Antti Akonniemi

10 Finnish people to follow on Twitter

July 13, 2009 · 17 Comments

Here are 10 Finnish people on Twitter I recommend that you should check out and follow!

The list is not in any kind of order and it has only people who tweet mainly in English.

@moia – Marko Ahtisaari. Dopplr, CEO and Co-Founder.
@jyri – Jyri Engeström. Jaiku Co-Founder, currently product manager of mobile and social at Google.
@markonen – Marko Karppinen. Owner at MK&C .THE Mac / iPhone developer to follow in Finland.
@vilpponen – Antti Vilpponen. Co-Founder Gyllene Skor, Founder ArcticStartup. Need connections in Finland? Contact Antti.
@saarikko – Janne Saarikko. Excellent commentary on financial, design and social media issues.
@jussipekka – Jussi-Pekka Erkkola. Web driven communicator/marketer working at Nokia. Social media extraordinaire.
@jussil – Jussi Laakkonen. Serial games entrepreneur, currently building: http://everyplay.com/. Online and social games, virtual goods, demoscene. Main organizer of ASSEMBLY demo/LAN part. Almost everything I learn about online games and virtual goods, I learn from Jussi
@samin – Sami Niemelä. Nordkapp co-founder. One of the best UI/UX/design/visual interaction guys I know.
@alexnieminen – Alex Nieminen. Marketing and media geek. Managing Director at N2 and N2 Laundry. True oldschool. Just found him on Twitter.
@mikkohypponen – Mikko Hyppönen. CRO at F-Secure. Looking for antivirus/malware info? Mikko is your source for cutting edge news on the subject.

What are your 10 recommendations?

→ 17 CommentsCategories: Uncategorized
Tagged: twitter

My notes on Nokia N97

July 9, 2009 · 1 Comment

I was invited to Nokia’s event to hear about their the new flagship model N97. I wrote my experiences done, but hesitated sharing them because there’s already ton of reviews/bashes/etc out there. I already wrote them so what the heck. Here are my thoughts.

The event

It’s very good that Nokia is opening up. Proof of that is that in Old-Nokia’s event I probably would have been thrown out because of my questions (or they would only accept approved questions).

Venue was good except it was hot as hell.

Not enough test phones for everyone. I mean, you are a phone manufacturer? Right?

@jussipekka and @heleneauramo are great speakers.

Also Twitter screen was very nice!

Actual device

Is pretty good. Design is nice, keyboard is acceptable (for iPhone user), opening mechanism is very nice. Phone is a bit lighter than iPhone (or at least it feels like it). Touch screen needs a stylus or nail. I had hard times trying to transfer my “iPhone touch screen skills” to N97.

Software

First the good things: Homescreen is great, except I don’t like the design. I mean do you want your customers to pimp their homescreens? If someone shows their N97 to me, the first impression will probably be awful unless the person is a designer. Plus I’ll see his/hers Facebook/Twitter/Email messages which nobody wants.

Oh, back to the good things Ovi Store will have operator billing. Best thing? Finnish TVKaista works in N97.

Now the juicy part.

Homescreen widgets? Widsets? Whaat? Nokia seems to have dropped Widsets and are now calling them widgets. I asked about this, but the Nokia people didn’t seem to understand my question.

Three ways to type – stylus, “normal phone keyboard” and the slide. Why three? One is enough.

Ovi Store – (joke and punchline combined).

Ovi Store was slow, UI was horrible and they did not demo the payment.

Symbian. Symbian is still slow.

Conclusion

Nokia: Drop Symbian NOW. You’ve been building Linux based OS for long time. Take the jump. Symbian is too old and bloated.

Nokia: Take chances. Design = choices. You’re not making them, you are just passing them to the user. You can also call this engineer driven design.

@setok made really good question: “Is this the device that will help Nokia to catch Apple?” – No and I was hoping for so much more.

