Dirty Aura

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?

I’ll be giving a talk at TechStart event at Aalto Entrepreneurship Society today. The talk will be from a bit different view point than before. I’ll explore why focusing on mobile is suddenly interesting for small startup companies.  The event is sold-out, but there is an after-event meetup at Ravintola Teatteri around 20:30. If you want to chat, drop by at the meetup!

I’ll be discussing about startups and the future of mobile in a panel at ArcticEvening in Stockholm tonight. Feel free to come to discuss after the panel. I’m interested in various topics including but not limited to:

• startups
• protopunk
• Brixton, London
• Customer Development
• trekking in Lapland
• all things mobile: social networks, payments, gaming, lbs, …
• functional programming
• The Mission, San Francisco
• neuroscience
• german-style boardgames
• Upplands Väsby, Sverige
• molecular gastronomy
• hard drinking
• early stages of human civilizations
• booty funk

On Friday, I’ll be working and hanging around Stockholm. Tips for interesting restaurants appreciated! You can reach me privately via email: teemu.kurppa@iki.fi.

In addition to the Platform = Stage – How to choose a mobile development platform talk I gave in MobileDevCamp Helsinki, I gave a short BarCamp presentation about iPhone memory management practices titled Leaks & Zombies. It’s a more technical presentation, targeted to novice and intermediate iPhone programmers.

Here are slides of a talk that I gave a few weeks ago in MobileDevCamp Helsinki. It’s a modified version of a similar talk that I gave in Slush Helsinki conference last fall.

Talk discusses an important changes that happened in a mobile business in 2008. It discusses what problems iPhone’s AppStore solves – namely distribution and payment problems – and what it doesn’t – marketing. Compared to a talk gave in Slush Helsinki, this version doesn’t include a part discussing mobile web and HTML 5.