Category Archives: Events

Location in internet services – our panel discussion

I participated in a panel discussion at Spot On Locative Media seminar to talk about location in internet and mobile services. Participants in addition to me were Mika Raento – my ex-Jaiku fellow and one of the most experienced persons in the world in this topic, Kevin Anderson – a freelance nomadic journalist with a lot of practical experience of using location data in journalism, Mikko Hämäläinen – one of the founders of Grey Area, a gaming company developing Shadow Cities, an upcoming location based MMO for iPhone.

I think we were able to share a couple of valuable insights based on our real experiences of designing location-based services. Topics include automatic location tracking vs check-in models, curated vs user generated content, how should location data surface in a newspaper sites, instant customization based on location etc. As always when people are talking about location-based services, the discussion side-tracked to the important but a bit dull topic of privacy, but all in all, I think it’s worth of watching if you are interested in the topic.

Spot On Locative Media panel

A video of the panel discussion is now available Finnish Broadcasting Company’s (YLE) web service YLE Areena. The event was organized by YLE and you can see that in the video quality, although audio volume is a bit too low.

You can view the video here, the panel starts around 1:36.

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Summary of my talk: “Love Your Users”

Charlotta from AaltoES, did a great summary of my talk on Wednesday. If you are interested what I had to say, go read it.

I also mentioned a couple of slideshows or videos to watch, here are direct links to them.

  • How Did X Get Traction – a Q&A threads on Quora. Lots of nuggets of wisdom about acquiring your initial audience.
  • ‘Bootstrapping Soundcloud’ – an entertaining talk by Eric Wahlforss. Eric tells a great story about SoundCloud party that they organized in Berlin and how it acted as a right kind of grassroot PR to make them better known among musicians, their target audience.
  • Startup Lessons Learned – a presentation by Dropbox. They explain how advertising and traditional PR didn’t work for them. Offline virality (people suggesting Dropbox to their friends) was the most effective and they did things that helped user to evangelize Dropbox online.
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Talking today at Aalto Venture Garage for Summer of Startups

I’m giving a talk today for a bunch of young and energetic startups that are part of the Summer of Startups program.

I’m going to talk about a few topics related to tech startups that I know something about. It’s a bit random selection of topics, but I thought it would offer a better background for a free-form discussion after the talk than a very focused one topic talk.

Topics are, in the order of raising importance for an early stage startup:

  • Getting acquired. Why is a startup acquired?
  • Trial and error of attracting early users
  • Working smarter, being persistent. Hackers & Hustlers. Difficulties that tech founders encounter.

Summer of Startups is a first attempt to organize something akin to a very early stage investor Y-Combinator in Finland. It’s organized by student-run associations AaltoES, HankenES and Hues, but nevertheless they have been able to involve a lot of experienced entrepreneurs and investors. I think it’s amazing what is currently happening with Summer of Startups at Aalto Venture Garage and around these associations.

Ramine Darahiba is coaching founders during the summer.
Checkout a list of startups participating from his Arctic Startup post.

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Demoing our UI technology today at MobileDevCamp


My company Huikea Experience released our first game Facetap last week. It’s a fun casual game about faces of your Facebook friends. Get it to your iPhone from the App Store.
However, Facetap is not the only thing we’ve been doing, today we are demoing our underlying technology at MobileDevCamp.

We have build a domain-specific language on top of C++ to easily define, control and mix animations, music, asynchronous events like user input and network requests. It allows rapid development of visually rich networked applications.

Implementing quality user interfaces is time-consuming process, usually taking a major portion of development time of any service or application. In game development, which is a creative iterative process, this is even more true. Server-side technologies and practices have been developing very fast and allow you to do amazing things quickly, but progress in user interface programming technologies has been much slower. Our technology tries to help with that pain point.

MobileDevCamp 2010Currently our technology runs on iPhone OS, but it’s written in a platform independent way and we will be porting it to other major smartphone platforms in the future.

Come to MobileDevCamp today to discuss with us!

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Mobile startups and small payments opportunity

I gave a presentation at the TechStart event of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society on mobile and startups. Why mobile is now an interesting opportunity for a small early-stage startup?

In short, App Store and it’s rivals are solving a distribution problem so that it’s very cost-efficient for a small startup to test an idea, reach users and try to get traction in mobile. This wasn’t possible just 3 years ago, when we started Jaiku. Only reasonable way to get a mobile application to users was through operator or device manufacture deals.

Another interesting opportunity is that new App Store in iPhone OS 3.0 is providing a small payment solution in a user-friendly way. You can build and test business models that have been very difficult in web services as there hasn’t been widely adopted solution to pay few bucks in user-friendly way.

Now, very interesting future possibility is that Apple and others are not actually building application stores, but more general small payment systems. What if iPhone OS 4.0 would provide JavaScript APIs to App Store in-app payment system?

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