I would like to empathise with the author. After playing Gears of War 3, Tetris really pales in comparison.
On a high level, both games are about using items to eliminate obstacles. One could consider Horde an alternative to Tetris’ levels: as you eliminate more enemies (lines/hordes), it becomes faster and more difficult. In order to deal with this, the game provides you with weapons (blocks/guns).

Now that we’ve established that both games are roughly the same, let’s examine why Gears is the superior game:

More items:
While Tetris offers only 7 blocks (in fact, the L and Z blocks are simply mirrored), Gears of War offers a whopping 29 weapons (!!)

More gameplay:
Tetris only lets you rotate blocks left or right, and only one at a time. Gears allows you to aim, shoot, has an inventory so you can hot swap your weapons, and the use of Active Reload gives more depth. Why doesn’t Tetris provide more points when you rotate at the last second, or drop a block faster?!

Coop:
In Gears, players can support each other, by providing cover, or letting your friend get a weapon that is complementary to yours. Tetris has no coop mode, which makes no sense. The addition of a mode where you could complete lines together would definitely increase fun. For example, you could revive your friend from a Game Over by doing 4 lines. Or you could share an item in an item slot, so that either you or your friend could use it when needed. You could even have griefing by placing a Z block on top of your friend’s upcoming Tetris!

Story:
Gears has much better graphics, with the latest shaders. This means that the game is more realistic. Also, the game is more epic than Tetris: why are you making lines? why are blocks falling from the sky? The game never answers those questions.

I first lived in San Francisco. I was in the Mission district, next to IO Ventures. Paul Bragiel was kind enough to let me use their co-working space. I had done most of my work from home before, but I didn’t want to stay locked in my hotel room. IO was a great space: half of it is a café, and it’s nice to be surrounded by other people who work in startups as well. The Mission is an interesting area. There’s some nice graffiti around there, plenty of lively bars. I wouldn’t go too far in Mission St. though, it gets pretty shady. As for most foreign startupers, my first week’s meals consisted mostly of burritos. I was feeling hot all the time after the Finnish winter, so I decided to shave my head. People kept mistaking me for a Mexican and speaking to me in Spanish, that was awkward!

I decided to explore the city. I bought myself a Clipper card: that’s your equivalent of an HKL card. You can use the Muni (that’s the bus and tram), the BART (local subway) and Caltrain (long distance train that goes to Silicon Valley). It costs $60/month, but you need to charge it with money for the Caltrain trips. That said, public transportation in the USA is terrible. The busses are slow, don’t run very often, and it takes approximately 3x the time it would take to get somewhere by car. I tend to prefer the taxi when downtown, most trips are below $10.

However, this can add up, so I decided to buy a bike, which I found through Google Maps. The service is a lot more evolved here than in Europe. You can reliably find stores near you, and it even tells you the times of public transports! You don’t really need a GPS here. San Francisco is not very big, so it’s realistic to get around town by bike. So I bought myself a one, parked it across the street from the local police station, with a nice big lock. It got stolen in 24 hours. Don’t park your bike in public, especially at night.

I got myself a bank account at Wells Fargo. You need to go to the bank office if you want to transfer money to a different bank or abroad. They also gave me a checkbook, and assured me people really use those. Setting up a bank account wasn’t difficult, you just need to give them an address. I was lucky enough to have a local social security number already though, so don’t take my word for it.

Getting a local mobile number is a pain. First of all, the connectivity is very low. Often, if you’re in a home or a parking lot, you won’t have any reception. As a result, you’ll get a lot of dropped calls. Mobile data is slow too. In Finland, I was able to use my phone’s 3G as a replacement to my home modem, and get speeds of 4Mbps reliably. Don’t count on that here. I went looking for a good operator. I wanted to keep my European phone, using a US sim card. Not all phone companies in the US use sims: Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, which simply activates the phone you’ve bought from them.

My experience with AT&T was terrible. They told me the only way to get a 3G unlimited data + calls plan would require a 1 year contract, at $80 per month. They also claimed to not have any shorter offering, and that their prepaid cards wouldn’t work on a smartphone (I read the opposite online). When I lied and said I’d need it for my Nokia, they said they need to do “complicated things in the store to activate it”. So basically they refused to sell me a prepaid card. You can get one from Fry’s or similar shops though, but I don’t know how well it will work. I went to 3 AT&T shops, until I decided to give up on them.

I then went to T-Mobile. the first person I met understood my situation right away, gave me an unlim 3G data + call/sms plan for $60/month without a contract, so I can cancel it at any time. If you have an iPhone, I do not recommend this though: you will only get Edge speeds, because their network uses different frequencies, and you need to cut the sim card manually in a way that the left part of the metal is cut more…

I looked around for a flat I could rent. A good place to look is Padmapper. It shows you the latest listing on Craigslist on a map. It’s very common to have roommates here, even if it’s people you don’t know. I asked a few friends if they knew someone who was looking for a roommate. Turned out that Chris Mccan was looking for one, in Palo Alto. I asked my friends what they thought of moving there. In general, I’d strongly recommend living in town. The social life is vibrant, it’s easy to go out with people without planning ahead, there’s many small events every day if you want to meet new people, great choices of foods, clubs, etc. Palo Alto is to SF what Espoo is to Hki: a nice, quiet neighborhood, great if you’re married, have kids and a big car. I’m living with 4 other guys (Chris & Brendan work on Startup Digest, Brian and Kyle on Slidepad), so we’re all working on our startups under the same roof, buying the same food, and we even have a pool! So I like this a lot better than being alone in a flat in SF. There’s not much to do downtown: you can grab drinks at a few bars, there’s a night club, a bunch of restaurants. It’s not the most social place on earth. Most of the people from SF won’t come visit here, because they consider the 45 minute trip too long. You’re near Stanford, some of the VCs, and it’s easier to get to Menlo Park, Mountain View, Sunnyvale etc.

There’s a lot more things I’ve learned here. I’ll write about networking and socializing here in another post. In the meantime, if you’re thinking of doing a startup here, have a look at my previous post on challenges for Finns in the Valley.

The first game is EteRNA. It’s a puzzle game, where you create RNA shape. The role of RNA isn’t fully understood yet, and the computers doing the folding aren’t as creative as humans, so this game lets you help. Gameplay wise, it’s a bit on the simplistic side, at least in the beginning, but it seems like it picks up after the early levels.

The other game is Phylo. You compare genetic code, by aligning genetic code together. The game reminds me of Lumines. Basically you need to find patterns and match them.

I think they should give those games to kids in schools, and teach science this way. Maybe one day, a hardcore gamer will help beat AIDS :)

The Nordics are amazing. The quality of life is excellent. In this tiny frozen corner of the earth, Linux, Mysql and Skype were built. I’m very happy and proud to be contributing to this ecosystem. These are people who have been doing more, with less. What Garage48 and Aalto Venture Garage are doing feels like David vs Golliath. We have very capable people. But we’re also very few. It’s difficult to find skilled Javascript / Html5 developers in Finland. Students are less keen on founding companies, so we have fewer co-founders. We will remain a minority.

The various entrepreneurship societies are doing a superb job changing this. Every year, more students are interested in creating startups. Often, they are the smart ones too! You can learn to pitch, network and to be lean, in programs like Bootcamp or Summer of Startups. But you’ll have to deal with trying to find funding from fewer, less experienced sources, networking mostly in local events, and mostly failing at getting media attention. In the end, you’ll either have to settle for “whatever you can get” (eg: less), or to endure those things.

There’s a third solution: to refuse this game. Prepare in Finland, and move away. Learn as much as possible here to prepare yourself for where you need to go. Regarding Mysites, we’re at a point where we need funding to grow, and I don’t think it’s worth continuing if we don’t. So it makes sense to maximize our chances, we’ll get more bang for our buck there. I think it’s the same for startups such as AudioDraft and DealMachine. I don’t think we should forget where our roots are from, though. In fact, it’s important we don’t.

We come with a smaller network and less funding, but more war stories and lessons learned than most. That’s valuable. There are many Nordics coming in and out of the valley, so I’ll do what I can to get us together, raise our profile and hopefully all of us will gain something from this. I’ll blog more on ReadWriteWeb to make our best people shine, and try to give my company the chance it deserves. There are others coming during the same period as well: Applifier, Kristo Ovaska. I hope my move will inspire others to come.

PS: I expect comments with the two classic counter arguments again moving to the Valley.

1) Finland provides great support to companies

There’s a little bit of public funding. It comes with restrictions, bureaucratic overhead, and lower valuations. It’s usually not smart money either. This idea also disregards the negative elements here.

2) Good ideas find money anyway

That’s just nonsense. If they did, there wouldn’t even be a need for public funding in the first place. There are a few exceptions.

A few months ago, the PS3 had been jailbroken, but the publishing of the keys means that any piece of software can now be signed like official code! The same thing is now possible for PSP and DSi.

At this point, there is very little that can be done to prevent the hacking of those consoles. Of course, this also means that piracy will be made easier, but the issue has been rampant for the PSP and DS for many years already.

This opens a lot of possibilities for homebrew developers. For example, bringing Linux back to the PS3, or integrating XBMC and emulators to work directly from the dashboard. A number of homebrew apps are available already.

I remember reading that Microsoft learned a lot from the homebrew community for the Xbox 360 launch. The integration of media players, better online gameplay, downloadable games comes directly from this. While it is understandable, Sony’s decision to sue GeoHot and the other authors of the exploit is unfortunate. It might not even hold its ground, as iPhone hacking (made possible by him also) has been proven legal.