I also did some interviews at the event (in Finnish): video

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Tagged: Helene Auramo, Jussi-Pekka Erkkola, Kristoffer Lawson, N97, Nokia, Ovi Store

What is fast?

February 26, 2009 · 2 Comments

We released Twitbear into wild this week. Twitbear is a hobby project done by me, Helene Auramo (Zipipop) and Kai Lemmetty (Floobs). Twitbear enables discussion on Twitter.

Feedback has been amazing and it has spawned a number of really interesting discussions. I will discuss those in separate posts (such as design decisions which might have caused some discussion). Although you should understand that Twitbear is still in closed beta and should be considered more as a proof-of-concept than a ready service (for now).

I’ve been asked multiple times how much time it took to build it. There is no definite answer. I would guess it all started when we started to get frustrated in Jaiku and tried using Twitter. Decision to build Twitbear was done probably a bit over month ago. After that there was a lot of planning done. We had different kind of models how to do everything, but ended up selecting the current one. Our aim was just to enable discussions on top of Twitter. Nothing more.

After that Helene started working on the design (first the bear, then the service ;D). Once the design was roughly ready, we started working on the technical solution which we built on Ruby on Rails. Building the layout from PSD-files probably took 4 hours and the actual development around 3-4 days total. It doesn’t seem much, but we had a really clear plan what to do. Plan which wouldn’t be possible without months of hesitation whether to use Jaiku or Twitter, excellent team, great design work, tossing around model how we could do things..

We were not in hurry and that could be one reason why we were so “fast”. When there is no pressure, you have time to think what is important.

What makes you fast?

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Tagged: jaiku, twitbear, twitter

Fruugo – complete shopping experience (screenshots)

February 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment

More about Fruugo launch here, here and here. Last Wednesday I was invited to Fruugo to see their service and hear their plans for the future. I think everyone had pretty much guessed what they we’re building. Nobody (that I know) has posted screenshots that cover the whole shopping experience, so I thought to do everyone a favor and buy something useful from Fruugo (a great excuse )

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Tagged: fruugo

Layout updated

December 31, 2008 · 1 Comment

Site’s layout has now been updated (finally!!). Although some minor tweaking is still needed. Had some problems with WordPress.com CSS, but those should be fixed now. Give a shout if you think something needs more attention. Thanks!

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Arrogant Arrington and feeble Feldman make a fool of themselves at and after Le Web

December 17, 2008 · Leave a Comment

There was lot of talk (and here) after comments made by Mr. Arrington in Le Web during the Gillmor Gang. I was there and to me the comments made Arrington (comments such as The Europeans are lazy) look a bit arrogant (and even more so after the comments made when he returned to US). It was nevertheless entertaining and all in all I really enjoyed the Le Web.

On that stage that day was also Loren Feldman. I didn’t know who he was before, but I liked his charisma. After that day I did some research about him, watched his video clips, started to follow him in Twitter. He seemed like a cool guy.

Today the fun started when I woke up. Little did I know what would happen.

Loic Le Meur had posted a link to this video:

I knew he had some NY-attitude, but come on!

I replied to Loic and look what happened:

Nice

Boy was I bummed. Then I found more Loren’s comments about Europe:

Back home. G-d Bless America. Amazing how much better we are then the rest of the world

Up and working. Last day of European tour. I came, I saw, I’m leaving unimpressed.

@vincenzof These Frenchies are so weak. Amazing to me.No force of will at all. @techcrunch was 100 percent correct. They cant compete @ all

And I’m not the only one being blocked by Loren:

@ToddGilmore Questions like that are probably the reason I blocked you. You seem like an idiot to me

@danielracovitan – Blocked frenchie!

France is rapidly becoming a distant nightmare. So happy I banned them.

And so on.. What a classy guy! I hope this tactic works for him and he gets ton of views for his show. I’m not impressed and I’ll continue following more classier New Yorkers like Gary Vaynerchuk.

