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?

Business, Mobile AppStore, Helsinki, Mobile, payments, presentation, startups, TechStart

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!

Business, Mobile AES, Business, event, Helsinki, Mobile, TechStart

I’m giving a talk in MobileDevCamp Helsinki on this Saturday (Feb 23th 2009). MobileDevCamp is an event for people interested in innovating and developing on mobile phones. It is held at Vanha Ylioppilastalo, right in the city center of Helsinki.

There’s at least three good reasons to attend in addition to the fact that event is free of charge.

First, Google’s Android Team just sent an Android Dev Phone 1 as a grand prize for the afternoon Hackathon event. Dev Phone 1 is a fully functional SIM unlocked phone running Android operation system. You can read more about the device from the Android web site. I’ll be in a jury who will give a prize to the best application presented at MobileDevCamp Hackathon.

Second, the day starts with a bunch of interesting talks. I’ll give my Platform = Stage – How to choose a mobile development platform? talk that I gave at Slush event in November. It’s a non-technical talk that tries to get you thinking about mobile platforms from the different points of view than just sold units of phones or technical possibilities of a specific platform. I’ll discuss about distribution models on different platforms and other facts that are crucial for your application’s success. I’ve updated the talk with a couple of new insights.

Other talks cover different platforms in more detail. I’m especially waiting a talk by Niklas Wahrman who have developed Asterope game for both Android and iPhone platforms.

Finally, there’s a BarCamp event after the longer talks. You can freely give a short presentation or a hands-on hacking session. I expect BarCamp to be both fun and useful.

I’m planning to give a short technical presentation targeted for novice and intermediated iPhone programmers. Talk is called “Leaks and Zombies” and it’s about memory management in iPhone programming. You might think that that’s the most boring topic ever, but anything that involves zombies can’t be boring! It should be useful too, it seems that even experienced programmers have trouble of getting iPhone’s memory management right if their background is in garbage collected languages. And if you don’t know why zombies are involved, you should come to listen.

Sign up to MobileDevCamp here.

Mobile Android, events, Helsinki, iPhone, MobileDevCamp