Consoles are becoming a more and more important part of our lives, as they slowly take over functionality from our PCs and make their more accessible to the average user. It would be a shame to see our every day computers become closed ecosystems. So here’s to homebrew enabling the PS3, to Only do Everything.

I covered the previous Garage48 that took place in Tartu, Estonia: it’s a 48 hour get-together, where people come to create a startup just for the fun of it. This time, among the 100 attendees, there will be 59 from Finland, 35 from Estonia and 15 from Latvia.

The event is sold out, however there will be an open event on Sunday, where the startups created will be demoed. Check out the Facebook event page (50-100 extra are expected).

I will be one of the 3 mentors at the event, together with Teemu Kurppa (of Jaiku fame) and Osma Ahvenlampi (CTO at Sulake). We’ll be helping teams, if they want, with feedback and hands on support.

I’m looking forward to seeing our Baltic friends again and to create silly startups together. I believe Finland needs more hacker-friendly events (the recent Android community and Frontendfinland efforts are great).This will be the first pan-baltic event to happen after our Baltic Tour this summer, so it’s great to see the community shaping up.

Everything is back to normal. No data was lost. Thanks to the users who messaged us.

It would be easy to mistake this list as bragging. It’s not. None of the things listed here have brought me significant money or fame. People often misunderstand what entrepreneurship is about. It’s about freedom. Most of the work I do is pro bono, so knowing that you make a small difference is what keeps you going.

Personal:

Traveled to Greece (cousin’s wedding), UK (meeting VCs), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden (Baltic tour with Kristo Ovaska, Mikko Kuusi and Timo Herttua) and the US (Silicon Valley trip with AaltoVG)

Saw my favorite band, Atari Teenage Riot, play live in London, after their 10 year hiatus!

Spoke at the opening day of TAMK, my previous school

Created a game at Finnish Game Jam, which ranked top 2!

Started a meme: Moomin slides!

Work:

Got MySites huge amounts of traffic

Did a Q&A about Mysites on Reddit!

Failed to raise more money :(

Social media:

Tried to make the Finnish startups more visible, by posting on Nerdstalker and Siliconangle

Wrote some of the most read blog posts in the country, on ReadWriteWeb and ArcticStartup

Hacked Google Buzz, became top user worldwide

Wrote a story together with Google Buzz users

Co-created the first Google Buzz widget!

Talks:

At TEDx Proacademy, I was able to speak about my personal views of why the Internet is important for humans

At the Finnish Internet Forum (Finnish Parliament), I spoke about the future of the web

At Kokoomus’ event (Finnish Parliament), I spoke about how to make the country more welcoming for foreign entrepreneurs

At Mindtrek, spoke about learning from failure

At HMEA Entrepreneur Tuesday with Taneli Tikka and Aape Pohjavirta, spoke about changing Finland or dying trying

Grassroots entrepreneurship:

Mentored at Garage48 in Tartu, and Talkoot in Venture Garage

Coached Summer of Startups and Bootcamp

Helped organize startup events in Latvia and Lithuania

Judged 6 pitching competitions

Spoke at events from AaltoES, HankenES, HUES, Boost Turku (VIDEO) and Stream Tampere, Aalto students in Pori, Jolly Dragon Entrepreneurship Action, Metropolia Marketing Talks with Taneli Tikka, Ettevotja in Tallin with Petteri Koponen and Kristo Ovaska (500 students!).

Thanks:

There’s a whole bunch of people I’d like to thank for their support in 2010, but particularly:

Armin Roehrl, Michael Borejdo, Sonja Kangas, Taneli Tikka, Valve for their never faltering support

Kristo Ovaska, Ville Simola, Mikko Kuusi, Olli Gunst, Jens Sorensen, Natalie Gaudet, Juha Ruohonen, for their efforts to change an entire country

Idarose Sylvester, Shirley Lin, Cassie Phillips, Mark Hopkins, John Furrier, for making Silicon Valley more welcoming

Varun Singh, Igor Burattini, Rudi Skogman, Eppie Eloranta, Janne Hopeela, Jukka Siltanen, Christina Forsgard, Antti Aarnio, Teemu Seppala, Juuso Palander  and the HMEA guys, for their amazing help

Lauri Jarvilehto and Jaan Tallin for the inspiring conversations

Antti Vilpponen, Ville Vesterinen for making the only media outlet for startups in the region, and letting me write there

Martin Villig, Juri Kaljundi, Ernests Stals, Rokas Tamosiunas and all our other friends in the Baltics

I figured I would share the news here, because I’m a big fan of old school adventure games as well as fangames. I recently wrote about the best adventure fangames on Siliconangle.

What makes this game special is that it has been in development for over 4 years! Usually, such projects fall into limbo due to lack of time and motivation. The team had originally released a demo a while ago, but it’s great to see the game moving forward.

Gameplay-wise, it’s a traditional point & click game, similarly to  Lucasarts’ earlier games (Monkey Island, Sam & Max etc). However, the quality of the game is way above what is usually seen in other fangames made with Adventure Game Studio.

Congrats to the Screen7 team. If you’d like to support them, you can preorder a limited edition DVD of the demo (it’s just a demo, but it’s the gesture that counts!).

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.

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

Why You Should Follow E3 this Year

Steam and the Strengths of PC gaming

5 brilliant indie games you haven’t played

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

Together with Kristo Ovaska, we organized a trip through the Baltics, to promote Nordic entrepreneurship and meet new entrepreneurs.

ArcticStartup and AaltoVG go Baltics

Nevermind Finland: Here’s Estonia! [Part 1/3]

Nevermind Finland: 20 Hot Estonian Startups [Part 2/3]

Nevermind Finland: Estonia’s Garage48 [Part 3/3]

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

Floobs – Retrospective

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.

I hope you enjoy those videos, and would love to hear your impressions and thoughts in the comments!

PS: There were other very interesting speakers at the event, but unfortunately in Finnish. Check out the videos on the Proacademy fan page!

A bit of history

Many people’s interest in startups started in 2005-2008. It was a time where the role models were Delicious and Flickr and MySpace was the hottest thing since sauna. Techcrunch was an up and coming blog, where Arrington would offer founders to crash on his couch. Some English guy was setting up a blog too.

The VCs were all mighty, pouring several millions in  startup trends. First it was the social networks, then tagging, then the video sites. Like sheep. Most of them failed, the global downturn happened, and Sequoia said…

The party was over

Of course, most startups fail. Such is the Darwinian world of startups. But I am not here to reminisce the failure of me-too projects like that Flickr clone or some random social network. People stopped using the term Web 2.0 as soon as it stopped giving them an easy term sheet. But the poster children of the trend are still fairly highly regarded.

Still, Delicious is about to be sold by Yahoo. MySpace is a mere shadow of its former self. Digg is a ghost town. Bebo turned out to be smokes and mirrors. Of all the web 2.0 role models, only Facebook has been a major success, with Flickr and Youtube being fairly strong as well.

Web 2.0 is dead.

What can we learn from this?

1) The blogs don’t know sh**

Sure, bloggers review a lot of startups, have inside info on competitors, and are at the bleeding edge of technology. But that doesn’t make them capable of commenting on the business potential of startups in a reliable way. It used to matter to be on Techcrunch, but even that won’t convert to traction anymore.

2) Ignore the hype

Hype is a byproduct of the envy opened by unforeseen opportunities. I could do this too, and better! Generally, if something is hyped, it’s because somebody’s already making a killing in that market. Why would you care?

3) The VCs are clueless

Some of the most meaningful feedback I ever received was from experienced VCs. That said, the investment decisions made in the past 5 years show a clear pattern: they have no idea who’s going to succeed (that said, I believe Accel and DST have done an amazing job).

4) Don’t build an addon

Many startups were built with hopes to sell to one of the giants. If your business is to sell a feature that would be nice to have, you’re locking yourself into a corner. Yes, if your startup had the traction and budgets of Google, it would be great. But how likely is that to happen?

5) Traction doesn’t mean anything

Back in the MySpace days, everybody was crazy about eyeballs. Page impressions and SEO would be super important, because they’d be a good metric for an exit at a valuation per user, or theoretical revenue. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if you don’t monetize it, you’re also locking yourself in a corner (I should know).

The number one lesson of Web 2.0 is simple: build a scalable business. If anything, today’s web makes it more difficult, with all the distractions and increased competition. Those to win are the most timely, tenacious and adaptive ones, who last long enough to be lucky, or get wiser.

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.

The public is of course mostly ignorant about the issue, and the few blips about privacy control on Facebook are now a distant memory. And half of them can come back every day, so we can play Farmville and check our friends’ relationship status. In Europe, the lack of cloud infrastructure companies is simply shocking. It is as if we do not think about the technology that will empower the entire web. Big data is still mostly a US game.

And yet this topic is extremely important. Amazon removed Wikileaks from its servers. Their DNS was also compromised by EveryDNS, and Paypal and Mastercard were involved in some fashion as well. Basically, if you host your services with the wrong people, be prepared to have the plug pulled whenever they want.

Establishing your website in a privately owned cloud is the same as moving in a building that would be owned by a corporation.

Amazon’s excuse was that they were enforcing their terms of use. It is not the job of a service provider to spy on and judge its users, that is the role of a court of law.

Wikileaks was able to recover from this series of threats, with the help of international supporters. However, the risk for small businesses is very real. We must start taking the cloud more seriously.

