antti.vilpponen.net

One of the best online education video resources I’ve found to date: The Stanford Educators Corner. A huge array of videos from world acknowledged speakers.

Strongly suggested.

You seldom find good stuff. Tonight I’ve found it I reckon. It rocks :)

Update: As the sharpest have realised the time of the post - I wasn’t at my best after a long night out. :)

Kauppalehti “reports” that Universal, the movie company, states the decline in agricultural revenue is due to roaming P2P networks. The logic is that as people go to movies less, there is less popcorn to be sold. Mmm’kay. The P2P networks that are in question include (seriously, I’m not making this up): Torrent, Napster and eMule. Last time I checked Napster was legally in the music business. Oh well, small misquotes happen to all of us…

Read the full article here (and here’s a screencapture to prove it).

Janne Waltonen ja Matti Djateu bloggaavat San Franciscon Web 2.0 Exposta Omasana.fi-palvelussa. Kannattaa lukea ja seurata mitä ison lätäkön tuolla puolen turinoidaan “kakspistenollasta”.

(Just sharing some links with my Finnish readers - 2 marketing dudes are blogging about the Web 2.0 Expo in SF)

As an additional tip: MindMeister - a social mindmapping tool. Looks pretty neat, haven’t used it before…have to dig in some time in the near future.

Sorry Roxie, but this leaves me wondering about the Americans :) Helsingin Sanomat published some results from different studies that quite honestly are shocking:

• According to the State Education Study, about 33% of Washington’s Washington D.C.’s citizens are illiterate.
• About one third of Americans are scientifically illiterate, meaning they are unable to understand simple scientific material for example from a newspaper says the US Science Academy (own translation)
• John D. Miller from the Michigan State University rightly argues that this could be the reason why most of the Americans are unable to understand evolution, DNA or global warming.
• About 20% of Americans believe that the sun revolves around Earth.

Sigh….

Sometimes customer service just works. Read this entry on Nintendo Wii customer service in the US.

Good news for once. BBC reports that some of the largest companies in the US have told President Bush that he must push government actions to stop climate change. The companies in question have formed a partnership to cut greenhouse gases by 60% until 2050. That’s a pretty damn respectful goal. Nice to see some energy companies react as well.

I’ve been trying to fight a cold today, on the first true day of winter in Helsinki. The temperature was about -13 in the morning - the coldest in a long time, as I walked to work. This winter has by no means been a normal one. Even though I’m a 110% a summer person - it’s about time we got some snow.

A set of companies belonging to the RIAA sue the Russian AllofMP3.com for a whopping 1.65 trillion USD. That’s a lot of money. BBC, for example has the story, but let me compare this number to some other figures:

1. The Russian GDP is appr. $1.576 trillion (src)
2. According to RIAA, music industry losses are $4.2 billion because of piracy (src) - so AllofMP3.com is sued for 392 years worth of damages.
3. The world music sales were 20,795 billion USD in 2005 (src) - AllofMP3.com is sued for 79 years’ of music sales (if they had been this big ever since)

Very reasonable, right?

I’m all for commercial music, but when things get this out of hands it’s just ridiculous.

There’s an excellent speech written by the CEO of Ooga Labs, a small (but extremely successful) start-up located in California, for graduates of a ‘06 class:

Don’t make my mistake!

So you’re going to take a cube job with slow Microsoft, bureaucratic Oracle, or with some boring financial company?

Why don’t you just shoot yourself in the head?

C’mon! Do you want spend all of your life wearing modest habits of charcoal grey, driving your Volvo on the salty roads of the drab East Coast, paying 50% of your earnings to taxes, and hanging out with narrow minded people, congratulating yourselves on improving a feature of a widget of version 12.1b.4 of some software, or maybe improving the financial return of some rich bald dude in Greenwich, CT by 0.2% above the S&P Index?

Has no one taken you aside and said, “Wait! You’re about to waste 10 years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is crap!”

No one did to me either when I went to Princeton, and it took me until I was 31 to get my ass out to San Francisco and do tech start ups. Don’t make my mistake. Save yourself now. Even if you don’t work for me. I mean it.

Out here, you think about the future. Out here, you are surrounded by colorful, dynamic technologists and entrepreneurs who are really making a difference, pushing the edge.

Most people think that working for a big or known company will give them good experience. That’s kind of like saying learning to sit still for dental surgery is good experience. Sure, it’s an experience, but there are life paths where you don’t have to have dental surgery, or work for a big company, to have the best life. In fact, I would argue that you learn the wrong things working for a big company, and that it’s actually not good experience. A good experience is when you really make something happen in the world. Big companies teach you how to work through layers of bureaucracy and how to solve problems in very risk-averse ways — in short, how to make something happen in their organization. A big company is not the safe career choice. It’s the risky choice. It risks your mind and your life.

Oh, and one more thing. Initially, your friends and family may not understand why you didn’t take that “safe” cube-job with the company whose name they know, but in two years they will understand. They will love using the websites you build, and they will talk often with their friends about it. They will see you having a vibrant life, pushing the edge of what’s happening, and they’ll be proud to know you.

Take a few minutes and reconsider your first “starting point” out of college. It sets up a direction that takes some time to change. Aim yourself in the right direction. Again, you don’t have to come to Ooga Labs, just get to the Bay Area and join a startup. You will never regret it.

I agree with this 100%. I took a chance and joined a small, but growing start-up in Helsinki - Apaja Online Entertainment. I was the 16th person to start working there, today we are close to 40. Work has been dynamic, demanding, challenging but most importantly very rewarding in terms of experience and challenge.

From year to year, the best of business graduates want to join large Finnish companies and work in a cubicle performing that routine job from day-to-day. However, I’d argue it’s more common among tech graduates to found their own company or join a start-up - they get to do the coding and designing they’ve always wanted to do. How many successful engineers do people worldwide know that came out of Finland, couple perhaps - how about successful business men?

New York Times has an article on how 22-year old Mark Zucherman has been offered close to 900 million dollars for his social networking site Facebook. He turned down an offer of $750m offer from Viacom in January as he was asking for 2 billion USD.

Social networking sites aren’t going to be just internet sites in the near future, they are going to platforms where millions of people spend time.

(via Guardian)