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El Blog!, Touppi's Super Eleet Blog.
Tuomas Toivonen
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Thu, 03 Apr 2008
Okay. Party time. We went over another 2^n milestone with the number of registered Scred users. Day on day growth at 13.5%. Really unbelievable. Best day ever. Well - thank you Next Web. Glad we decided to attend. Still can't believe it. What magic did we do?
Mixed blessing though. been a 16h conference day and I am really truly beat. Several severely sleep deprived nights working on the next Scred release are starting to show. But mixed blessing: a lot of user feedback to respond to. But that is quite okay. Morcheeba is playing at the lobby bar of the Hotel de Filosoof. A nice cold beer. Catching up on things back home and mail. One thing to gripe about Next Web so far: the wifi has been abysmal. Like there's effectively not been one.
And oh: Hotel de Filosoof. What a wonderful little three star place. Each room is themed after a philosopher. We're camped at the Confucius room. With Taoist sayings painted on the walls. Very soothing.
P.S. So why the growth? Techcrunched.
Sat, 08 Mar 2008Day two of Startup Camp was consisted of two more hours of unconference sessions. I went to one where the topic was leveraging social networks. Somewhat interesting, but not really that valuable. The focus was on how you leverage business oriented social networks such as LinkedIn or Ecademy to build your professional reputation and network. That has certain value, but personally I am more interested in the consumer oriented sites and their potential as a platform for distributing and syndicating Scred, and also for providing access to the kinds of communities that we are servicing with Scred. Another thing with all those business networking sites (and the consumer ones as well) is that social network portability is urgently needed. Later today I filled in my profile at YouNoodle. What for, really, I don't know. One more site where I've manually entered my CV, qualifications and interests. What we need and data portability efforts may ultimately achieve, is a sort of social multigraph. You need to be able to connect to the same people over multiple channels no matter where they're listed.
The other unconference session I attended today was about "cool things": useful web-based services, mashups and all that. Kind of interesting but I wasn't paying too much attention (being occupied with finding out how to get to Luton in a few hours ... this is where my laptop run out of battery and I switched to reading an Iain Banks novel - it was Scotland I was flying to after all).
Arrived in Glasgow. My brother's place has a nice view over the city, but this being Saturday night and right in the center of the city, well, it is kind of noisy down on the street. No matter though. Feeling plenty tired after Startup Camp so time to sleep. Glad we went there. Loads of good feedback and lots of work to be done in refining our pitch.
Fri, 07 Mar 2008Been an interesting and worthwhile first day at the Startup Camp. I'm glad we decided to come over here. This being my first "unconference" I didn't really know what to expect, but so far the experience has been positive. Basically what happens at an uncoference is whatever the attendees bring to the table, so to speak. After a couple of keynote speakers (David Axmark of MySQL and Steve Garnet of Salesforce.com) there was a session to set the agenda for the rest of the conference. Anyone was free to suggest a topic for a one hour slots and there were several parallel tracks running. The person suggesting the topic then acted as a moderator for that session. What was especially good that people who were not experts themselves could suggest topics. Like someone could say that "I'm having problems in my startup with xyz, is there an expert in xyz?" It was easy then for people to volunteer to chair a session as there was a clear demand for expertise.
Perhaps the most rewarding - or at anyrate, the funniest - session I attended was on raising venture capital. The chair was a Finnish guy. We knew that apart from us there was supposed to be a Finn at the conference from a mobile video streaming company Floobs. So even though the session chair wasn't the fellow named in the roster as coming from Floobs I assumed that they'd simply sent someone else. During the session then I was quite of wondering: why did they raise first round of funding in London? I mean, they're a Finnish company after all, based in Helsinki. I was about to ask him why they zoomed on UK-based VCs right away, but confirmed first that you're based in Helsinki, Finland, right? And you're from a company called Floobs? And he was like, um, no and no. Okay, fair enough, but what actually makes this funny is that earlier on he'd talked about how his startup is doing video streaming and that they have mobile applications for that. Exactly what a fellow from Floobs would say. He'd also said how they first focused on the entertainment space, but then moved more on to security applications. And there I was, thinking, seems like Floobs has changed direction since I last talked to some of their people a week ago. Already I was wondering what they were now called. I mean, being called Floobs and doing sort of "mobile CCTV" doesn't quite mix. Oh well. And for what Floobs is doing, and that's in the entertainment space still, their name is catchy enough.
Thu, 06 Mar 2008
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.