I was speaking there, together with Lauri Jarvilehto (Filosofian Academia) and Jaan Tallin (Skype), we had our talks back to back about the Singularity and getting there. My talk specifically was about answering the question: Is Google Making Us Stupid? You can find my slides here: http://rameen.mysites.com/-presentation/tedx-ramine.ppt.

Some great discussions afterwards also. Spent something like 7 hours talking about whether free will exists, the many worlds theory, Newcomb’s problem, the Singularity, AI and other fun problems to think about. You can read more about those on http://www.lesswrong.com. It was refreshing not to talk about entrepreneurship for a change. I hope the others didn’t find our discussions too nerdy :)

Thanks for the great event.

We’ve recently finished the version 1 one our desktop uploader!

It allows you to easily drag an drop files from your desktop, to upload on MySites. You can select many files, and any kind of media (photos, videos etc), no matter how big they are. You can check your MySites content from the window, and share/play your media easily from there. The uploader will autorun with a small icon at the bottom when your computer starts (just like Skype or MSN), so you can upload files easily.

To install the uploader:

1. Go to MySites.com
2. Click Desktop Uploader at the bottom
3. If you do not have Adobe AIR (it’s an upgrade to Flash), install it (click open/accept if needed)
4. Install the uploader! (click open/accept if needed)
5. You can login with your current MySites account.

It will add a MySites icon on your desktop (for PC users) or Applications folder (for Macs), and should work on Linux as well.

Keep in mind that it’s the first version, so please let me know if you have any problems using it!

UPDATE: The current version of the Desktop uploader bugs on Windows 7. It works on XP and Mac as tested. We’re working on it.

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.

While it is important to gather information about the world around you, make sure you don’t do it for the wrong reasons: learning from other’s mistakes is a great way to save time. But seeking out information shouldn’t  take precedence on executing  and trying things for yourself. This is the best way for you to learn. Nobody ever flew a plane by reading the training manual.

Two excellent resources I recommend reading thoroughly are Founders Space and Venture Hacks

Plan and do

It is very easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possibilities. There are hundreds of technical routes, potential customers, business models, sales channels etc ahead of you.

Spend time thinking about them. Starting building a plan of simple tasks as early as possible: “make user registration possible” is good, “work on marketing” is not. Don’t be vague, get results quickly.

Make sure you can keep on succeeding quickly, give yourself a way to measure your progress, as well as a clear plan.

Practice pitching

Pitching is difficult and scary. It isn’t normal to be in a situation where you have to talk in front of several people while they judge you and you have to sound smart and convincing. Nobody’s used to this.

Don’t panic. Don’t try new stuff during your pitch. Don’t try to make up answers. Don’t downplay competitors. No one will take you seriously if you start making fun of Apple or 37 Signals and you don’t have something revolutionary.

Be honest. Be passionate. Be inspiring. Everybody knows you’re early. It’s ok that your tech isn’t there yet. It’s ok you don’t know how you’ll make money yet. Explain that you’re working on it. Say that you need team members. Say you realize where you don’t have the needed skills.

Practice pitching at every single opportunity. To your family, to your friends, to someone you’ve just met who asked you what you do, with your school teachers, people who have sales experience. In every situation, it will not be as brutal as when something is really at stake.

I used to do very shy and plain presentations. I took the basic Guy Kawasaki slide deck, recited it with excitement for my vision. Fuck that. You’re a rock star. Wow people. Impress them, be memorable.

If you can’t sell your idea, nobody else can.

Be an opportunist

Go to events. Network, meet new people. Every person you meet is a potential client. Often, they’ll be happy to give you advice. Free market research! Don’t have money for a lawyer? Find one who’s speaking at an event and ask him questions!

Find all the events in your area. The barcamps, the open coffees, the startup meetups, the social media meetups.

Write a blog, share other people’s things, respond to them, connect with anyone who’s relevant, be active on social networks. Make yourself visible. If nobody knows you, your ideas, your startup, it will be more difficult. Get your foot in the door. Ask for introductions. Seek face time. If people know you, if they like you, you’d be surprised how much your life can be. Make sure this works both ways. Help others when they need it. So what if it doesn’t pay off now?

Don’t focus on technology

I know. You want to use the latest sexy script, widget, coding language and APIs. You’ll totally blow away the competition with your compressed javascript and your fancy Ajax.

Talk to your users. Ask them what they want. Do they really want these things? Are you building something they’d use? Something they’d buy? Make sure you don’t build things because you can, but because you need them.

Learn to listen

It’s easy to read. It is difficult to listen. People who don’t know your field as well as you will criticize your work. Sometimes, they will do so very harshly.

Any person who criticizes you does so for a reason. Maybe they don’t like the color blue, maybe your registration is too difficult. Don’t counter argue. Don’t justify your choices. Listen, and try to make the next person happy.

Believe in yourself

While watching our teams, I realized most of them don’t consider themselves entrepreneurs or CEOs yet. They feel like they’re just hacking something together. But at the same time, this thing will be the greatest thing in the world. It’s their baby, and it’s going to be the best.

Guess what. That’s what entrepreneurs do.

We talk about Nokia, how large scale companies are changing their processes, how crowdsourcing fits in management, LocalMotors (a crowdsourced car company), the difference between open source and community, and being lean.

Watch or download the video here (sorry, my blog can’t embed!).

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.

I can see how that is a problem. However, I would need better examples of business implementation. In the case of pizza, they’ve always arrived within 30 minutes and this has never been a problem. I know Pizza Hut in France has special carton boxes which help also. Sometimes food is also delivered in aluminum foil. However, maybe this is different in India and China, where traffic can be a real pain? Or maybe your solution can be cheaper than using specific carton or bag wrappings?

I would need to see:

- are there cases where this is a real problem?

- in those cases, will the pain be enough to drive towards buying your product?

2. Solution
The first stage will focus on development of a heating assembly which can be installed on pizza delivery bikes and use exhaust gases as the energy source.

Ok, that sounds like a cool technology idea. After all, Nokia recently released the charger for bikes. I really need to see business applications though! Why only sell something like this to pizza delivery for example? are there consumer cases? or other types of services that require transportation which could use this?

3. Profitability
Will tackle the huge problem of food degradation during its transport & will fulfill needs of a very huge market, especially in developing countries like India in a sustainable way by recycling the waste gas effluents from vehicles. Thus, helps environment.

You insist again on the importance of food degradation in developing countries. I would really love some numbers there, and again some way of knowing this is a real problem people are willing to pay for.

Also, it would help to know if this technology can be adapted to other vehicles or use cases.

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.

This is not true. I invite you to look at this chart http://rameen.mysites.com/-2010-week-24/advertising-chart.jpg. You will find several (DSP) Demand Side Platforms and (RTB) Real Time Bidding are doing this: AdBrite, Google DCX, Pubmatic, Admeld, AdExchanger. Unless you meant some different thing and I misunderstood.

It would help if you can explain your positioning in the ad space, and how you differ from existing targeting approaches. Do you want to use cookies? Do you provide stats? Do you process stats? Do you get ad inventory? Do you optimize key value pairs? Do you provide better keywords? Do you do user-centric targeting, or do you want to optimize specific media? Do you do banners? Text ads? This needs clarification.

Solution:

Solution And Profitability: Shobu is a mobile application that aims to provide a new marketing channel. Our services range from: exposing physical store fronts, sending the latest campaign offers in real time, relevant to users and offering accurate and up to date analytical data

So, you are doing a mobile app, which will show me ads based on my location. And from what you said earlier, you want to use the data from the user stats, to provide better results to the advertisers. Fair enough.

I see a few problems with this approach:

- I believe you will find it difficult to reach consumers who will want to install your application to view ads. There needs to be an offering, which will attract them. For example, a game, a service, a smart map, something like that.

- You need to get a good local ad inventory. For example, if I’m in Finland, you need ads for Finland, that’s easy. If I’m in Pakistan, that’s trickier. I need to see you’ve thought about where to get the ads, which market you’re aiming. I also need to see which value added you’re bringing. Are you saying you’re bringing better stats to advertisers? In that case, this means you most likely have to get the inventory, or do revenue sharing with a 3rd party, which won’t consider you until you’re much bigger.

- This precise problem is being solved by Foursquare. Fun app, user behavior, ad impressions (check in, show nearby things).

Once you have a good answer to those questions, you’ll have a great product. Mobile advertising brings in the highest CPMs on the market. If you find a good segment for Shobu, you can win. Good luck!

If other Summer of Startups teams would like feedback, I’d be happy to do so.

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.

I decided to share how I reviewed the applications, so that you understand my reasoning, and that you get some constructive feedback if you haven’t been selected.

What I don’t care about

I don’t care about your age, if you’re a guy or a girl, if you’re a local or a foreigner. I don’t care which school you are from, or if you have experience in your field. This program is aimed at newcomers, we know that your idea is unclear. New startups have ideas all over the place, and that’s a good thing, you need to refine them, challenge them, that’s how they improve.

Are you a startup?

A good way to answer this question is: do you think Techcrunch, Venturebeat or Mashable would write about your company? Are you a technology company? Are you scalable to millions of consumers? or are you targeted at a very difficult to enter, super profitable niche? If you’re not, you’re not a startup, so I can’t pick you for Summer of Startups.

Passion

The most important thing in a founder is passion. It’s pretty difficult to judge passion based on a short summary from someone. However, if I see that you are clearly very passionate about what you want to create, that’s definitely a plus. Startup founders will fail a lot of times, so showing that you have energy for your idea is good.

Less is more

Bold statements (ex: “We will make seven billion in 2 weeks”) impress no one who has experience. Don’t force yourself to write “business-y”. If you write something that looks like your life story, it’s not very helpful, try to be concise. If you start listing features, it’s not very helpful, because they will change in the future, so just focus on the core idea.

