The Aula site is down due to a disk problem – the hosting company is working to fix it and hopefully we’ll be back up and running soon.

Marko Ahtisaari and I are organizing the Aula 2006 – Movement event in Helsinki next week. This will be the largest Aula event yet, and we’ve moved it to a larger venue at Bio Rex to accommodate as many participants as we can.

The theme ‘movement’ points to mobility meeting web 2.0, technologies as social movements, and the overlapping between physical and virtual worlds. On a personal level movement is about not staying still but taking action to shape the future.

The keynote speakers are Clay Shirky on situated software, Alastair Curtis on mobile 2.0, Martin Varsavsky on Fon, and Joi Ito on World of Warcraft. 3 Quarks Daily is posting in-depth profiles about them over the next days in anticipation of the event.

The second day of the event is an invitation only gathering. Speakers include Tyler Brule the founder of Wallpaper, Dan Gillmor author of We Media, Dan Hill of the BBC, Saul Griffith of Squid Labs, Henrik Torstensson of Stardoll; and Danah Boyd on MySpace, Adam Greenfield on the ethics of ubiquitous computing, Arwen O’Reilly on the DIY renaissance, Timo Arnall on interfaces for the local, Aditya Dev Sood on Indian hardware hackers, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Matt Jones, Justin Hall, Thomas Crampton, Cory Doctorow, and many others.

The talks start at 5pm on Wednesday, June 14th at Bio Rex. Admission is free, and there’s no need to register in advance so come early to ensure seating. The open party will start at 9pm in Ahjo Bar in Hotel Klaus K. The conference dinner will be at restaurant Via.

See you there!

Last weekend I went out on a kite boat in the North Bay with Saul Griffith of Squid Labs and Tim Anderson and other friends.

It’s like kite surfing except with a sailboat. The kite boat goes faster than a standard katamaran and you get very wet. It’s totally awesome. We used a 21 meter kite that Saul designed for his sister’s company Monkey Kites.

We bought two beat-up Hoby Cat hulls from Craigslist and Tim, Nick Papadakis and Saul put the first boat together on Saturday in the Squid Labs garage. Tim wrote a kite boat how-to on Instructables using the photos Ulla and I took. Tim also does other unconventional sailing. He wrote an incredible story on how he tried to sail to Cuba.

On Sunday I went out on the kite boat with Saul and Patrick another Squid Labs friend. The wind was stronger and after some wrestling shoulder-deep in the water we got the kite fastened to the boat. As soon as we climbed aboard the boat shot off like a bullet. We jigged for a while before the rudder snapped and Saul and Patrick had to manouver the boat back to the beach.

Saul fixed the rudder with some wood and inner tubes and soon they were off again.

A little while ago Janne Jalkanen asked me if I’d partner up with him to create a Finnish-language podcast about the second generation of the Web. I thought it’d be a good idea especially since Finland is strong on mobile, and mobility and the Web are now starting to integrate in cool new ways.

This week I was over at Tim O’Reilly‘s house in Sebastopol, so I asked Tim for an interview for the podcast and he agreed. I recorded the podcast while we were unwinding in the hot tub.

Update: my iPod didn’t save the audio file. Either I did something wrong or it’s a problem with the disk or the Belkin mic/software.

Everyone in the O’Reilly family is doing something interesting: Tim’s wife Christine is writing and directing a play that will debut in August; their daughter Arwen is a brilliant editor at Make: and Arwen’s younger sister has a band, Feathers Family, whose album was recently reviewed in the Rolling Stone. Tim himself is a unique mix of hippie and entrepreneur. If you don’t know Tim, read Steven Levy’s short piece about him in Wired.

The most interesting part of the interview was Tim’s vision about the future of the Web. Tim’s vision has slightly evolved since the publication of his canonical Web 2.0 article. The top three blips on his radar right now are business applications, multiple devices, and virtual worlds.

Tim’s main argument is that the Web (and the internet more broadly) should be understood as one single plaftorm the same way that Windows is a platform for the desktop. The applications that succeed are the ones that extend the platform by adding some capability to it that was previously missing. The applications that fail are the silos that don’t share their data.

