Work

Talks

• The Internet as an Extended Mind (TEDxHelsinki, 2014): Taking David Chalmers' extended mind seriously: memory, search, and recall already moved outside the skull. What that changes, and what to protect.
• Beyond Spotify: Direct-to-Fan Music (Industry talk, 2022): It takes roughly 600,000 streams a month to earn minimum wage. The case for direct-to-fan, and the platform we built for it.
• Design Patterns for the DWeb (DWeb Camp, 2019): Product and UX discipline for protocol-heavy systems: how the decentralized web starts feeling like software people choose.
• Publishing on the Decentralized Web (IPFS Camp, 2019): What a creator-owned Substack could look like on content-addressed infrastructure: consumer publishing for the permaweb.
• Design Deep Dive on IPFS apps (IPFS Camp, 2019): What an IPFS app needs before normal people can use it: hide the hashes, the peers, and the pinning behind a real product.
• Building the Finnish Startup Ecosystem (Stanford GSB, 2015): How Finland built a startup ecosystem out of culture and student energy, and what other regions can copy from it.
• Why Europe Needs a Sovereign Cloud (Finnish Parliament, Internet Forum, 2010): Cloud, privacy, and digital sovereignty are product and infrastructure decisions, not just policy. Argued in Parliament in 2010.
• Rebooting a Four-Year-Old Game to the Top of the App Store (GDC, Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, 2015): How a four-year-old game most studios would sunset went back into the U.S. top 20, and the live-ops playbook it produced.
• Collaborate to Innovate (Queensland Government, Industry Briefing, 2015): Briefing the Queensland Government on Halfbrick Academy: students placed inside real production on globally shipped games.
• From Free-to-Play to Indie (GDC, Independent Games Summit, 2016): Which billion-download habits help an indie game, and which ones quietly kill it. Lessons from producing The Consuming Shadow.
• Angry Birds on the Web (Assembly Summer, Helsinki, 2011): Bringing Angry Birds to the browser when a web game still meant a banner ad: the open web as a real games platform.
• Building the Best Product Team in Mobile Games (The Family): Roles, cadence, and operating model: building the product function behind a mobile games portfolio. In French, at The Family.
• Reaching the Top 10 of the App Store (The Family): The playbook that takes a game into the App Store's top charts, told for a room of founders. In French, at The Family.

Articles

• How the Shape of Tokyo Trains Can Dictate Your App's Success (Game Developer, 2023): Product design lessons from Japan on how daily context, commute length, device posture, and attention shape what people actually use.
• Luxury Paid For in the Currency of Privacy (SiliconANGLE, 2010): A cloud-era privacy essay on the real cost of free products, user data, platform trust, and the tradeoffs behind connected services.
• What Nokia Got Wrong About Platform Strategy (Arctic Startup, 2011): A widely read platform-strategy essay on Nokia that became one of ArcticStartup's most-read pieces and was picked up by Helsingin Sanomat.
• How Rovio Builds a Brand to Last (ReadWrite, 2016): How Angry Birds became more than a hit game: brand systems, distribution, repetition, licensing, and long-term franchise strategy.
• Design Tips from the Designer of Fruit Ninja (ReadWrite, 2012): How Fruit Ninja's feel, polish, collisions, bounce, and rhythm were deliberately engineered to make every action satisfying.
• The Quiet Rise of the Hobbyists (Game Developer, 2012): How tools like GameMaker, RPG Maker, and Twine opened game creation to non-developers with ideas worth playing.
• 10 Lessons from Finland's Summer of Startups (ReadWrite, 2011): Lessons from serving as head coach for a summer program where student founders built real startups instead of taking summer jobs.
• The Unsung Hero (Arctic Startup, 2010): A piece on the overlooked people who make startup ecosystems work before the spotlight reaches the companies they helped create.
• The Accidental Cyberactivist (2009): Coverage in El País (2009): I posted working proxy addresses to Twitter so Iranians could route around state censorship during the Green Movement.
• How Heavy Rain Delivers, and Fails in the Process (SiliconANGLE, 2010): A close reading of Heavy Rain: where its cinematic, choice-driven design pulls you in and where it breaks, on interaction, immersion, and managing player expectation.
• The Brief History of Funrank, an Agile Startup from Finland (SiliconANGLE, 2011): A founder's postmortem of Funrank: validating a product, recognizing a market that would not scale, and the judgment to kill it and move on.
• How I Became the Robert Scoble of Buzz (ReadWriteWeb, 2010): My first ReadWriteWeb piece (2010): a weekend spent figuring out how Google Buzz's discovery and follower mechanics worked, then publishing what I found.

Projects

• AI Store Manager: An AI agent built to run the whole business behind a page: catalog, checkout, shipping, fulfillment. A working MVP, ahead of the agent wave.
• Games as a Service: Built Halfbrick's product function and turned Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and the whole catalog into live services. The flagship passed a billion downloads.
• Product on Angry Birds: PM on the biggest mobile game in the world: platforms, ads, location, partnerships, and a toys-to-life unlock years before Amiibo.
• Identity Systems: User-owned identity, social-login wallets, and a gasless social rollup that Tezos core developers called the first of its kind.
• AI Email Agents: Rules, scripts, and actions that let software act safely on your inbox. An agent product shipped before agents were the pitch.
• Browser-Based OS: A web desktop with files, apps, publishing, and identity, used by roughly 72 million people before the browser-as-OS was a category.
• Decentralized Music & Social: DNS.xyz: one social login gave you a wallet you own, a portable identity, and a place to publish and sell directly to fans. Four surfaces, one platform on Tezos.
• Experimental Technology: 50+ prototypes across AR, procedural generation, new inputs, and the open web. R&D pushed until the novelty became play.
• Direct-to-Fan Music Platform: Artists publish, build community, and sell directly to fans. Some earned materially more here than streaming paid them.
• Smart Wallets: Sign in with Google or Twitter and get a non-custodial wallet you genuinely own. Account abstraction hidden behind a normal signup.
• Hyperminter: Drop in your art, edit metadata in bulk, mint the whole set in one click. The most-used batch minter on Tezos.
• Soundmojis: Collectible characters with sound, designed like premium toys you want on a shelf, not assets you wait to flip.
• The Consuming Shadow: Produced Yahtzee Croshaw's first commercial game, a Lovecraftian procedural horror. Very Positive on Steam, with one shot to get it right.
• A Change of Heart: A 48-hour jam win: an endless runner you steer with earphones in your pocket, used backwards as a motion sensor.
• Game Design for Music Drops: Leaderboards, collector tiers, and unlockable perks on a Kane Mayfield drop. Game design pointed at fandom.