In the last post I didn’t say that much about what I was going to do. However, if you’ve been following my Foursquare updates, you probably have noticed I’m checking at 13KB, also known as Bolder & Kisko Labs office. So the news are: I’m now a partner at Kisko Labs.

“Clients are the difference between design and art.”
– Michael Bierut

I’ve been following Kisko Labs from the start and working with the team on ArcticStartup projects. I really appreciate the fact that they thrive to be something different than your common software vendor. Helping the client to get their idea off the ground and not just building some software with a spec.

Although my role is more on design side of things, I aim to make things that people need, want or like. For that you need great development and design, but usually know even more about if we’re building the right things, in the right way, what things to measure and how take care of all the aspects of the service, not just the view of the app in your browser.

Anyway, I’m excited to help and learn more on building new things and I hope we at Kisko Labs can be your startup team or the skunkworks for your company.

For some time I’ve been thinking a bit about my long-term and how to focus or simplify my life more. I always try to do too many things which is fun, but also distracting.

One change that came from this thinking is, about two weeks ago, with a considerable regret, I gave resignation for my job at Flowdock (or Nodeta). So this Friday, 23 July, will be my last day.
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I gave my Startup Tales talk for New Practice students at Turku School of Economics. New Practice is an interesting joint course between Turku School of Economics and Aalto University of Art and Design:

“You will come up with a completely new business idea, learn deep collaboration with design students and come to understand the design and innovation process on a new level.”

I was happy to see how hands on the course seemed and how engaged the students were with their ideas. People seemed to have real ownership and passion which you don’t see that often in school projects.

Anyway, it was great to help out and here are the slides and the stuff mentioned:
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(My “Tales from The Startup” presentation that I gave last Wednesday got featured on Slideshare, was tweeted about, and just in four days it collected almost a thousand views. For me, those were pretty surprising results for a presentation that I just intended to put out there to help the listeners focus on the presentation, not writing stuff down. So thanks everyone for your attention and hopefully you got something out of it.)

Anyway, in the presentation I made a statement that “You don’t need a business plan” which generated some response. To clear that out, even I do believe that, I don’t think that business plans are completely worthless. The current way of making them might be. › Continue reading

I gave a talk at Nesu Vaasa Spring Conference. Here are the slides and the stuff mentioned.

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This was orginally posted to ArcticStartup on February 12, 2010

The marketplace is crowded with products with no soul. I’ve always wondered who creates the masses of these terrible products and why they don’t they fix them: startups that run for months or years with horrible user experience.

It just seems that with a little bit of effort it could’ve been much better. In today’s world, you actually might need that extra effort.
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Recently I’ve been travelling a lot between my current place to live and study, Vaasa and my place to work, Helsinki. I travel mostly by train so I can work during the trips. For a couple days stay, I try to manage with a backpack packed with the essential things above + one set of extra clothing. If I stay longer, I can always buy new clothes or other stuff.

After a while you start to wonder what are all these other things in your life for.

Initially I started this as a comment for Taneli’s blog entry, but made this as a post after realizing how much I wanted to say about this.

Today in Finland you can hear the word ”innovation” coming from politicians and other officials mouth almost more than “healthcare” and “education”. As much as politicians have something to do with actually curing and educating people they have to do with innovating stuff. The difference is that they know what a school or hospital looks like, but probably they don’t know what an innovation is even it was shoved in their throats.
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Mindtrek Conference was again held in Tampere, 7-9.10.2008. Although it was already the 12th time, it was the first time for me. Mindtrek Conference describes itself as ”12th international digital media & business conference, leading Nordic social media event” which I think is accurate enough.
At least on this year the whole atmosphere was very fresh and startupish, which is always a good thing. You could notice that semi-old-school and large companies were missing just by looking around the event. I think few topics came up more than others in conversations and other instances.
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As some of you already know, I recently joined in the ranks of ArcticStartup. As the same time I though it was the time for my own blog as well. I try to keep the startup news updates at ArcticStartup and my opinions and discussion here.