Image by petrasoderling

This week I had the privilege to attend to Mobile Brain Bank Africa event where people interested in doing things mobile in Africa gathered together to network and hear some pretty interesting presentations and pitches on things about the mobile scene in Africa.

What made this really special for me was that I was able to attend the event with my partners and friends from Tanzania who just happened to visit us at Tampere at the same time. Special thanks goes to the organizer Petra Söderling. I hope we can spread the MoBB message further.

But, I’m not writing this post just for chitchatting. I’d also want to share some ideas and thoughts on the event and from the later discussions with my Tanzanian partners (who found the event very interesting and useful).

African + (your country here) Collaboration

I believe that, if we Europeans or who ever who want to do business in Africa and create those awesome mobile or other successes, we ought to listen to more of the people who actually live there and understand the local culture[s]. We should also try to do more joint ventures with people who know the local markets and have real passion for business.

And with ‘passion for business’ I’m not referring to some negative force driven by greed or the need to exploit. Like I believe Esko Aho said so nicely in his presentation (which was actually a lot better that I could’ve thought this kind of corporate presentation could be) “People tend to feel that ‘business’ is always something nasty or dirty, but it doesn’t need be that way”. And I believe this too. The times are changing, for example things like CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) are slowly raising their head and the social media driven openness doesn’t keep people quiet anymore.

I didn’t want to say anything about the aid issues in this post, but these things go together so I have to say this: I believe that international collaboration with local entrepreneurs and developers who really want to do business and have the capability or potential for this, is more sustainable way than any plain aid can ever be. And after what I’ve read and talked with many people, I’m not alone with my opinion.

Africa is (your version here)

I sometimes get a bit frustrated when talking to people who seem to know or have strong opinions what Africa is, even without ever being there.

What is Africa anyway? What is Europe? As there is no one Europe, there is no one Africa. Visit Morocco, Tanzania, Nigeria or South Africa. There are great differences in everything, from culture to business, even inside the countries themselves.

I love the writings of Anver Versi, the Chief Editor of African Business, and advice everyone to read them. Not just people who live outside Africa, but also Africans themselves. You can find many interesting articles from his profile for example the branding Africa – but there’s more in the AB magazine. Like said, perception is many times in the eye of the beholder.

Cross-field Networking Events

In order to create innovative new products which can actually benefit wider public [than just the geeks], we need more cross-cultural networking events like MoBBAfrica. One question from the audience stayed in my mind. It was about “I’d like to see health care apps and services in Mobile”.

This clearly presents one problem we often face: people of same feather flock together. People among us who are not so tech-oriented, don’t often know what’s out there and sometimes developers who have the ability to do things don’t hear about the needs these people could convey. We need more cross-pollinating in this.

Every innovation and creative guru and book out there can tell you this same thing: innovations are often born when different fields, different kinds of people with different interests and personalities come together. This is also a key thing that larger corporations of the modern world should take heed of: if your professionals are grunting to each other instead of talking and creating, you are in trouble.

Here were some initial thoughts that I was left with after the event. If you’re interested in reading more about the event and the topics, here’s the direct URL to the Mobile Brain Bank Africa’s site where you can find more blog posts and interesting links: www.mobilebrainbank.org/Africa.html

Some really neat new things are [again] taking place due to the summer happenings in Dar es Salaam and what is growing now after them. Also other interesting things are happening in Tampere because of some re-organizing of things. More about these all when there’s something more concrete to tell.

Some interesting events related to Africa are also taking place during this Fall, links to a couple of those below to all interested in the topic.

Events:

Afrikka – mahdollisuuksien maanosa – Helsinki, September 1st

Mobile Brain Bank Africa – Helsinki, September_30th

Sami Inkinen – Mobile Cloud Apps

“I’ve always been doing cloud computing” Larry Ellison.

If you want to have a widely distributed app, you should think of doing it to mobile web. Browsers are already good enough, so usually it’s safe to think of doing this.

