antti.vilpponen.net

Antti Akonniemi, co-founder of Kisko Labs and a partner in crime with me in Kisko Ventures, writes about failed projects in his blog. He talks about the lessons learned from one of their projects called aikaa.fi which aimed at solving a problem for smaller companies that in the end wasn’t such a big problem perhaps.

Very few companies are able to pull off blog posts like these. To go ahead and state you were wrong at some stage is incredibly powerful and very human. Yet, very few of us are able to do so.

I love working with these guys. Their honesty and openness in projects is a great builder of loyalty – one of the reasons why I joined them in Kisko Ventures and furthermore one of the reasons why we continue to work with them in ArcticStartup.

I finally managed to finish Dan Senor’s and Saul Singer’s Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. It is truly an outstanding book, I have to say. I wrote about it before in my blog and I knew back then it was good, but boy was it good. It was based on over 100 interviews (disclosure: honored to be one of those among the interviewed) and shines with the amount of information it portrays.

Dan Senor and Saul Singer have managed to write the book in an extremely interesting manner. Despite the story going through various grapevines of Israel’s history it all comes together nicely in the end to create a complete, holistic story and a good understanding of the issues behind Israel’s current economic state.

I won’t spoil it for the rest of you, but strongly invite you to read the book. This is something I honestly hope was made a compulsory read for the Finnish people working with our so called “innovation system”. We have a lot of issues Israel is looking forward to, for example the high living standards among all of our population. However, despite the high number of patents and innovations created in our society – we have utterly failed to capitalise on them.

The unfortunate answer from the politicians seem to usually be the easy way out – increase funding for innovation activities, ie. throw more money on a system that clearly isn’t working. Dan Senor and Saul Singer have done an extraordinaire job in writing the book and giving a relatively detailed and complete view into the Israeli way of startups.

Five out of five stars (and I’d given that without my interview too – easily).

I had heard of Audible a long time ago, but had never given it a try. A few weeks ago after listening to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech and hearing about Audible’s offer for new subscribers I thought of testing it out. It was a 14-day trial with 2 books I could listen to for free. The first book I downloaded was Rework and the second one, a book I already own, Startup Nation.

There are a lot of upsides to listening to audiobooks. I’ve become so busy in the last few years that I seldom have any energy to read books anymore. It’s a real pity and something that I want to change when it becomes possible.

However with audiobooks, I’m able to listen to books when I’m in between meetings for example or simply walking to catch the bus. It’s great for this and I’ve realised I can devour quite a bit of them in this format.

Not all is sparkly and well however. While I very much like the concept and would like to keep subscribing, I find it hard mainly for two reasons: catalogue size and DRM.

Audible is probably the largest audiobook store online, but it still lacks a lot of choice. I read mostly, if not only, business books and having looked at their recent listings of business books I could not go on for paying something “just in case” they happened to come up with good content. I could have gone on for a month or two more to listen to the books they had in their catalogue that I’d want to read, but I couldn’t justify paying for it.

Secondly is the issue of DRM. Having launched OlenRikollinen – the largest anti-DRM (and copyright legislation renewal) movement in Finland during the previous decade I thought the problem of DRM would have gotten less annoying as years went on.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. I’m very much in love with the Nokia N900. It’s a kick ass phone, built on open source standards that enables developers to build cool stuff on it. Equally unfortunate is that Audible does not support the device with their native application, thus cutting out the usage of the device unless you work your way round the DRM.

I’ve listened to audiobooks and podcasts on the device with the great Panucci app. It runs an array of formats, but does not support the Audible format. This means I’ve literally had to strip the DRM from the files, as a paying customer, to be able to listen to my purchases the way I want. How did I do this? I listened to the audiobook in iTunes over night with the Mac muted, while Audio Hijack recorded the audio into an mp3-file.

So all in all, there’s a lot of good to like in Audible, but for the above mentioned issues of catalogue size and DRM – it’s not for me. At least for now.

Thanks Audible, it was fun while it lasted.

I heard from our tech guru Karri Saarinen, how to sync your N900 and Google Calendar. Before this, I had my iCal synced to my Google Calendar and wondered what the N900 would mean to the initial setup. To my surprise, adding the Google Calendar – N900 sync worked perfectly and I wanted to share this with others as I’m sure many are looking for a way to keep their N900s in sync with iCal and Google Calendar, since Nokia doesn’t support this by default yet.

While I followed this piece of advice on setting up your sync, I found it a bit difficult and thought of writing my own simpler way.

The requirements

• N900 – please update it to the latest Maemo version
• Macintosh with iCal, synced to your Google account (get instructions for this from Google Calendar help)

Step 1

Go to your settings and find the “Mail for exchange” -button under Connectivity.

Step 2

You should see a view like this. Click Next to continue setup.

Step 3

Enter your e-mail address to the top field (I have tested this with Google accounts and thus I can’t guarantee this works with Google Apps accounts). Enter your password and check the username is correct. Leave the domain part blank. Press next to continue to the next step.

Step 4

For the server, enter m.google.com and make sure the port is 443 and secure connection is checked. Once you’ve entered these – press next.

Step 5

When you get to the step where you need to choose what to synchronise – only check to sync calendar and tasks. Press next to move forward.

It might give you a warning, click the screen to “ok” it and move forward.

Step 6

You get to this page, and you’re almost set. I strongly suggest you add the synchronised content to a new calendar, so click Advanced settings.

Step 7

Scroll down to the part where you see Calendar and tasks. In there, click Calendar and choose New. Once set – click Save. (Note: you won’t be able to name the calendar or anything in this step – you’ll have to do this from the Calendar settings)

Step 8

Once you’ve move forward from the Advanced settings, your N900 starts syncing with Google. This might take some time so give it a minute or so at least (depending on how much there is to sync).

Step 9

This is where you end up after setting up the Sync between N900 and Google. You can set the automatic syncs from the system settings under Mail for exchange if you want to set sync intervals during weekdays for example.

Now, when you add something to iCal it should automatically now sync it to Google and when your N900 has reached its sync interval (or you wish to sync it manually) – it will update itself with the new material.

All done!
If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have successfully setup your sync between Nokia N900 and Google Calendar (and iCal – if you have it synced, like I have). I’m not an expert in this, but let me know how this works for you!

Enjoy!

ArcticStartup won an innovation journalism prize yesterday in the award ceremony organised by the Finnish Society for Innovation Journalism. Good week!