Is this a business, or a feature?

Are you building a feature (eg: let’s make a comments system), or a business (let’s create a generalized commenting platform, which we’ll sell to blogging platforms)? Very often you will start with a technical idea, simply because you can do that. Those who are further down the road thinking about who they will sell to and how they will make money from this technology, will be better.

Do your research

The first thing you should do when you have a startup idea is examine the competitive landscape. Is there a demand for your idea? how big? where? are they willing to pay for that? Are others offering something like you? how many? can they copy your idea easily? how much leverage do they have which you don’t?

If you claim that something is difficult to do at the moment when it is not, or that you want to enter a market that is completely crowded without any sort of edge, this will not receive attention.

I hope this will help you. I have submitted a list of 20 applications I find very good, so good luck! I’d be happy to give you feedback in the future also. Please feel free to ask any question or to leave a comment.

What’s up?

Since August, a bit less than a year ago, we launched what we call internally “MySites 2.0”. We decided to focus only on saving and sharing files, and skip everything on the side. Essentially, we’ve become more lean. That means a much lower team size. It also means focusing more on listening to users and thinking about how to make things easier and prettier. We learned to listen, which is why I’ve invested so much time on Google Buzz, and we’ve managed to reuse some of our great previous technology and behave like a smaller startup.

Great new people

The other important thing is that we’ve got new people who’ve joined us as advisors, mentors or investors.

Taneli Tikka, who’s known for his work on Irc-Galleria, the Finnish social networking site with monetization levels beyond any others social networks, using high brand value advertising.

Sonja Kangas, from PAF, one of the leading online gaming companies, also involved in the Nordic Game program and organizer of IGDA (the International Game Developer Association) in Finland.

Valve, who’s one of the leading design firms in a country known for its great designs, and responsible for making us look so much better.

and continued support from Peter Vesterbacka, who’s helped us in the mobile world.

They come in addition to our 4 current advisors in Germany. I’m very happy that they’re here to provide the expertise. Each of them is simply the best in their field. Knowing that they can tell me when I’m wrong and help us avoid trial and error or simply open new doors lets me sleep better at night.

Partnerships

We launched a fully open API, which allows any 3rd party to do exactly what we can.

We’ve been developing partnerships with great startups:

Xihalife, who uses us for their video hosting, players, media conversion and file hosting.

Dazzboard, who offers MySites as a way to save your files online.

Breezetags, for which we’re the first implementation, who provides us with sharing by sms.

WreckAMovie, who is going to use us to offer media and file hosting and players to all their projects.

New features

Since January, half of the work we’ve done during the last 6 months has been simply trying to keep up with the growth. We’ve had our hands pretty full simply trying to make the site usable for as many people as possible, and launched a new design, which we keep on tweaking. Our goal is not to add many new features, but to make our existing ones better.

We’ve added support for documents, using Google Docs. You can now view Word, PowerPoint, PDF files directly on MySites (example here), and share them with your friends like you would on SlideShare.

We’re 90% done with our desktop uploader, which will work on PC and Mac, and let you upload multiple files with drag and drop. It will be live in a few days, but ask me if you want to try a beta. Here is a preview from our dev version:

We’ve started work to simplify the Home page once you login, and on social gaming features, which we’ll explain more soon. You can expect our background in gaming to come much more into play in the near future.

PS: Don’t just stand there, leave a comment!

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.

ArcticStartup didn’t exist. In fact, practically one blogged about the Finnish startups. TV or press coverage was beyond our wildest dreams (heh, it still is </sarcasm>). I’d ask feedback from my schoolmates in TAMK, some of which worked at Nokia and were interested in that stuff. I’d talk to my teachers, ask them for contacts. Some people would tell me I was completely insane and I should aim at being the biggest startup in Tampere. There were no entrepreneurship societies.

Our role model was Nokia. They were clearly the world leaders in mobile and were opening to 3rd party developers with Symbian. Finland was one of the leaders in Symbian, actually. Irc-Galleria and MySQL hadn’t exited yet.

Now.

Last month, a bunch of students from Aalto University organized Bootcamp, the largest startup training program ever made in the country.

Today, we gathered with a group of 100 people in what used to be 6 months ago an empty hangar in the forest, to talk with Tom Keller from TechStars and Alan Moore, co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, in spite of the rain and the opening of the World Cup.

In two weeks, we’ll be running our very own version of Y-Combinator, called Summer of Startups; I’m honored to be one of the coaches there and I’m looking forward to helping the newcomers.

We’ve come a long way.

PS: Don’t just stand there, please comment!

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.

What is a consultant?

A consultant is somebody who sells his expertise, to other companies, for a certain period of time. They are people who are (hopefully) very knowledgeable about a specific topic, where the company is lacking. So in short, they are experts for rent. They can be helpful not only because of their knowledge and their experience, but also because they come as an external party, which enables them to be more detached about things. They are also rather costly, with an average consultant charging roughly 1000e a day.

This should not be mistaken for services. Lawyers, accountants sell their services on a regular basis, and usually have a continued relationship with companies.

When is this a problem?

You will find no argument from me that consultants are very helpful in enterprise cases. In that case, outsourcing your non-vital needs can be very helpful, and bring some fresh air into your organization. In that sense, consultants little to no value to the team, but can add greatly to the company. The problem is that in startups, very few things are non-vital by definition.

Commitment

As startup’s value is very rarely in its offering. Most code or design can be copied for extremely cheap. What defines it at the core is its team. However, what value is a team member who is there only for a short period of time, and not financially tied to the future of the company?

Competence

When you charge 1000e a day, you better be worth it. In Finland, a country with very few successful Internet cases, I’d say the value of consultants for startups is more than limited. Case in point, the completely disproportionate amount of social media consultants, who happen to are active on extremely few services, have not created, developed or managed any large sustainable community online, and blog very rarely. If somebody’s got only limited actual experience, he/she is not an expert.

Importance

Consultants can help with aspects that are not the core focus of a company. I would say they should be mostly irrelevant in terms of code, design, management and sales. It would not be wise to place such key elements of an early company in the hands of people who have no stake in it. And as I explained earlier, I do not consider lawyers and accountants as consultants. This doesn’t leave much space for anyone else to come in.

In that sense, an external non-committed team member will be significantly less valuable than a real team member.

The value of advisors

One may think that I find no value in experts coming in to help your team. This could not be further from the truth. MySites has 10 advisors. They help me know when I’m wrong, open doors, get contacts, perspective on things. They are extremely valuable, as they help me delegate a lot of my time and remain focused.

Advisors are great for startups when they are committed to your team. People who will stick by you in helping you grow, and will stay long enough so that you can rely on them and learn something in the process. You cannot fight all the fights yourself, so this is very welcome. In that sense, the Vigo program is very good for the startups in Finland. It constitutes a definite step forward. Let’s hope we see more in the future.

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

Receive advice from really nice coaches (including me!)

You can brag about it on your CV a lot more than if you were a waitress

If it fucks up, you didn’t lose any money!

You don’t need to be Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs to get it. We’ll take people with no experience. Rome wasn’t built in one day.

Read more here, apply here.

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.

1. Lack of entrepreneurs

The most urgent problem is the lack of willingness of Finns to become entrepreneurs. To quote The Economist: “if only 3% of the population want to be entrepreneurs, as in Finland, you will have trouble creating an entrepreneurial economy”.

People have blamed this on several factors: lack of emphasis from schools, the emphasis on becoming a consultant, eased by the amount of public support that pays them, the so-called cultural lack of risk taking. While I will not try to pinpoint a specific reason for this, the country needs to create more entrepreneurs.

Pros: In spite of the lack of efforts from schools or the government, student organizations such as Aaltoes, Hankenes, Hues, Boost Turku and Stream Tampere have done a great deal of efforts to get interest from students during the past year.

2. Lack of role models

There is very little awareness of growth entrepreneurship as a viable career path. This comes as a surprise, considering Finland’s considerable contribution to technology: Nokia, F-Secure, SSH, IRC are all Finnish creations. Yet how many students know Marten Mickos or Taneli Tikka? How many want to create the next Remedy, Sulake or Digital Chocolate? Schools and the media have a large role to play in this. There is no shame in wanting to become the next Bill Gates, Sergei Brin or Mark Zuckerberg.

Pros: Aaltoes has managed to invite several “name” speakers in front of students, including: Risto Siilasmaa, Taneli Tikka, Marten Mickos, speakers from Standford and MIT.

3. Centralization

MySites started in Tampere, which is a city I didn’t know existed before 2003. Most events, VCs, people, startups are located in Helsinki. This is less true for the gaming industry, which has managed to have significant activity in Oulu, Kajaani and Tampere. However, the web is far behind.

Pros: Boost Turku and Stream Tampere have been successful at creating local startup events. Also, Tampere All Stars has made commendable efforts in the city of Tampere.

4. Lack of visibility

To my knowledge, there is a grand total of one blog that regularly covers all the Finnish startups. Getting coverage in mainstream press is practically unheard of. In fact, I have had consistently more success at getting coverage from foreign media than locally. You will not hear from innovative startups in your newspaper. There is very little discussion about growth entrepreneurship. Abroad, Twitter gets invited on Oprah, and even minor startups appear at the Journal de 20 Heures in France.

Pros: At least there’s Arcticstartup.