Some figures:

• Total 325 000 web sites optimized for touch mobile usage
• 200 000 mobile apps available from iPhone, Ovi, Android and Blackberry app stores (ABI Research, March 2010)
• In 2008, already 42.8 million mobile cloud computing subscribers worldwide

Mobilization steps

1. Optimize usability for mobile
- New apps from scratch
- Migrating existing desktop Web apps

2. Make it behave like an app, not like Web page
- Fast response and response rates

3. Implement native look-and-feel
- Graphical elements and styling
- Effect libraries

Pros

• Fast and cost-effective development
• Seampless updates as software is entirely running on server
• support across phone models and OS
• Native application like look-and-feel possible

Cons

• Higher data transfer rewuirements
• Longer start-up time than with installed apps
• Slower execution than native software
• Limited offline usage
• Limited access to phone peripherals

• No app store marketing support (I don’t actually agree with this, because as I see it, it’s just a new affiliation model that is needed here)

Summary

Mobile apps based on cloud tech are a viable alternatives to native aps – for piloting and producing implementations alike.

Karri Huhtanen – Mobile cloud challenges

Scalability

• If you want to be born global, your service and apps must be built global.
• A good, scalable architecture and code from the start is even more important than before. My comment: If you fail to give a good experience from the start, it just may be that they won’t come back.
• From Slashdot effect to Facebook effect.

Endurance

Reliability is provided by the cloud, endurance and robustness must be built by you.

Internet is broken –> connection between mobiles and services are and will be unreliable.

Your app and service must handle the Interner problems while maintaining good user experience. My comment: The problem is that you must find a reliable service provider. And the user, he or she doesn’t really care: if your connection suck, you suck. Even if it’s not “your fault”.

Q&A:

Q: Have to market your native apps without things like OVI store or Apple AppStore?
A: One possibility is in building a good brand around your company or service.
- Possibly other cloud stores.
- Of course Social media: through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. My comment: Actually it’s like in any good marketing; you have to have imagination, courage, know where your clients are and who they are, and in the top of it all: differentiate yourself from others and make an interesting product.

I’ve been using a Nokia n97 mini about a week now so here’s a short review on that. Not going too deep into the device specs, one can always read them at Nokia’s site or from other tech blogs.

What I like

It feels quality. Flipping the top works like it supposed to and I like the keyboard, although the buttons may be even too sturdy. I also like how easily it works overall. Was pretty light to start using it, but I’m a bit of a tech freak so can’t say how my grandmother would do with it.

Clicking the touch screen usually also works fine and there’s not that many nuisances [but, see the "What I don't like"].

What I don’t like

Of course it’s understandable if you have many apps on the same time, your battery isn’t going to last too long. But it’s still boring if you have to charge it daily, as you have to with n97 – maybe there’s something one could do with tweaking some hidden energy saver menu, but haven’t dived that deep to that so can’t say. I usually put the device to the wall when I’m going to sleep so it doesn’t really matter that much, but one day I forgot to do it and in the middle of the day the device just died.

Also I don’t like how some of the touch screen things sometimes work, like for example scrolling. There are times it feels that I really have to hit the screen in order the device to realize I want to activate scrolling. On some apps it works really good [like in Gravity, see below], but in the device’s own menu it sometimes gives a little cough.

And also I happen to have a thumb size of a potato and when I’m trying to hit the scroll bar I sometimes hit something else I shouldn’t have, like someone’s status update in the native Facebook application.

About OVI and Syncing

If you want to sync OVI with the device you get good instructions from OVI during syncing. Well, not exactly, but almost.

When you are doing the syncing with the service it gives you instructions that take you half way there; with the instructions you can get the OVI work and signed in to the service, but there were some problems with syncing the contacts with the device.

This wasn’t because of the help being vague, but being totally wrong in some point. The right options are in a different place in n97 mini’s menu and you have to do a lot more in order to get them working.

Fortunately [in a way] there has been other people suffering with this, so I found help here: http://www.n97fanatics.com/sync-with-ovi-on-the-n97/ Thanks Timi!

Two apps I’m using on n97 mini

Here’s a few words about two apps I’m currently using on n97 mini. I haven’t used them too long so I’ll write longer reviews later.

Snaptu

App to use your different web services like Facebook, Twitter [multiple accounts], Google Calendar/Gmail, RSS etc. with the mobile.

