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Tuomas Toivonen

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En route to Startup Camp in London

Writing on a Blue1 flight from Helsinki to London Stansted. We're heading with Setok to Startup Camp, a two day event sponsored by Sun and MySQL (well, Sun and Sun). Friday morning there'll be couple of hours of "startup university" with speakers from some of the sponsoring companies. Friday afternoon and Saturday will be an "unconference" in the {Foo,Bar}Camp format. The agenda - as is to be expected - was still wide open when I last checked yesterday, but it should prove interesting. Last count was that there will be about four hundred attendees: most people from early stage startups that have either recently launched or are still in pre-launch development. Some media folks (Mashable is one of the sponsors) will be there too and a couple of VCs. What we most hope to get out of the conference is basically to talk about Scred to hone our pitch and get feedback on the various ideas we've been developing for Scred that are still three to six months out. We're also looking for potential partners that would fit our Scred distribution strategy that we've been actively developing since our public launch last month.

At least I am (and I think I can speak for the whole team) rather excited about how well the Scred effort has been going. Last time around (2001-2002) when we were doing a startup kind of thing (the Nodnol project) we tanked before we could launch the product. I can't claim that we've done everything right this time, but we've done so many thinks a whole lot better. We have a product on the market and real users. We have less code and less technology done than we had with Nodnol, but the release early, release often model is something that we should have done then too. Instead we built the server side and the client side on no less than three mobile platforms (Palm, Pocket PC and the Nokia Communicator - the three big platforms from a Scandinavian smartphone and/or PDA perspective). We had the prototypes done and everything more or less worked. And the GUIs and content were described wholly on the server in a platform independent manner. Very cool, but also very stupid from a bandwidth utilization perspective. I've been drafting a longer post on what Nodnol was all about, what went wrong and why, but that will have to wait until after the Startupcamp.

Oh, and Nodnol, that's London in reverse, how very appropriate considering where headed. And why Nodnol, well, that's an episode from Red Dwarf where everything happened in reverse, time running in the opposite direction or something like that. Haven't seen it in a while. Can't even remember why we picked it. But it's an episode from a sci-fi series, like our release code names for Scred. Some continuity there then, at least.

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