5. Lack of sweat equity

The value of your startup stems from the robustness of your team. In my experience, many people will expect the same things from a startup job as for a regular one: work normal hours, get paid a regular salary, don’t ask for equity. Without sweat equity, your team is less committed to stay and fight the hard fights. Without working extra hours, your team cannot compete with people who receive more money or have superior technology.

Pros: None that I can think of. Use your Kela money, student loans and credit cards more.

6. Lack of investments

As is the case in most of Europe, Finnish startups are less funded than American or Western-European counterparts. There is a distinct lack of foreign investments in the country, possibly due to the lack of tax incentives, while local risk investors have a consistent track record of getting less involved in local cases than Swedish investors. There’s been enough discussion about the topic. However, one must consider that with less access to funding, Finnish startups are less likely to be competitive with well-funded players.

Pros: While this is still very difficult, there has been an increate in very early stage investments (<50k range) and attempts to make fundraising less complicated by the Vigo program (though it is still early).

7. Lack of feedback

This one is purely personal, but I have found it extremely difficult to receive feedback in Finland. Consumers would simply say the positive things or say nothing. More alarmingly, even industry people (consultants, VCs) have been tight-lipped with their response. In contrast, feedback I received on every important meeting abroad has been extremely invaluable. I am not sure why this is the case. Maybe Finns are trying to be polite? Negative feedback is the basis of change, and the only way we can learn how to meet your needs.

Pros: There is a growing amount of “Open Mic” events organized by the different entrepreneurship societies, where feedback has been very straightforward. I’m looking forward for more of this from others as well.

8. Lack of networking and collaboration

There are plenty of startup and social media related events. Yet, in one year of attending these events, I’ve gathered fewer contacts and business cards than I have in San Francisco or London in less than a week. What gives? It can’t be simply that there’s fewer people or that they’ve all got their hands full with projects. How do you conduct business if you don’t actively hunt for new leads or partnerships?

Pros: There are less than 10 people I would consider “heavy networkers” in the country. Taneli Tikka, Peter Vesterbacka, myself, Janne Saarikko, Sonja Kangas, Ville Vesterinen, Christina Forsgard, and Kai Lemmetty. Talk to them, learn from them!

9. Lack of internationalization

The European market is very fragmented. When you live in one of the smaller nations in Europe, you should start thinking about being international very early (unless you’re aiming for a really, really profitable niche). I often hear that Finland is a good test market. In my experience, it is not: it is more difficult to acquire consumers, get visibility, get feedback. Also, Finns have lower purchasing power than Western Europeans. I think it is quite a stretch to think that this knowledge is relevant abroad. There should be a stronger emphasis on participating in international events, setting up offices abroad, hiring foreigners, getting international visibility. In my experience, and this is quite counter-intuitive, all of these things are easier to do than their local counterparts.

Pros: There’s been an increase of internationalization by Finnish startups, such as Dazzboard, Mysites, Xihalife, Muxlim, Gigswiz. Also, Culminatum has been making efforts with its EIB Clinic to help some.

10. Too tech driven

Since very few people want to become entrepreneurs, most who do are people with a certain technical skill, who want to get it turned into a product. Many very smart engineering students want to create something new instead of working for some big company, and this is even more true of the active ones who contribute to open source projects. Of course, this creates a huge gap in the new companies that are founded. Legal, management, sales knowledge are often seen as secondary.

Pros: The Vigo program’s goal is to fix these gaps. Aaltoes organizes the Talkoot events (one of which I was mentoring) to help gather teams.

Hopefully we can make those points history in a year or two :)

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.

There is a saying: “you don’t just love your children, you fall in love with them”. I believe every entrepreneur feels the same with their business. That is why you keep getting up and learning and adapting.

Just yesterday, I accomplished one of my childhood dreams. I went to see a band that was dissolved 10 years ago, which was very important to me. They came back for one gig, and I saw them. I had other childhood dreams too; going to Japan and visiting Akihabara, going to Moscow, building a huuuuge video game library, creating a nice Internet company (I’m working on that one).

Most of the talks I hear in Finland, where we’re trying to create an ecosystem, are about how you should find focus, find a business model, a great team, etc. Most people ignore the value of passion.

The main reason that’s kept me going through MySites, and even my earlier projects, the reason I moved to Finland, the reason I got into a good business school, is the same. It was to achieve it, to not live in regret, and because of plain rage that drove me to prove people wrong. Most of the good things that I got in life came after some people told me it was impossible.

Don’t forget about your passion. Dare to dream. Dare to do whatever you’ve set for yourself. Because that is the most rewarding thing in life.

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.

It took quite a bit of experimenting until I could start using the service though. Google Voice doesn’t let you use it outside of the US. I assume they have deals with the carriers there, plus some support issues they don’t want to support yet.

To start using Voice, you need to use a US connection. You can do that through a proxy software called Hotspotshield, which will also let you use Pandora and Hulu by the way :)

Once you do so, you need to validate your existing US number. Since I didn’t have one, I got a Skype Online Number (they used to be called SkypeIn). That gives you a real US phone number for people to call you, and sends the calls to Skype.

I added this to Google Voice, validated my account. Once you’ve confirmed you’re a US person (:P), you can get yourself a Google Voice number, this time for free. You get to select an area code, and a number from their list; I picked myself a nice looking, memorable number.

One thing I was not able to do is validate the service so I could get voicemail, because the number you need to call can’t be called through Skype.

Whew, that took long.

So, what’s Google Voice like?

My first call experience was pretty bad, but I forgot to shut the US proxy.

My second call was ok. Sound quality is rather low (like the worst SkypeOut calls), and there is a noticeable lag (~1.5 sec) when you’re talking.

In practice, you’ll ask your friend to repeat things a lot and talk at the same time after an awkward blank moment.

Calls in the US and Canada are free, which is useless to me, but international calls are lower than on Skype, so that’s not a bad thing. $0.15/min for a Finnish mobile.

The SMS functionality works great. You can send an sms anywhere for free, and people can reply to your sms (they see your Google Voice number). The nice touch is that it’s easy to send SMS either from the web or desktop, and you can track them easily later. Much better than spending 0.X sents for a couple of bits of data like I did so far. I suppose old SMS are searchable too (haven’t gotten enough to make use of that yet).

The approach of Voice is interesting: it calls your phone, then calls your friend. Then you get charged the Google rate, instead of your carrier’s. This is a bit like the startup Jajah did. Essentially, it means it’s VOIP for any phone, no need for extra software. This also means you need to worry when you’re abroad, because of roaming charges.

Why is this a Skype killer?

Better call screening. Voicemail as a service if I go to the US, free sms, sms as a service, great integration with Gmail. You can in theory search for your older stuff, and get voicemail converted to text. The whole thing is easier to save.

Skype doesn’t let you receive SMS, has poor widget support and mostly ties you to machines that have Skype clients. Voice is more open: already, there are several widgets, hacks etc making use of the service, for example to send group sms, integrate with instant messengers, etc.

However, the service is not quite there yet. It takes a lot of patience to setup, and you’ll need to start using that number regularly for it to be really powerful.

Apparently, you people seem to like it a lot, because there’s been 400% more activity on the site last month! So that means you guys are sharing more things with your friends, uploading more stuff, and simply looking more at what your friends posted.
Thanks a lot for that.

Also, we’ve got a discussion going on at Google Buzz, which has been super helpful.
People have been sending us a lot of feature requests, reporting bugs, and not only has it helped us improve the site at a much faster pace, it’s also saved us money from doing a lot of trial and error.
So thanks for that too, you guys rock.

In addition, our friends at the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society in Helsinki have asked us to add support to share their slides, pdfs and word documents, so you can now preview them directly inside MySites, instead of using Slideshare for example (and we can do the sharing as well).

We’ll update you very soon with some new features we’re working on right now, hopefully early next week :)

As I explained earlier, MySites has been getting considerably more traffic lately.

Many people have been asking me why the site has been so slow. The reason is that we weren’t ready to grow so fast.

We didn’t expect things to grow at that rate., and no matter the effort, traffic grew faster. Sorry about this.

We took the decision to slow down most of our Chinese traffic, so that our Western users get the same experience as before.

The last post I did about this was on January 10th. Here is what it looks like until January 31st.

Lessons learned:

- You always think “it’s a good problem to have”, until your users can’t get to the page and you’re not delivering them the service they expect.

- Internet growth can be unpredictably fast.

It’s a worldwide event, in 40 countries, where people get together in small groups, and have 48 hours to create a game from scratch.

Here is our game:

The Ultimate Showdown!

You can download the game here.

It is a mixture of:

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.

Earlier, I might have said that Finland needs more access to capital to help entrepreneurship. However, since my recent Silicon Valley trip, I’d have to say the problem does not lie there.

Finland has plenty of capital. For example, public efforts from entities such as Tekes and VeraVenture pour several millions in projects. Consider that Y-Combinator has invested in ~150 startups, for a total sum of less than $3M since its creation.

So the issue is not so much the lack of money, but how it is spent. For a fraction of the money spent in Finland, YC has been able to create Reddit, Dropbox, Disqus, Parakey (sold to Facebook), Justin.tv. You can find a list of Y-Combinator startups and successful exits here.

Why is that? I think we should blame both startups and the government.

Decisions from Tekes are often made by people who have not been entrepreneurs or CEOs themselves. Their experience is very generic, and usually only in Finland. In addition, the application process is very tedious, as it can take up to weeks to simply apply for this money. Lastly the process involves having to plan very detailed processes for several months in the future, which, in the age of lean and adaptive startups, is rather counterproductive. So this process creates a strong mismatch between the funding side and what the startups need.