Up until now, online business applications have been mainly silos. But the platform logic extends to them too. In Tim’s view it doesn’t matter if your networked application plays music or does inventory management – it’s more fit to survive if other applications depend on it. That’s why he believes the B2B field is going to get Web 2.0-ified over the next couple of years.

The second point is multiple devices. For example, Tim uses a device that displays the real-time Bay Area traffic data. He could get the same information on his smartphone but the single-purpose device is more convenient. As the price of memory and wireless connectivity drops, Tim predicts we’ll see more handheld devices that deliver an optimized ready-to-hand experience for online applications.

The third point is virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are changing from games to “places”. We’re already seeing this in Second Life and Google’s release of SketchUp takes this to the next level by enabling people to place 3D models in Google Earth. You can show up at the virtual place or the physical location. For instance, Make: Magazine has an area in Second Life, and according to Tim, when someone shows up there, Senior Editor Phil Torrone gets a ping telling him who’s there.

I just booked flights to San Francisco and Seattle, leaving on Friday. Ulla is going to launch the Thinglink beta at Maker Faire on Saturday. Coolio!

Ulla booked us a room at this wacky hotel in San Francisco for the weekend. I don’t know where we’ll stay after that. On May 5th we’ll go to Seattle and attend MSR’s Social Computing Symposium.

I have very little planned so let me know if you want to meet up to talk biz, go skateboarding, debate social theory or just hang out in the Bay Area next week or the following week.

I did something that sounds completely nuts. I resigned from my position at Nokia Multimedia after just six weeks. That so because it turned out unfeasible to do what I consider sensible there. Better to acknowledge it in good spirit. There are some good people there and we remain friends.

Guess it’s time to try and make meaning.

Ulla and I will run an introductory course on Web 2.0 and recommendation-based markets at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki on Friday. The course is for anyone who is wondering how the Web might affect the design and marketing of their product or service. It will probably benefit designers, consultants, marketers, and general managers across a wide range of industries. The course fee is 265 euros. The language will be Finnish. There are still a few places left – sign up here.

On March 1st I joined Nokia as Senior Product Manager, Internet Handhelds. I’m based in Helsinki. In Nokia’s org I work in the Convergence Products Business Program, which is part of the Multimedia group.

I’ll be responsible for the development of new Nokia products based on the open source Linux software architecture developed for the Nokia 770 internet tablet.

Analysis on Nokia’s Convergence Products act in Business Week last month:

One way or another, the 770 is a sharp break from Nokia’s past that points the way to a dramatically different future.

Here’s a link to the article.

Ray Ozzie is showing a demo of ‘Live Clipboard‘ here at ETech. It’s a way to copy structured (for instance, microformatted) data from a web page and paste it to another web service or desktop app while keeping the structure intact.

Some things this enables him to show:
– Copying an event from Eventful to your desktop calendar so it automagically gets placed in the proper date & time
– Copying your profile from MSN Spaces to Facebook, with the custom field for ‘location’ getting added to the profile
– Copying billing & shipping address information from the clipboard to an e-commerce site

This is going to significantly improve the Web-to-desktop app user experience. Here are screencasts of the demo. The work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike.

Microsoft got itself one hell of a CTO when it acquired Ozzie’s Groove Networks last year.

A free public Wi-Fi network will open in Helsinki in the beginning March, reports Helsingin Sanomat today. The network will cover the cafés and boutiques around the central Esplanadi park.

This good news to anyone wishing to access the internet wirelessly in Helsinki, where free Wi-Fi is practically nonexistent. In a surprising departure from the open access approach of neighboring cities Turku, Tampere, and Tallinn, the mayor of Helsinki has taken a stand against open wireless networks.

The open network is the accomplishment of a private individual, former Nokia CEO Kalle Isokallio, who grew frustrated with Helsinki’s Wi-Fi aversion. Isokallio funds the operation together with a restaurant chain and Fujitsu.

“I wanted to show that this can be built as a one-man operation. It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of will”, Isokallio is quoted saying.