risk of the cloud becoming dominated by US-based private companies.

For all the “data is going to the cloud” talk, very few people I’ve met think of the consequences.

In the pre-Internet, pre-cloud era, all we had to worry about in terms of privacy was that your loyalty card would track your purchases, and then fill a bunch of fake names and birthdays when they asked you to fill in forms at a hotel and such. Nowadays, two US companies, Facebook and Google, own the vast majority of *your* information.
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I’ve been coaching 10 teams at Summer of Startups for 2 days now. Though it’s been a short period of time, this has plunged me back in the time when I too was starting.

Be a sponge

I forgot how much time early startups spend thinking and reading. Many of the teams are spending considerable amount of time gathering knowledge: they’re looking at what other players in their space are doing, they’re reading articles in the big blogs, and advice from role models.
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Himanshu sent us an application for his team, SRC. Their team consists of two students based in India, who both study in IIT Delhi, making them some of the top tech students in India. Here is my feedback on his submission.

First of all, I have to say I’m impressed by your resourcefulness. Very few people monitor what’s possible to help their early startups, fewer actually dare to apply, and even fewer are abroad.

1. Problem
Lack of food-warming facilities during its transportation resulting in its degradation and loss of nutritional value. For eg. As in pizza home delivery business.
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Fandi Yacine has been very active with Shobu. He participated to an earlier Aaltoes pitching competition, and applied to Summer of Startups. He was also commenting actively on posts that are related. Today he discovered that Shobu was not selected in the top 20 applications and asked me for feedback. I really like his approach, so here is my review of his application.

Problem:

Targeting users with the right adverts that match their interests and their location is impossible. Also, no accurate statistics on the efficiency of campaigns can be provided at any moment.
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I’ve just finished reviewing the applications to Summer of Startups. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a program like Y-Combinator that’s being organized for the first time in Finland.

Selection process

First of all, thanks to everyone who’s sent an application, the turnover was phenomenal. We’ve received 60 applications in total! We will pick 10 companies in the program. I’m one of the 4 people who are rating.

What this means is that right from the start, you have 16% chance of being taken. You might think it’s low, but it’s much higher than in TechStars or Y-Combinator.
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Four years ago, as I was starting to work on MySites 1.0, I was living in Tampere. It was a pretty lonely thing. I knew of no other startups in the city. I was involved in IGDA (the International Game Developer Association), because the gaming industry was so much more organized (they had monthly meetup in Helsinki with ~20 people) and it was the closest thing to my interests.

I would take the train to Helsinki every 2 weeks, because there was this young guy Ville who was doing Open Coffee. We’d be something around 6-10 people, chit chatting about cool startup stuff we saw on Techcrunch, Mashable etc. Cool startups of the day were Jaiku, Sulake, Irc-Galleria, and soon Scred and Zipipop.
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A large portion of the public support money in Finland is aimed at paying consultants. The belief is that by hiring an expert to come join your company, they can help you improve your structure or your offering. The curriculum in most business schools is also designed in a way that encourages students to become consultants. Let’s look at why this is counter-productive for startups.

Edit: I’m not happy with how some of my points have come across, especially about the value that consultants may bring in terms of vision. I will add to those points later.
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My Summer used to be: watch TV, get some drinks, play video games, hang out on the Internet, repeat.

Some people I know got crappy Summer jobs selling ice cream, cleaning tables etc, made a quick buck, bought a couple of things for themselves.

How about you work on your own idea? We really really want you to create new awesome companies, so the entrepreneurship societies Aaltoes, Hues and Hankenes got together and managed to get funding for Summer of Startups!

So why should you join that?

Create *your* next big thing

Get paid for it
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I moved to Finland in Summer 2004, and started my company (MySites) in 2006. During that time, I have been able to witness and participate in the development of the nascent Finnish startup ecosystem, as well as get experience from all around the USA, France, Germany and more recently the UK.

While I am upbeat about the developments in the Web industry, I would like to stress the points that I feel are more challenging in Finland and need to address if we wish to succeed, plus share an insight of how things are improving.
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I live a rather simple life. I’m very passionate about a few things. I  completely ignore the others. Though I enjoy things such as writing, music, good cuisine very much, the one thing that has driven me most of my life is my unconditional love for computers and what can be done with them.

Most people do not realize it, but the life of an entrepreneur is a very lonely one. It is one where you get up every day, to mostly fail. And get up again. Every penny you spend, you spend with caution. You might be the CEO, your standard of living will likely be more akin to that of a student. And the only thing that keeps you going is your love for the idea.
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Those of you who know me know that I’m an early adopter. This weekend, I decided to start using Google Voice. It’s not exactly an easy feat when you’re living in Europe. We, simple people of the Old Continent, do not get such fancy things, you see. Here’s a quick overview of my adventure getting the service available, and my opinions.

Hint: it’s a Skype killer (in a year or two).

First things first.

How to get on Google Voice? That’s the easy part. Anyone can get an invite from Ebay, you can find them for around $5. I got mine in less than an hour, and there were no problems.
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This morning I received an email from a student who’s enthusiastic about his new startup. He asked me about what to do in San Francisco.