Of course, Tekes is not a specialized entity, unlike YC is. While I understand the value Tekes for R&D of large projects, it is an inadequate tool for stimulating growth entrepreneurship. The Vigo program seems like a step in the right direction, though I deplore the lack of an Internet-focused accelerator.

Another large problem we have is internationalization. Not enough startups are aiming to be international from day one. Not enough have international team members, or experience dealing with foreign cultures. Alarmingly, most startups here are reluctant to look for funding in other European countries, let alone the US.

There is this underlying idea that starting in Finland is a safe way to test the market. I disagree. Finland is not a test market for growth businesses. The efforts that need to be made here, the barriers to reach the consumer, are equally high if not higher than to reach users in another Western country. To put it differently, if your business has an international scope, you should be international from day one, not just “maybe later”.

Lastly, I would like to stress that funders do not have enough access to information about the startups in the country to make decisions. There is too little public information about the business angels here and how to reach them. There are very few business angel networks, and they are too difficult to reach. There are too few international VCs scouting the market. It would be helpful to see efforts to bring more of them at regular events here, the same way VCs go to Y-Combinator to find their next Google.

I sincerely hope we can make the system here more efficient. If we don’t, it would mean that most companies will either lack proper chances to succeed, or have to move abroad. In any case, the biggest loser will be the Finnish economy.

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.

Basically, the event is split in 2 parts: first, some ~7 minute pitches from startups, then 1 minute open mic pitches where anyone can talk about anything.

What really struck me there is that pretty much all the startups were early stage, and really open about their bootstrapping. The event is basically a great showcase for hackers who put together a new idea, and would like to meet likeminded people, potential investors and partners. There’s also plenty of bloggers! (Check out Nerdstalker and TechPulse360).

There’s plenty of free tacos to be eaten outside, and cheap drinks, so it’s a regular hangout place.

Here’s my 46 second pitch ;-)

Mobile 2.0:

This is one of the big mobile events of the year. The event was split in 2 days. First a business day, then a developer day. I was only able to attend the first one.

The event gathered many of the hot mobile companies, such as GetJar, Shozu, Funambol, Brightkite, as well as VCs and operators.

There were several talks about the state of mobile, with lots of interest towards Android 2, and talks about how everyone is going to react to the changes brought by Apple.

MySites was one of 5 companies selected for the launchpad. The panel was led by Rich Wong, from Accel Partners, who said he saw a need for us, but questionned the business model (which pushed me to do a lot of reworking on it since). I will write more about my experience with the VCs soon (it was very positive).

I also realized during that event that we (and any other startup) has a huge opportunity in mobile at the moment. There was a very palpable sense that everyone is pushing for that space, now that the desktop web has settled down and that the iPhone has changed the game.

Sheryl Sandberg interview by Charlene Li at Churchill Club:

Sheryl Sandberg is the COO at Facebook (think of it as what Will Riker is to Jean-Luc Picard), and before that was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She was being interviewed by Charlene Li at the Churchill Club.

In a nutshell: objective is more people, more mobile, more payments. It was interesting to hear that Facebook keeps iterating new features and remains flexible, rather than having a strict roadmap.

Lots of videos of the talk here.

Play:

Next event was Play. This one is a big event organized by the students of Berkeley. Now when I say big, I was truly surprised by exactly -how- big.

Easily 500+ people, with 3 simulataneous panels at all times, plus significant demo pits and stands. World known speakers.

Lots of talk about the future of gaming, mobiles, media and the cloud.

There I got a chance to talk with Peter Moore (the guy who launched the Dreamcast, the Xbox 360, and now leads EA Sports), and Bradley Horowitz (Vice President of Google).

There were also important people from Zynga, Nokia, Mozilla, Joyent, Salesforce.com, YouTube, Justin.tv, Guitar Hero…

There’s a bit too much for this one for me to cover here, but if you’re curious you can check out the page.

BizTechDay:

A conference aimed at early stage people. I only attended the first day there, and got a chance to meet with Marie Domingo (PR queen) and Daniel Brusilovsky (a 16 year-old entrepreneur who also worked on Qik, runs TeensinTech and writes for Techcrunch).

The talks revolved mostly around how to start / plan / structure your business on the cheap, so it wasn’t that interesting to me, but it was a great opportunity to meet with people!

Failcon:

“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B”.

Failcon is a conference about failure. How startups, VCs, entrepreneurs deal or should deal with failure.

400+ people were attending, including ~40 Finnish people I brought from Aaltoes ;) The event took place in the “Japantown” (I didn’t know such a thing existed), which was filled with nice shops and restaurants.

Besides the very enthusiastic organizer Cassie Phillipps, there was an impressive lineup of speakers, including the founders of Meebo, Zynga (Mafiawars, Farmville), Slide, FastCompany, TheFunded, Aardvark.

Personal highlights of the day included hearing massive fails from the Meebo team (paying $60k upfront for a guy who ran away to Mexico!), a legal guy who gave a checklist of all the stuff to avoid when you start a startup (it was basically a list of things I had to pay ~$30k in legal fees to find out), and flooding the Twitter wall (made many people laugh, but I deleted them within the minute because I didn’t want to bother anyone) :)

I really loved that event, because it brought a lot of healthy discussion about failure. Everybody fails at stuff. Every successful startup had some mishaps at some point. We Europeans fail at accepting that, ironically. I would love to see more of this mentality coming to the old continent.

That was a very short event in Stanford. About 100 students listening to the words of Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga (again!), and Bing Gordon (ex Chief Creative Officer of EA). Having heard Mark speak 3 times in less than 2 weeks, this was not so interesting, but I really appreciated the fact that Stanford regularly organizes events with known speakers to inspire their students.

PACT:

This is a pitching and networking event organized by the Plug & Play Tech Center. The Plug and Play center is an incubator, which works on facilitating offices, funding, hosting and offices to startups.

Pact brings about 40 companies to pitch for 3 minutes in front of a large group of VCs.

The companies were mainly web/IT startups and Greentech. Most of them were in the early stages, and it was interesting to see “normal” people pitch their ideas. At points, it felt almost like the event was a candy store for VCs, where they’d pick the companies they’d find promising. I have to say that Europe could gain a lot from this type of networking/matchmaking.

Arctic Shakeup:

Last event in the trip was Arctic Shakeup, organized by ArcticStartup and Aaltoes. It gathered Michel Wendell (Nexit Ventures), Tanja Aitamurto (Huffington Post, Helsingin Sanomat), David Aslin, Marten Mickos (ex MySQL), Giacom
o Marini (founder of Logitech) and a Finnish VC lady whose name I forgot and is not listed on the event’s info :)

The event was about the nordics and Silicon Valley. The summary of the discussion there was that Finnish companies should take the best from what’s out there, and have one competitive edge, which is the subsidies from organizations like Tekes for example. This marked a good conclusion to my long trip, and to this blog entry!

It was a difficult choice to make. We decided to throw away tons of work hours, some of our technology, and use another company instead.

Today I’m very happy to say that it has paid off.
During the past month, half of our user registrations came from Facebook Connect!

Users who use FB Connect to login come more often on MySites. They use our sharing to the FB wall and posting comments much more too.

We noticed that integrating Facebook more has brought more activity from users. MySites used to be most about sharing uncompressed pictures, but nowadays it’s mostly students sharing group work or music.

My advice: surrender the right stuff to the right people, and win!

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?

Sure, it might not be exactly as you would have done it. Not your baby. Does it matter?

2) Focus:

Doing partnerships forces you to focus on what you do best.

You need to have a compelling offer for the other party, and you need to be good at what you’re doing. Better than the others. Another side effect is that since you’re not going to do some of the things yourself, you’ll be positioning yourself as more specialized in your own domain, which can give you a lot of room to think about how you can focus on delivering something better.

3) Time (= money):

Well, we’re a startup. We can’t do everything. If we could, we wouldn’t be a startup :)

Our partnerships are saving each other months of work, which means that not only can we deliver fast, we’re also saving significant money in the process.

4) Brand building:

Your brand becomes more meaningful, so does theirs. It’s a great way to reach new users and offer them a better experience, so they’ll thank you for it.

5) It’s good for you:

Showing that you’re capable of agreeing with others, finding your core strengths and actually delivering is a pretty good skill to have. Maybe not as sexy and glorious as achieving everything yourself, but you learn a lot.

6) Don’t worry, be happy:

If something from their offering breaks, I know they will fix it asap, just as we will deliver with our offering. So both parties have a little bit less to worry about.

There, I hope you can use some of my wisdom. And maybe we should partner some time :)

1) Gamer stuff

One thing that was very cool there was that I got to try Nvidia 3D vision.
Basically, it’s 3D glasses that you wear for your video games. Most new games work with it.
I also tried a “force feedback vest“, which is a vest you wear, and it pokes you when you get hit in a game!

I tried both 3d vision and the vest together for about 45 minutes on Call of Duty 4.
Even though the game is old now, it was like virtual reality! It felt like being inside, and the hits made it even more “real”.
Really impressive stuff.

The only downside was that in order to use 3D vision, you have to cross eyes to focus on the picture (the same way you would for stereograms for example), so it’s a bit tireing after a while.

I also went to see the gamer tournaments:
I watched the official Finnish finals of the Counterstrike and Counterstrike Source tournaments (which my friends won! congrats Ollimatte and Sami).
I got to play in the Street Fighter 4 tournament, which I didn’t win this time!

2) The Demos

That’s what people consider the super nerdy side of Assembly. It’s actually pretty interesting.