It’s OK, but in my opinion some oddities with the UI and again my potato thumb doesn’t like those rather small hotspots and too sensitive touch! Also, what’s with the pixelated n97 desktop icon?

I’m currently using this to read my RSS blogs and news, and for these this works OK.

Gravity

I’m not taking sides, but for using Twitter with my mobile, I like this one’s UI better than the previous one’s.

The touch screen scrolling feels firm, there not that many accidental clicks and it looks rather stylish too. Using it to Twitter, Twitter search and you can also have groups based on search terms.

Facebook

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot the Facebook app! It’s pre-installed and gives you updates regularly to the desktop. The UI is rather simple, but one thing I was missing was that it should give you some indication if people have replied to updates or other threads you have written. Now there seems to be none and it’s boring to try to hunt them manually.

Still, I feel this is a better way for occasional updates and visits to FB, than the one for example in n95.

Conclusion

Used n97 mini a week and a half now and there hasn’t been that many situations where I wanted to throw this to the wall. Guess that summarizes it well? Like we all know; a device and user experience is good when you don’t have too much to cry about, right?

So, this is the first post of hopefully many to come, where I chat a while with an entrepreneur that has seemed an interesting fellow to me and has had the time to give some of their precious time to tell some insights for what it’s like to be an entrepreneur or a start-up.

About a week ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Ramine Darabiha, CEO of MySites, a web service where you can share files with your friends. Here’s his thoughts about entrepreneurship.

Marko Teräs: So, why did you want to start a business in the first place?
Ramine Darabiha: Well, I’ve been doing these things as a hobby for 12 years already. For example I’ve been an active member of the gaming community.

I studied as an exchange student in TAMK (Tampere University of Applied Sciences) and we often had these problems with having your files in the school network and not having a good way of accessing and sharing them. We had Citrix, but it wasn’t that good.

We also had many parties and people clearly needed an easier way to share lots of party photos and other content and there wasn’t that good choices at that time. So the idea of MySites got it’s start there.

MT: What do you want to achieve with your company, the major goals?
RD: Simply put, make it easier for people to share their files.

MT: What are the major qualities you believe a starting entrepreneur should have or what you believe are helping you?
RD: Big set of balls and a lot of luck.

Love and persistence in what you do. Being ‘your own boss’ is equal to more hours than in normal work and you can’t do it just for the money.

You’re gonna be under a lot of pressure and if you believe you have a great idea, you have to continue believing in it no matter what and engage yourself in doing it. It’s worth of doing if you have the passion for it.

MT: What were the major obstacles you had when trying to establish your company?
RD: It wasn’t the easiest thing to start. I was a French student who didn’t speak Finnish, in Tampere Finland, trying to start an international project on Internet! (laughter) It doesn’t get much more difficult than that.

It’s also been difficult on few other aspects. One is bureaucracy. Because every single official paper is in Finnish and that’s annoying.

The second thing is more about the mentality of business here. We decided to not to pursue a lot of effort in making deals in Finland because Finns don’t like taking risks and that’s been a bit of a barrier in my opinion. So lot of the stuff we have done have been with foreigners who have loved the idea.

I’d like to see more of start-ups and new business in Finland, but the overall atmosphere isn’t always that supportive. However, we have had support from Finnvera for example. They were super helpful. But in the end I would say that the infrastructure here isn’t made easy for entrepreneurs.

MT: You kind of answered the next question already but, Where did you get help for your company?
RD: First of all from my dad. It was really great that, although he wasn’t super excited, he still supported me.

Also from TAMK (Tampere University of Applied Sciences), not so much in the sense of the courses, but they helped me get good contacts and were super flexible with my schedule. In some way they also pointed ways of what courses to do and who to talk with in the light of the business idea.

And finally of course finding your great team and being with these people.

MT: How do you feel now and what are the greatest / worst things about being the one in charge?
RD: Well, it’s a lot of responsibility. It’s a good thing that I can execute the things I come up with but at the same time I’m in a deeper way responsible for the things I do where as if I worked in another company in a day job.

