I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Daily, I have the chance to go through a ton of content online as I keep myself up-to-date on things. It’s a big part of my job and I really like it. As a side product of this process, I’m left with a lot of interesting content that can’t really be shared on ArcticStartup.

We have a strict editorial policy to blog about internet and mobile startups, news, and anything making noise in those specific industries in Nordics and Baltics (or by founders from the region running businesses elsewhere). It’s worked for us very well. Many investors and entrepreneurs follow us exactly for this reason – we cover something no one else does.

So, I don’t see why we should break something great that works. However, I’ve felt for quite some time that I wanted to share some of the other interesting content I come across in a simple newsletter, optimized for entrepreneurs and their iPads (but there’s no reason it shouldn’t appeal to others as well).

The newsletter is going be published every week on Fridays, so you’ve got interesting content to read over the weekend. The articles are not only beautifully presented in the e-mail, but all the links are rendered for optimum reading experience on your iPad through a Readability conversion process to clear out everything else except the content.

Meet thedigest.

Give it a try, I hope you like it!

ps. Feedback (and article suggestions) is always welcome at info(at)thedige.st. The first issue should be out Friday October 14th. Also, my little project is heavily influenced by the fantastic Hacker Newsletter by Kale Davis.

I realised this today as the publisher of the Steve Jobs biography stated that they will release the book in a matter of weeks instead of the original schedule, when it was due out in the spring time.

This strikes me as odd. I know anyone is able to crunch a bit of time off by working faster for a short period of time, but around 5-6 months? This tells me just how lax the processes are in a larger company, albeit it is between an author and a publisher this time.

No startup is able to run that loosely, efficiency must be built in everything you do. This clearly isn’t the case in larger companies (which we all knew, but this is a great example of it). This is one of the reasons why startups are able to, in some cases, run circles around larger companies.

httpvh://www.youtu.be/qGllzWt0acU

The video above got passed around a bit in my circles in Facebook and wanted to share it to my blog’s readers as well. It really does tell only one thing – Helsinki is a very well connected city when it comes to public transport. I saw a quote earlier somewhere, so I won’t take credit for it, but it summed up the situation pretty nicely.

You’re not stuck in traffic – you are traffic.

I’m an avid user of public transportation – it’s good for the environment and it’s cheap.

For me, Facebook has at least temporarily won the social network wars. I tried to be somewhat active on Google+ in the past, but fragmenting my posts to multiple similar networks didn’t make a lot of sense.

With the recent changes to Facebook, the subscriptions mostly, it has enabled better privacy controls in a simple way. I think Zuck’s also noticed that it’s not just having the features in place, but actually in such a manner that people can use them quickly. The better they are implemented, the more people will post to their friends/subscribers (be they public or private).

With these changes I feel Facebook is seriously competing for focus on Twitter as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter came out with some new improvements in the coming months to counter the improvements Facebook released.

Nevertheless, the long intro to what I actually wanted to state is that I’m going to be focusing my online presence even more towards Facebook in the future with the recent changes. One concrete change to this was the fact that I deleted the link to my Google+ page from my about page.

Feel free to subscribe to my Facebook updates on my Facebook profile.

Shot taken on our way to Kuortane. Blogged from the car. Love my mobile office :)

I really love my job, I really do. It’s a lot of work, but I get to organise cool conferences like Arctic15 and invite the best people there. We had a blast yesterday and I’ve yet to soak all the feedback.

Close to 400 people, from all over Northern Europe. Startups, investors, media, large corporations and students. It was a blast!

I’m thinking of writing a longer post on how we put the event together and what you need to look for in an event like this into a “how-to” guide/e-book. But what I’ll do is that I’ll start it off with a blog post on ArcticStartup in the coming weeks.

However, the feedback has been pretty amazing. I found it slightly odd to receive over 50 people coming to me personally to thank and congratulate ArcticStartup on the great event. Also about 5 people spontaneously came and hugged me to thank for the event. It felt funny, because congratulating is almost like we left the possibility of a great event on luck. When you’ve got everything planned – things have a higher chance of working out. Nevertheless, these people really made my day – I knew we had hit it home with Arctic15.

Also kind of cool was the part where you realise you’re bar hopping with one of the coolest people from San Francisco in the heart of Helsinki at 3am. It was also a privilege to be able to meet all the speakers in person – they’re super nice people, all of them.

The single most important goal I set out for myself at least was that I wanted some of the more important people to tweet/publicly cast their feelings regarding the event (hopefully positive).

I set out to look for feedback from speakers, startups on stage, organisations with a stand/booth, world renown investors from London, smaller mobile investors from London, more investors from London, and perhaps really push it with investors from London, participants from Latvia, participants from Estonia and our biggest sponsors to name a few.

In addition to this, I got about 10 companies telling me they want to be sponsoring Arctic15 next year. That’s pretty cool.

Despite the good feedback from the above parties to name a few – I want to aim very, very high in terms of quality and content with the stuff we do at ArcticStartup. We’ll be conducting a proper feedback round from all the different parties to gather smaller concrete proposals to make such an event still much better for everyone involved. This means, we’ll ask feedback from startups, general attendees, students, startups on stage, speakers, media, sponsors and demo stand people. I really want to push the quality of the work we do for the startups and the community.

What I also want to do in the blog post is to publicly thank companies (lots) who made the event so great and also cast some criticism (just a few) who didn’t quite deliver according to what we agreed.

I’m honored to have been able to organise the event with ArcticStartup. It really wasn’t the burden people think it was, thanks to our wonderful Anna and her team of superstar volunteers.

Signing off with my somewhat unstructured rant, extremely tired, but extremely happy.

I’ve been all week at the Build conference taking place in Anaheim, California this week. I’ve shot quite a few photos here and as I was going through them I came across these two shown below that made me smile. Microsoft has put in a lot of effort to organise the event, and also take extremely good care of the media people here. To build on this – check out the images below.