Maybe you’ve wondered what the demoscene is. Basically, it’s a way of creating computer art, using very difficult techniques.

A demo is a program that consists of a combination of audio and video.
The goal of a demo is to create the most elegant program, both in terms of programing and art.
The result is a usually mixture of hightech, minimalist artwork, electronic music, modern art.

Think of it as graffiti for computers.

The different demo competitions are a great way of showing how much power you can get out of a machine, in an intelligent manner.

Demos have a long history of mixing with the pirate scene and the gaming scene.

It was a real pleasure to see what some of the best coders out there can do with our machines.
Out of the demos I saw at ASM, I found two of them truly beautiful:

Wrath by Matt Current (came 4th) (click here to view it)
FrameRanger by Fairlight / CNCD / Orange (winner) (click here to view it)

3) Seminars

Each year Assembly has seminars, which are basically talks by known people on a topic.

Jussi Laakonen got to talk about starting a game company, from his own experience doing Everyplay.

The guy from Love (an insane combination of MMO and art) got to explain his vision.

I met one of the MAME guys, who talked about game preservation.

Also got to talk with Maria-Edla Candia (scifi writer) who discussed the Cyborg Manifesto.

Looking forward to ’10!

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

We discovered that many early adopters enjoyed our site, but the vast majority of users found it too difficult.

Here’s an analysis of why:

Navigation:

1) Desktop-style usability:
Making MySites look and feel like a desktop was a success in many aspects. Mashable called it “One of the best Web desktops available today“  and we were pretty happy with that. Our users weren’t.

There were some stupid decisions, such as having to double click to open content, which confused a lot of people.
Ultimately, we realized that we gained very little from the “wow” effect of replicating the desktop, but lost very much in terms of usability.

2) Too many services:
Users have been confused by our service offering.
Currently, we have several services, such as one for pictures, one for movies, music, files, etc.

We realized that many users would try to upload pictures and movies together in the same folder (for a holiday album for example), or a photo + some tunes.
This is currently not possible, as our services are separate.

We decided to simplify our service offering to a single service, which can store, play and share any type of content.

3) Separation between “home” and users:
When we dropped the desktop a few months ago, we decided to adopt user pages (such as http://rameen.mysites.com for example).

These would be a good way to show your content to other people:
- you get a nice vanity url
- you can easily share this page with people
- you can view other users easily

However, one mistake we did was to take you directly to your user page once you logged in.
The logic was that if you login to MySites, you want to be able to upload content and maybe afterwards visit other content.

This is wrong.
The usability of social sites clearly shows that the majority of users prefer watching content than uploading content.
So we had to prepare a specific landing page, where you could see interesting content (similarly to the streams you would get on Facebook or Twitter)

4) Uploading is too difficult:
Currently, if you wish to upload content on MySites, you will need to:
- Login
- Click on a service name
- Click on Manage items + wait for the new page to load
- Click on Add content
- Actually add the content

This is unacceptable.
Uploading content should be easy for our users.

Social features:

1) Weak sharing
Until recently, sharing on MySites was extremely painful.
- Opening items happened on the same page, which made it impossible to copy the url from your browser, though we did generate permalinks for every file.
- Sharing content on other sites was not very obvious, the icons were in a sub menu called “share”
- Embedding, BBcodes, direct links were hidden in a sub menu
- mobile QR codes were in a sub menu, with no explanation about what they are

The problem was not the functionality itself. All these features were usable, but using them was very counter-intuitive

2) Buddies – concept

Since the beginning of MySites, we’ve used the word “buddies” to define “friends”.
When you say buddies, people think about blocking the user, sending him/her messages, poking, etc.

This is not what we have. In practice, our “buddies” are very much like the “follow” functionality of Twitter.
This needs to be explained properly to our users, through examples and careful wording.

3) Finding people

Finding users on MySites is difficult.
You see an interesting item, you want to follow its owner. You can’t.
You know a user, you want to get to his page. You can’t.
You want to paste your vanity url for others to find your page, you have to give it manually.

This is too difficult.

Technology:

During the past 3 years, we’ve built a lot of really awesome technology. A bit too much, maybe.

Our focus on technology has driven us towards creating “what’s possible” instead of “what people expect”.

1) Too much ajax

MySites is/was a full desktop, written entirely in javascript.

It is designed to run mostly on the client:
There are virtually no page loads.
Content is retrieved through JSON, which is then renderred locally.

This created the following problems:

- There were no “hard links”: You would not navigate from one page to another, you would not be able to get the url from the browser bar. Instead, we had to offer a “permalink” feature, which

our users found difficult.
- There was no back button support: Instead, we had to provide a “back” button on the site, which broke people’s expectations.

2) Too much legacy

The problem with maintaining a system for 3 years is that you will end up with a lot of legacy code.

What this means is that every time we wanted to create something new, we had to worry about how it would behave in relation with older code.

From the start, we decided to make sure that all the code we produce could be recycled.
The problem was that one widget / module we would code would then be tied to several other places, making it very difficult to modify a few months in the future.

3) Browser support

Heavy use of Ajax / JSON meant very specific requirements in terms of browsers.

Because of this, maintaining compatibility across different browsers was very difficult.
We were forced to support only the majority of the market (Internet Explorer, Firefox) due to technical reasons.

Simplifying the code base on the client would mean greater productivity and better compatibility.

4) Translations

It has always been our goal to support several languages on MySites.
We have built a translation engine in our infrastructure, to enable quick additions.

The problem is that by having very much legacy and interlinked widgets, we ended up making it very difficult to find and modify text.
Cleaning up will enable us to offer localizations much more easily, as originally intended.

I hope this list will give you a better insight of how we work. If you run a startup, maybe you’ve run across some of these problems. Hopefully this will help you solve some of them!

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.

The problem is, we don’t have that many stories to relate to.

European successes?

There haven’t been that many successful European Internet startups.

There’s:
Meetic, the dating giant.
Skype, which sold to Ebay
Alando.de (German precursor to Ebay), which sold to Ebay
StudiVZ (German copy of Facebook), sold to Holtzbrinck
LastMinute.com, which sold to Sabre
MySQL, which sold to Sun

From this list, you would think that in order to be successful, you need to create something early and sell it to the US :)

In comparison, we have:
Bill Gates, a kid who dropped out of university and created the largest company in the world.
Larry Page and Sergei Brin, two students who went on to found the fastest growing business in history.
Mark Zuckerberg, who decided to email his schoolmates about a site he made, and 5 years later got the largest social website in history.

Not exactly the same caliber of stories. Why?

The glass is half empty

I believe the problem lies in mental barriers that people build for themselves.
I identified 4 of them:

1) Lack of passion:
Most people aren’t passionate. It takes a specific mindset to want to create a startup. You must either really believe in the idea, or be very greedy :)
Is this idea worth fighting for? Will I get satisfaction out of it?

2) Lack of self-confidence:

I got a great idea. Now what? Do I have what it takes to do this? Do I have the contacts, the experience, the money, the stamina, the skills? What about the other guys who are better than me? Why don’t they do it? What if they do it better?

3) Fear of responsibility:

I guess I can do it. But then, I’ll have all this stuff to do. Manage people. Tell them what to do. Put my own money. Put other people’s money. Report to people. Deal with legal things, pitching, etc. Maybe I’ll just be better off in an office job, where I don’t have to worry so much. Do I actually have what it takes?

4) Fear of failure:
I guess I do. But this is going to take years. What if it fails? What do I do then? Is this all actually worth doing?

As you can see, there’s a lot of questions for potential entrepreneurs.

From that angle, it looks borderline irresponsible to do a startup.

It should be half full

In order to get started, in order for Europe to get more entrepreneurs, people need to become very driven.
I believe the US society creates more individuals like this, where people’s self-confidence and ego is really boosted.

In order to get started, we need people who are more willing to accept risks and/or confident.

If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will.

That said, there are other very real external barriers that can prevent you from success, which I will detail tomorrow.

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?

The problem

The European market is completely fragmented:

There are 27 countries in Europe.
That’s 27 different national identities, each with their own culture.
There’s more than 20 languages spoken.
Each country has its own specific consuming habits.

The good news: they use the Euro.

You can’t be local

Internet companies are usually aimed at being high growth scenarios: most online businesses are not about selling services to a small niche of people.
It’s perfectly fine to be local if you want to have a flower shop or a car rental.
The problem with staying in your own country is that it’s going to be difficult to reach millions of people.

If you live in Germany or France, you may be able to afford to ignore this advice. Not so if you live in Finland, Slovenia, Belgium, Sweden, or any other market with < 10M people.

Language

So let’s say you want to reach different countries. You’ll have to plan your site for this:

- Make sure your site has an infrastructure that supports different languages
- Make sure you can update those languages easily. If text in one language, you need to be able to do the same in others as well.
- You need to be able to reach the guy who did the translation later, just in case. It’s not a one time thing.
- It needs to sound “authentic”. No funny expressions from the dictionary.
- You need to support funny characters, such as ß ö ä é ø
- You need to make sure you address people in the correct manner. In french, we have “tu”, which is less formal than “vous”. I don’t want a website to call me “tu”, I’m not a teenager.

Of course, you also need to have good English.
Nothing says “cheap” as a bad english translation.

Culture and marketing

Each country has its own culture.
If you want to penetrate a country, you will need to adapt.

Who else is in the same market?
Where can you reach your customers? Are there communities, forums, student unions, events where they are gathered?

What do people want? Maybe your product service doesn’t fit people’s mentality in that country. Are you sure?
Do they expect freebies?
How important is it to be present locally? Do you know anyone there?