I do feel it’s the best job in the world. I can express myself and have this weight in what I do. I like that really much. And what I really love is that I feel very free. Of course you still have the uncertainty, but you still free doing your thing.

MT: Why still in Finland? (Note: Ramine is the only one of the MySites team still located in Finland)
RD: Combination of things; I like working here. There’s this good mixture of people who aren’t that scared of tech. And I like that people give each other more space also.

Also the competition here is a bit more healthy than in other countries. It’s not as hectic as you would have for example in Paris.

MT: Where do you see yourself and your company after 3-5 years from now?
RD: For the company: I hope it will become a way people share files, I hope it’ll make easy for people to share files with their mobile and I hope there will become a point were this whole issue of sharing content is solved. You know like video online is basically solved.

I just hope we become a good way of sharing content. As for myself, I’d just love to continue that, making it bigger.

MT: What would you say to those who think of starting up their own companies?

RD: It’s is doable.

I have even heard a one teacher of economics telling new entrepreneurs “Don’t start a company”. I told him later after the class that it’s because of stupid people like you that the economy in Finland isn’t growing. He didn’t like it that much. (laughter) This country needs more Internet success stories, more entrepreneurs. You can’t drive the economy with not having entrepreneurs.

My point is that, you hear a lot of people telling you things like “it’s not possible”, “why would you do it” or “No one hasn’t done anything like that here before”. People are trying to put you down with lots of different reasonings and instead of establishing a business they want you to have a comfy job, family and two dogs.

It may be a dumb idea you’re having, you never know. But at least you tried and don’t have to think it later on how it could’ve been. So basically you should just go ahead and “do it”. It’s a leap of faith; you don’t know if it’s gonna work. It keeps banging in your head and you just have to do it.

There are also those people who are thinking of having millions, telling other people what to do, want to become Bill Gates or whatever. A lot of people want to have a business because of that and they don’t understand what it is.

MT: For the final question, From who do you think that starting entrepreneurs should learn from?
RD: I have no one specifically. I don’t want to send people learning from Guy Kawasaki or watching Steve Jobs presentations, everyone’s telling that.

I admire people who had balls to go direction where no one has gone before. Generally people who made bold decisions, sticked to their idea and made it work.

For example people like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. When he started the company he didn’t have any idea of being a savvy business guy, but he made decisions that brought more users.

In other words, he made users happy.

Hi, just wanted to tell you that I quit my current job and started to control my own future.

Now I’m starting to build a future that looks a bit more like me with a company of my own. This means enjoying my work more, engaging customers to more fun and meaningful concepts, expanding the creativity beyond ‘crazy’ and while doing this all, helping other people to achieve their potential and goals too.

My goal is to build a strong ecosystem of enthusiastic people around digital design and marketing, social media and web and mobile concepts.

The purpose and contents of the blog is most likely going to change a bit but not too much. You may see more writings about meaningful use of social media, of entrepreneurship and things like mobility and augmented reality. And of course I’m going to let you in in establishing my company! I want to benefit starting [or thinking about starting] entrepreneurs on my behalf in any way possible. This is going to be an interesting learning process.

I can’t tell you how excited I am! I’ll see you around and if you like to contact me for future collaborative mash-ups or just to say ‘Hi’, you’ll find channels to do so in the ‘about’ page.

Lately I’ve become more and more fascinated with augmented reality mobile applications. Future [and already contemporary] applications will most likely drastically change many things in our behavior, for example how we act in our environment and for example what services we’re going to need or won’t need when we travel and adventure cities new to us.

Mashable has a nice  post about six application to iPhone and Android phones in Top 6 Augmented Reality Mobile Apps [Videos]. It seems like sci-fi, but it’s already yesterday’s news [The Mashable's post is from yesterday]. Watching these makes the future of using the ‘phone’ very interesting.

I wonder where are Nokia applications like these, I’d really like to see more what’s going on there? For comparison, here are the latest finalists of the Calling All Innovators contest. There are 4 categories: Internet Innovation, Flash, Emerging Markets and Mobile Necessities and Apps on Maps.

If someone got more interesting links to similar like these, please share them!