Blyk – a new, free mobile operator – announced this morning it will launch in the UK in mid-2007. Blyk offers free calls and texts in exchange for ads pushed to the handset.
The youth-oriented operator was founded by former Nokia President Pekka Ala-Pietilä and his college buddy Antti Öhrling, who heads an advertising agency. The duo recruited Marko Ahtisaari to manage Blyk’s brand and design.
Blyk’s addressing an obvious need: mobile communication is still overpriced and nobody has yet disrupted it the way low-cost airlines like Southwest and EasyJet disrupted the airline industry.
The future for Blyk looks bright. The ad-based model so clearly trumps the prepaid/subscription model from a teen’s perspective, that with decent marketing it shouldn’t have trouble attracting a customer base.
A more vexing question is how the text ads will work. Sure the Net Generation is accustomed to ads online. But they’re also accustomed to filtering the spam from their inboxes.
A lot of that boils down to relevance and creativity. With the information Blyk gathers about its customers, it has the potential to target its ads very precisely. The challenge they pose their advertisers is: now that we offer you the means to reach this audience, can you engage it with equal originality?
Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is the guest in the latest episode of Janne’s and my Verkko 2 podcast. We talk about the history and future of the wiki as a collaborative tool. Ward’s interview is in English – if you’re interested but don’t speak Finnish, just skip the first couple of minutes where Janne and I yak in Finnish.
John Buckman, CEO and Founder of Magnatune, will give an Aula Talk entitled “Is There a Record Company That Is Not Evil?” this evening 7pm at Korjaamo (Töölönkatu 51 B, Helsinki).
John’s company Magnatune is at the forefront of the new wave of distributors focusing on Creative Commons-licensed music.
The topic this time is ‘harnessing collective intelligence.’ It wasn’t hard to come up with a real-world example. The Finnish sci-fi parody film Star Wreck by director Timo Vuorensola and producer Samuli Torssonen has been downloaded over 4 million times, and translated to over 20 languages. Our studio guest Timo Vuorensola estimates over 300 people have contributed 3D models, translations, promotion, etc.
We had a chat with Timo about the future of peer-produced & peer-distributed film and wrap up with musings of how this relates to the broader change in the social nature of the internet. “If King Tut lived today, he’d build his pyramid online.”
David Homik has a nice post on VentureBlog about the problems incubators and government grants create for startups. Both have played a visible role in Europe’s strategy for bringing about an entrepreneurial culture. My past experience at an incubator, at a corporate venturing unit, and presently as an entrepreneur in a country where government grants are a common source of new business funding corroborate Homik’s reasoning that both can be recipes for disaster. Homik writes:
Traditional incubators and economic grants can do more harm than good to a startup culture when there is not already a well-engrained and robust entrepreneurial ecosystem upon which these startups may grow and thrive.
The question that logically follows from Homik’s arguing is, how might a well-engrained and robust entrepreneurial ecosystem arise if not by channeling resources into incubators and government support? I think it’s reasonable to assume this requires instruments that are perhaps not financial as much as they are cultural in nature. Entrepreneurial activity is linked with a culture of taking things apart, making ad-hoc fixes, and a general inclination to come up with customized local solutions to problems that have already been ‘solved’. Europe’s got to rediscover this in its tradition if it wants to become the ecosystem Homik points to.
Ulla and I are heading stateside today. We’ll be in New York tomorrow, at FOO Camp in Sebastopol this weekend, and in the San Francisco Bay Area next week. We’ll stop in NYC again on Saturday 2 Sep on our way back to Helsinki.
Anyone in SF or NYC area ping me on email/SMS if you’d like to hook up.
In the talk, Biddulph describes how the Open Data Movement emerged from Open Source. He discusses the relationship between Open Data, Open Content, and Open Source, and gives examples of open data services that he has helped to create. The talk is followed by a Q&A.
Thanks to Matt and everyone who showed up for a fantastic evening. Stay tuned for more Aula Talks!
Petteri Koponen, who I co-founded Jaiku with, is now blogging on Vox as Serial Trier. He’s punning on the Finnish expression for ‘entrepreneur’ and I’m glad he’s got the chutzpah to do that. No intention to blow the national trumpet but I do find Finnish expressions have a tendency to cut through the fluff: entrepreneurship, indeed, is about trying.
Petteri notes that the local startup scene is waking back to life. I share that belief and would add that the new wave of ‘triers’ is better positioned because they can build on a generation of entrepreneurs like him who’ve already once been around the block. The conditions for current-day style entreprenurship only really came about in Finland after the Soviet collapse.
Here’s Petteri:
There does not exist a good word for entrepreneur in Finnish. The closest one is “yrittäjä”, which can be translated as “trier”. According to Oxford American Dictionaries, a trier is “a person who always makes an effort, however unsuccesful they may be”. It is no wonder Finland was recently ranked the 26th country (out of 35 countries) in the ratio of entrepreneurs/triers per capita, which was less than 5%. It is encouraging, however, that the general start-up scene in Finland seems to be revitalizing and there are already a few success stores such as Habbo/Sulake and a number of game or 3D graphics boutiques.