Writing & Talks

13 articles for Game Developer, ReadWrite, SiliconANGLE, and more, on product design, platforms, and play.

Recent product decisions

• Kinship labels for a 426 person tree (2026-09-07): A family tree that explains how you are related, in English, Persian and French. Caching two graph walks brought a labelled canvas from 645ms to 37ms.
• LSDj export and import, verified in mGBA (2026-09-04): Take a generated song into a musician’s existing tools and keep composing. The export is checked by running LSDj in mGBA, not by trusting our own decoder.
• A 2.2 second split between the direct and relay paths (2026-08-11): A room should hear the same moment together. Real-player measurements found a 2.2-second direct/relay split and exposed a misleading test proxy. The timing limit remains open.
• Spatial Gallery (2026-06-25): A dual-mode WebXR gallery with gaze-and-pinch interaction on Apple Vision Pro and the same real-time 3D scene on standard browsers.
• ramine.net: AI-First Publishing (2026-06-18): A typed content graph, deterministic two-site compiler, fully prerendered routes, compiled client-side search, and spatial WebXR edition.

Writing

• How the Shape of Tokyo Trains Can Dictate Your App's Success (Game Developer, 2016): 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.
• Building Frontier Products with AI at One-Person Scale (2026): Building with agents, designing products that agents can operate, and deciding what is ready for people to use. Lessons from native audio, an agentic archive and a browser instrument.

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.