I forwarded him a list of events to follow, and a video presentation about what I’ve learned during my trip there.

Since this advice doesn’t get old, here’s a link to the video :)

http://vimeo.com/8341355

Here is a quick overview of the hits on MySites, from August 2009 to January 2010 (though January is not over yet). As you can see, we’ve been growing substantially for 3 months now. Here’s your “hockey stick” :)

This is due to a few factors:

- MySites hosts some of the most popular Google Chrome extensions

- partnership with Xihalife

- significant increase in traffic from China

We’re hoping that with the announcement of our new design and new advisors joining us (more on that soon), the trend will accelerate.

Over the past 2.5 weeks in San Francisco, I’ve attended many events.

One thing I didn’t realize was that there’s really a lot of them, and many of them are very large. People in Silicon Valley like to network! (I’ll write a post specifically about this later). Here’s a quick overview of them, hopefully it’ll give you a better idea of what to expect from there.

SF New Tech:

SF New Tech is a monthly event taking place at The Mighty and organized by Myles Weissleder, where startups can pitch to an audiance of about ~300 people.
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I think many startups are wasting time trying to stab each other in the back.

We’re about to start two partnerships next week. Here’s what I’ve learned from these.

1) Offering:

At the end of the day, it’s the users that make or break what you create, so it makes sense to look at expanding your offering in ways that would make your users happy. Can you deliver everything they’d like? Can you afford to?

What about the other company? Do you have a compelling offer for them? Something that could help? What are your strengths? If your goals overlap, but your offerings don’t why not partner?
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We’re not happy with the current functionality of MySites. Some things needed fixing.
I would like to share a list of lessons we’ve learned, and the things which are changing.

What the hell is this site?
Every time a new user finds out about a website, they will ask this question.
It’s a simple question. It has a simple answer. We didn’t communicate it properly to our users.

If someone arrives on our site, he/she must be able to:
- use the site intuitively
- discover content easily
- interact with this content easily
- explain the process to a third party
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There aren’t so many success stories for Internet entrepreneurs in Europe. Maybe Europeans don’t want to succeed?

There are no stories

When you were a kid, you probably wanted to be a cowboy, a doctor or a policeman.
You probably didn’t think “I would like to be heading an Internet startup”.
You had all these pictures in your head of great adventure and potential success, which sounded very thrilling.

What defines most growth entrepreneurs, as opposed with traditional ones (eg: the shop down the corner), is the will to not only create something useful, but something big. To surpass the challenge, and beat the odds.
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Yes, I just invented a new word.

This is the first part in a series of articles on being an Internet entrepreneur in Europe.

Why is it so difficult to do an Internet startup in Europe?

Welcome to Europe, we have good food and pretty monuments!

We’re an interesting patchwork of cultures, with very specific issues such as language, population size, and lower purchasing power than in the USA or Japan in average. To put it differently, if you want your business to be successful, it will probably take more efforts than in these places. So what does that mean?
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The Iranian election brings forward an interesting issue. For the first time ever, social media has a clear edge on larger professional media outlets for the coverage of a major political event.
What’s been happening

After the election, protests were organized throughout the country. As a response the protests, the government has decided to:
- block sms messages
- cut phone communications from Tehran (reestablished but unstable after Sunday)
- block satelite tv
- block traffic to social sites (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc)
- ask journalists to leave the country
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As some of you may know, Professor Stephen Hawking has been admitted to the hospital yesterday, as he had been suffering from a chest infection for a week.

Those of you who are not familiar with him, Hawking is not merely a very smart man in a wheelchair. He’s one of the few scientists who has the ability and the will to explain complex physics to the average people. For him, it is more important to spread this rare knowledge to others, than to expand the field.
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Have you ever wondered what a CEO does? or what you need to do in a startup?
I get to meet a lot of people, most of which are not familiar with startups, online business and all those things.
Inevitably, the conversation reaches a point where they ask: “What do you do?”
Are you a programmer, a designer? no? You’re “the boss”? So, you just sit and tell people what to do?

I’ll try to give you an insight of what I did today:
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I have a problem:

I have:
* 1230 contacts on Facebook.
* 315+ followers on Twitter.
* I run an Internet startup that’s about sharing media.
And I’m not sure what “Social Media” means.

I understand it’s a buzz word. Something like the media (news, video, music etc), but made social.

You’ve probably heard it a lot too. Twitter is social media, there’s hundreds of  social media conferences, social media experts. But what does the word actually mean?

A definition:

According to this guy social media is “people having conversations online”. He even made us a nice list:
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They say that to become an entrepreneur, you have to have passion.

For me, that passion came very early. I was fascinated by the web and games very early. I wanted to achieve things.

I got involved in gaming communities, in gaming sites, in creating amateur games and game engines. I kept looking at new technologies, what the web could do, what people could do with it.

You should remember, that not so long ago, circa 2005, the web was very different.

People did not know about Facebook. They did not share their photos online. They did not go to YouTube to watch any video ever made.
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