antti.vilpponen.net

Churchill Club’s annual look at some of the successful internet companies in 2006. “Five Silicon Valley entrepreneurs discuss the critical success factors and challenges to reach the promised land.” (via Signum sine tinnitu)

Moderator: Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures

Speakers:

• Lauren Elliott, Founder, Personal News Network
• Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO, LinkedIn
• Joe Kraus, Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot
• Daniel Mattes, Co-Founder and CTO, Jajah
• Alex Welch, Co-Founder and CEO, Photobucket

Viewing time: 1h 29 min

CNET has an article on businesses in SecondLife. Ciroula, a business consultant, is starting a business in the virtual world consulting entrepreneurs on variety of things. According Ciroula’s research, there are about 3100 businesses looming in SecondLife and there are “only” about 300 000 to 400 000 active members in there. You do the math when the population is a few million :-)

(via Loic)

I just re-designed my website’s layout. It’s now a bit more… hmm, reserved and professional perhaps. I also updated the WordPress engine to 2.0.4. I also let go of my flickr photos as I recently changed my mobile phone (and the Nokia 9300i doesn’t have a camera).

Comments? :-)

Update: and I’m back with the old… didn’t like the new one even myself :)

I went to see Matt talk at an Aula event tonight with a friend. Matt has been working for example for BBC as a software engineer putting all their “back catalogue” (as they say in the media business) online into a searchable archive that is interlinked with lots of hyperlinks. He’s talk was about Open Data, which is sort of a mixture of Open Source and Open Content. Yet another interesting talk and definitely worth while making the effort.

I also managed to talk to Janne briefly about the music business, DRM and open content - have to catch up on that later!

Update: There’s now a video available here.

I read an interesting article on digitoday about a Harris Interactive survey on how Americans see games as entertainment. Here’s a little summary:

• If people over 18 had an hour of spare time, 31% would rather play games online than watch television.
• Of females over 40, 67% play casual games at least four times a week.
• Of females over 40, 6 out of 10 rather play games than watch television.
• Females over 40 see casual games equally interesting as movies.

Games are a very appealing form of entertainment to a growing group of people. We see this in our own portfolio and statistics. This also makes games a very interesting form of media to advertise on - players are glued to the brands for tens of minutes.

Now this is pretty cool. It’s not exactly ingame advertising, but more of a mash-up in my opinion. Is this the first time a big company has done something like this?

Last week I got an album, Poor Seamus - Sydney 5 Miles, that will be on sale in Finland on the 13th of September (don’t worry, it was 100% legal :) ). I have listened to the CD and then had to go through it again. I’m pretty sure these guys will break it big with this album. If I’d have to compare their melodic rock to something, Laura Närhi’s Kemopetrol would probably be closest with regard to genre.

Good stuff - 100%.

The BMW X-5 needs a parking assisstant, because then you could avoid issues like the one shown above. My friend’s bike was reversed into by a BMW X-5 which then fell on my bike - causing damage to both bikes. I will have to start the claims procedure on monday but I’m pretty sure it will already ruin the rest of the riding season for me. Damn it. A good indication of the power was that there was a 5 cm scratch on the tarmac next to both bikes’ stands, it wasn’t a very light push.

…and yes, it was a woman. (pun intended.)

Back in uni when I started to talk about internet stuff to my fellow students they considered me a nutcase being interested in all this stuff so much. Today, when I sat down with our site and flash gurus … well, let’s just say there weren’t that many spots I could open my mouth and contribute something useful to the conversation. These guys are good and when I say this, I mean it.

In Assembly 2006, the convention that gathers the best of the best in Finland on the computer front, three of our guys belonged to the group that won a browser demo competition - all of them hardcore flash coders. Check it out here (link fixed - thanks Sri!).

Steve Rubel has blogged about a WSJ article on the effect new media has had on individuals on the internet. An interesting read.