What kind of marketing do they like? Direct? Word of Mouth?
Is the press difficult to reach?

Maybe your name sounds stupid in other languages:

• When Motorola introduced its new “Q” phone in France, they did not know that selling them “Mon Q” sounded like “My ass”.
• Google’s social network “Orkut” means “Orgasms” in Finnish.
• And there’s more examples.

Don’t under estimate the nationality aspect either.
Some countries have very strong identities and will prefer a product because it is local.

For example, when Microsoft launched its Xbox 360 in Japan, it had to face remarks such as: “Japan already has Nintendo and Sony. Don’t need to buy the Xbox.”

It’s very difficult to appeal to people from a different culture.
If even big companies fail at reaching several countries, what will you do to do it better?

Team

Your company is only worth as much as what your team can produce.

You need a tech guy who can create a flexible system for your languages at least.
Be ready to use servers in other countries if needed.

You need to be able to pitch in english, and preferably also in other languages.
You need to talk with people from different places.
Be able to travel.

If you simply work with people who speak the same language and have the same cultural background as you, you’re in for a rough ride.

Local isn’t all that bad

There are examples of companies that have been very successful in their home markets:

StudiVZ.de, the German Facebook clone, managed to beat the US site.
Alando.de was a German clone of Ebay, which did the same and was later bought by Ebay.
Skyblog and Irc Galleria both have been very successful in their home countries.

Of course, there’s a few things to consider here:
- they’re the exception
- they were first movers in their market
- they all tried (and failed) at spreading in foreign markets

I hope I raised some points you didn’t think about before :)

Part 2 is coming soon!

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

The goal of the Iranian authorities is to prevent the organization of large scale protests, as well as lower their impact.

Social media comes in

As a response to the media lockdown, locals have been looking for ways to spread information.

Twitter has shown its true power: openness.
There are thousands of ways to update the service. Anyone with a few technical skills can setup a way to post there.
Unlike other media, Twitter has enabled people to reach large crowds by using any means available: email updates, mobile, web clients, desktop clients.

Anyone can send information, and there is virtually no way to censor it, apart from banning the whole Internet and the phone network.

And what if that happens? There are ways around Internet censorship.

On Slashdot, Iranians have asked how to setup Mesh networks and use Wifi. Back during the Chinese olympics, the Chaos Computer Club (well known German hacker group) had created the “Freedom Stick” for journalists.

That is the original purpose of the Internet: to allow communication in case of massive disruption in telecommunications.
This is guerilla tactics 2.0

The fact that people’s mobiles are capable of shooting pictures, videos and sending text updates turns anyone into a potential reporter. It’s easier to send away a white journalist and a camera crew, than to prevent a local from using his mobile phone.

This is the first time in a revolt where the opponents can leverage free flowing information and reach the whole world.

It also opens a whole new can of worms. Both sides are free to send false information. Trolls, and intelligence services can leverage the new large networks.

It will be interesting to see how this will develop in the coming weeks.

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.

Mr Hawking is also Lucasian Professor of Mathematics since 1980, which the media seem to overlook. This is a chair that was created in 1663, and was occupied by Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac.Also, he was on Star Trek.

This is a topic that is dear to me, being an agnostic raised among scientists. I believe it is extremely important that men like this make the effort of bringing mankind forward.

Mr Hawking: in a not so distant anymore future, people will use interfaces to use computers with their minds. They will have access and exchange to new ideas, knowledge, they will be able to explore the universe in just their imagination.

In a sense, they will be a little more like you.

Found this online: If you’d like to send him a card/flowers, here’s the address:
Addenbrookes
Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Hills Road Cambridge CB2 0QQ
UK

If you want to send a note from the US, try his college address;  they’re very good at holding and delivering post, and it will take at least a week to get here:
Gonville and Caius College
Trinity Street
Cambridge CB2 1TA
UK

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

First things first, being up to date:
I need to know what’s been happening in the world while I was asleep.
First thing I do in the morning is check my email box, see if anything urgent happened.
I also look at if I received any instant messages (Skype, MSN), and if my colleagues are awake.

I proceed to read the news. I read about 200 articles in one day, half in the morning, half at night. You see the links I found interesting here ;)

My main priority at the moment is the investments in MySites.
We’re lucky enough that we’ve been able to find funding, in these tough times.

My first call was to our new investor.
We discussed the company’s progress, our development, our short term and medium term plans.
We also talked about potential competition, and our upcoming mobile version, as well as the paperwork we need to do.
We’re working very hard on our mobile version, it’s a big topic for us.

I then called the CEO of NFOrce.nl, our hosting company. Pieter is an old friend, and his company was one of the first investors in MySites.
We’re doing a partnership with them to bring the NFOrce.nl readers (they own a still fairly large gaming-oriented portal) to us, which will bring us 0.5M extra visitors.
We spoke about what we can do to make that smooth for them: what do we offer them, how do we reach them without spamming, how to we integrate these users on our site.
I then spoke with NFOrce’s main programer, to talk about what they could do on the technical level to bring those users and what we would need to do on our side.

Then, I called our accounting person. Finland requires a lot of bureaucracy, and that is even more the case when we need to inform new investors or look for potential ones.
I made sure that she is up to date on the information needed, and informed her or upcoming papers we need.

I realized it was 3pm and went to get a sandwich.

I had a long chat with Mike, one of our developers.
He’s currently working on making the site more social.
We’re doing a lot of changes in how you use MySites, to make it easier and faster for you to get to content.
Easier to find your friends, other people, what they like, and easier to share that any way you want.
So we discussed his current tasks, what are his plans for the week, and in what priority it would make most sense to do those things.
I gave him some feedback from users and we also discussed some new functionality he has added recently, to see if we’d need to change anything.

I spoke with “secret person X” to assess what are possibilities for partnerships and funding in Finland.
We’re a pretty unique case, as we’ve already launched, gotten some users, some funding, a great team and technology but we don’t know much about what’s doable in terms of money in Finland.
There’s a lot of options out there to support new and innovative companies, which we discussed how to approach.

I then spoke with our main developer, to talk about upcoming changes.
We need to implement a proper emailing system, and we’re working on the integration of the social features and design changes.
The big chunk is thinking about how to grow the site without breaking things, add more users, have partnerships, and work on our mobile version at the same time.

Last big thing for the day was preparing for the press coverage. I’ve been preparing some media for the press and bloggers, concerning the current funding and the upcoming social launch.

I hope this gives you a better idea what an entrepreneur does on a daily basis.
The main thing is making decisions and doing your best to make them happen as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I started using the web in 1995.

At the time, I was a teenager with “unorthodox” interests such as gaming, computers, Star Trek and the Monty Pythons, living in a conservative, anglo-phobic country (France)

Needless to say, it wasn’t exactly easy to find people who liked the same things.

I started using the web just when we still had those noisy modems, and 56k sounded like very fast. Most of the web then consisted of poorly made corporate pages, people trying to feed you content.
Very soon, I started using IRC and forums. Suddenly, the world was filled with other people like me. And I could talk with them. You couldn’t do really much more than talk at the time anyway :)

The shift

I think the SomethingAwful guy put it really well:
You used to have all these weirdos who liked random things like collecting baby shoes. Now they have a place to get together and talk about whatever they like!

The world got smaller. It was just a start. Soon the web became less techy. Girls would spend their day chatting on MSN, guys would browse for pictures, people would download music, and spy on each other’s relationship statuses.

It was in 2001 that Napster became big. In less than a decade, not only music, but videos, and photos all became completely digital. Even phone calls.

Think about it for a second. In less than 10 years, the entire media output of the planet changed, to be usable on a single platform.

Everyone has more content. Everyone is connected. What does it mean?

You are becoming more

The web isn’t just a tool, or a method of communication of data. It became much more than that. Within 10 years, you will be always connected with everyone, and their content, and any other content you want. People will be able to know everything you want to say. You will know everything you want to know.

This is a profound change in humanity.

If everybody can follow and judge you, if everybody knows your passions, if you can meet more people like you, if you have access to any information, how will you behave?

It means that social pressure is increasing exponentially. It means that your persona, both socially and online, is becoming more and more like a brand, and it’s becoming deeper.

It’s making our society more interconnected.
It’s bring you new friends, new knowledge, new passions.
It’s making you a deeper individual.
More human.

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:

social media = (micro)blogs + chat + rss + widgets + social networks + bookmarks + forums + podcasts + video/photo sharing + virtual worlds + wikis

That seems pretty vague.

When the average person talks about media, he/she thinks TV, magazines, different types of vectors of information.

So what’s a social medium? I would define that as a way to spread information, directly between users. The idea is that they are about simple people, not companies. And about dialog, not just one way communication.

Not B2B, not B2C, but maybe peer to peer. I know, more umbrella terms.

The problem:

So, which vectors can people use to spread their content easily?

Of course, the Internet comes to mind. Podcasting, blogging, wikis, media sharing sites are obvious methods.

Less obvious would be forums, in their pure technical sense, but places like SomethingAwful have shown they can be platforms for media sharing, and not simply discussion.

But does social media need to be online? What about fanzines? amateur tv and radio channels? They’re definitely as social as some of the examples above. And they’re definitely media.

Yet you’ll never hear a “social media expert” talk about those. Instead you’ll hear about joining “the conversation”, and optimizing your online media presence.

So what is it then?

It seems that all social media seems to be online. And it seems to be mostly about sending a traditional message to the same recipients as before, just using different means, and getting more feedback.

So should we start calling those “Online media” or “Interactive media“?