Developer opportunity

Media opportunity

I reckon the media opportunity at the conference wasn’t bad at all – delicious cake :)

Disclosure: my trip was made possible by Microsoft, but they did not ask for anything in return.

Had dinner in a proper diner/bar tonight. Even though this was about a mile away from the convention centre, they had targeted all their promotion for the “Microsoft attendees” on their menus. Got to love the American passion for marketing.

I’ve been watching the stockmarket quite closely in the recent days and one thing that sends shivers throughout the globe is the imminent Greece default that is looming behind the corner.

While watching stocks, I keep the Bloomberg TV open (fantastic service by the way, it’s free and no ads). Bloomberg TV interviewed some analysts and institutional investors in the US (the market I follow) and they said that Greece’s default is pretty much taken for granted at this point. Many investors were quoting that “the default is imminent, let’s get on with it”.

Another interesting way to put it – which perhaps politicians and investors in Europe should also understand is that instead of talking about interest margins on the Greek Government bonds, they should be turning about the probability of a default. Essentially, it’s just that.

In the image below, one can see that on Friday the market priced the rates on the Greek bonds at a whopping 97.964.

Having said that, the market now believes that the Greece default has a probability of 97.964 percent. I’d say that’s pretty certain.

Bloomberg also stated that German banks have already begun to take precautions regarding the collapse of Greece. They have about 23 billion euros invested in Greece.

Finnish politicians should also start making plans for the Greece default. Why? Because I fear if they continue their stubborn ways the True Finns will yet again continue to increase their seats in the parliament and that should not be allowed to happen at any cost.

About 50 000 people have joined the Facebook page of a 15-year old girl who disappeared over a month ago and was found dead last night. People are grieving over her death with messages on the wall of the Facebook page, but it has also drawn low class comedians to play around with the issue as well. For example images have appeared in the gallery, playing around with her death and joking with the actions leading up to the alleged cause of death.

All I can say is that Finnish yellow press is to blame for the actions taking place on that Facebook page. While supposedly trying to help out in the search to find her, the yellow press has written headlines in the past weeks of all possible viewpoints in the largest font sizes available in an effort to get more pageviews and clicks to sell more advertising. They have made the girl, regardless of her will, a popularity icon that has helped them create a small scale phenomenon.

Media can take seriously disgusting forms sometimes and for some weird reason, the guilty few always hide behind the moral “high ground” given to media in our society. That is, if the time comes to defend their selves.

While media plays a very important role in any society – at least the Finnish yellow press has lost its dignity a long time ago in the search for more pageviews and turned disgustingly brown while doing so.

I flew to Malmö via Copenhagen yesterday and had to pay a quick visit to the mens’ room upon arrival. I picked a toilet randomly, one which seemed to be free. Once I got in, I burst out laughing – Meetin.gs, an online service by a Finnish company seems to have a good influence in the region as I bumped into a sticker regarding. I’m guessing there aren’t many of these around, but I had to leave my own tag there as well – let’s see how many startup stickers that toilet will accumulate over the years :)

Here’s my mobile office, pictured in the image above. I’ve Thinglinked it to explain a little what each item is. I decided to take the picture as I was packing up for tomorrow’s The Conference organised in Malmö. I like to travel light, so that’s pretty much all I intend to carry tomorrow (plus a few essential clothing items – decided to leave those out of the pic).

I’m missing my phone (iPhone 4) from the image as I took the photo with it. Basically with the above setup and my phone, I’m more or less “fully functional” when it comes to working.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShbC5yVqOdI

Danny Macaskill shows some serious skills in this 5-minute video – Industrial Revolutions. It’s got beautiful cinematography and scenery. It’s very much worth the 5 minutes.

I was reading a story on Reuters about comments from Stephen Elop on the Google-Motorola Mobility deal. Then I got to the end of the article.

(Reporting by Jossi Rosendahl. Writing by Sinead Carew. Editing by Robert MacMillan)

Think about it, three people work on a story before it gets published. That’s a lot of workflow, even though I agree that you most likely get a lot more focus on quality. Nevertheless, I can’t help to again wonder how stubborn larger media companies seem from where I’m standing.

I’m liking this guy already.

I’ve wondered about this in the past as well, but Google’s design of its user interface is so much better on the iPad than through a regular browser. I’m wondering if they’re trapped in the current design by their legacy – they’re unable to change it so dramatically.

I did a quick ride this evening to try and burn a few of the calories I consumed this morning in Fazer Cafe (not sure 30 mins on a bike will do any justice though). I haven’t really blogged about Sports Tracker, but I’ve used it a bit over the years.

When the company spun off from Nokia some time ago, it has come along way since. Back then the app was only available for Nokia phones, but today they support iPhones, Androids and naturally Nokia phones also. While the site is still all flash, it’s really user friendly and you can get a lot of data out of it (and export the GPX as well as embed the logged training, see below).

But it has to be said, the app is completely free and for a free app – it’s probably the best one out there that does the job. If you haven’t tried it out yet, do so.

Some of the cool features I personally like are:

• the accuracy of the GPS tracking and the amount of data points the app collects, it makes the whole route extremely smooth.
• all the basic data it collects; duration, distance, avg. speed, etc. You might take this for granted, but there are apps that don’t do this.
• privacy controls and sharing – you’re able to keep your diary to yourself, share it with your friends or the whole world. I love the ability to embed your stuff elsewhere as well, like I did below.

In short – it’s a really great app and if you’re into logging location based sports and/or activities, you should be using Sports Tracker.

Had a brilliant breakfast today at Fazer Cafe with Noora. Thanks Nana and Vesa, an excellent gift! Very much appreciated.