Loren Feldman, I now ban thee on all mediums that we share together and from Europe.

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Tagged: gary vaynerchuk, le web, loic le meur, loren feldman, michael arrington

Business Model vs. Working Business Model

December 11, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been preaching about importance of business models to everyone near me. I’ve always thought that most of the new startups had bad business models (or none). I still think that, but after Le Web’08 it came clear to me..

In this financial situation you need working business model from the start. You need positive cash flow. During these times you sell businesses, not ideas. Nobody will buy your fancy ideas. Everyone has ideas. It’s the execution that matters.

During the week in Le Web I’ve seen bunch of nice business models. Problem is that most of them need large user base which the startups didn’t have. Nor did they have good enough plan how to get them (being mentioned on Techcrunch is just not enough).

So from now on I’ll preach about importance of working business model. Cash is your fuel. Get it. You need to grab it! No one will bring it to you. Times are changing and it’ll be a hell of a ride!

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Tagged: business, business model

Why contracting doesn’t work?

December 4, 2008 · 3 Comments

For the most part of my career as consultant I’ve been doing traditional contracting work. There are times when it has worked perfectly and times when it hasn’t. I’ve always been interested how to do project work “right”. Scrum and other agile methods (if done right) tackle most of the problems. But for the contract/outsourcing part there is much to be done, especially on business and contract level.

I think the main reasons behind why it is so difficult to do properly are:

customer wants to get the most profit out of the contract as possible
contractor wants to get the most profit out of the contract as possible

Although the above reasons sound similar, they are very far away from each other. There are bunch of other reasons too. Such as features are defined already in the contract and so on. All these reasons cause decreases in agility and do not offer the best value for the customer.

How to do it better?

Partnership through equity compensation or profit sharing. This way both parties (customer and contractor) have common goal – making profit. We at Kisko Labs have been trying this out with two projects. This has been very exciting and we consider our experiment as succesful. Most important findings for us and our customers were:

increased trust
increased flexibility
increased focus on core business
spirit of co-operation
low capital requirements

It’s not for everyone, but at least for the projects we chose for testing this it worked very well! Cultural change is big and it really seems more natural way of working.

→ 3 CommentsCategories: Uncategorized
Tagged: business, contracting, kisko labs, scrum, sweat equity

Jaiku – Why did you fail?

November 12, 2008 · 6 Comments

I love Jaiku. I didn’t even join Twitter until yesterday. I think Jaiku’s features (mainly threads and channels) are still beating Twitter. In short Jaiku is like an IRC for the grown ups. But still I’m sad. It seems Twitter is winning the whole competition and I really don’t want it to.

API

There is a ton of Twitter applications for iPhone and desktop. Jaiku also has a couple of applications available (+ really cool location based app for Nokia phones (Boo!)). The difference is that Twitter’s API allows these applications to do everything that you can do on Twitter.com site and Jaiku’s API is very restricted/impaired.

Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails and using it really makes it easy to build RESTful API’s. I guess this is one of the reasons why Twitter has such an awesome API and Jaiku doesn’t. It’s logical that API isn’t the first thing on your todo-list when you start building a new service but you should not forget it. Not even when Google buys you.

Design

I kind of liked Jaiku’s design, but now when I’m on Twitter or better yet using the TweetDeck, Jaiku seems like an open source project built by some school kids. I kid, I kid! Twitter is still kicking Jaiku’s ass on the design side.

Invites

Come on! You are losing the battle and you’re still invite only?!?

Business model

Jaiku is strong business wise. First, they probably aren’t running out of money anytime soon being owned by Google. Second, ads are the next big thing in monetization!! Third, Jaiku’s location based and phone profile features pre-installed on Google phones could change everything.

Jaiku, get your shit together – now! You still have a chance.

→ 6 CommentsCategories: Uncategorized
Tagged: api, jaiku, ruby on rails, twitter