David Homik has a nice post on VentureBlog about the problems incubators and government grants create for startups. Both have played a visible role in Europe’s strategy for bringing about an entrepreneurial culture. My past experience at an incubator, at a corporate venturing unit, and presently as an entrepreneur in a country where government grants are a common source of new business funding corroborate Homik’s reasoning that both can be recipes for disaster. Homik writes:

Traditional incubators and economic grants can do more harm than good to a startup culture when there is not already a well-engrained and robust entrepreneurial ecosystem upon which these startups may grow and thrive.

The question that logically follows from Homik’s arguing is, how might a well-engrained and robust entrepreneurial ecosystem arise if not by channeling resources into incubators and government support? I think it’s reasonable to assume this requires instruments that are perhaps not financial as much as they are cultural in nature. Entrepreneurial activity is linked with a culture of taking things apart, making ad-hoc fixes, and a general inclination to come up with customized local solutions to problems that have already been ‘solved’. Europe’s got to rediscover this in its tradition if it wants to become the ecosystem Homik points to.

Ulla and I are heading stateside today. We’ll be in New York tomorrow, at FOO Camp in Sebastopol this weekend, and in the San Francisco Bay Area next week. We’ll stop in NYC again on Saturday 2 Sep on our way back to Helsinki.

Anyone in SF or NYC area ping me on email/SMS if you’d like to hook up.

The video of Matt Biddulph’s Aula Talk on the Open Data Movement is now available online.

In the talk, Biddulph describes how the Open Data Movement emerged from Open Source. He discusses the relationship between Open Data, Open Content, and Open Source, and gives examples of open data services that he has helped to create. The talk is followed by a Q&A.

Thanks to Matt and everyone who showed up for a fantastic evening. Stay tuned for more Aula Talks!

Videos of 19 of the 20+ talks from Aula 2006 – Movement are now available on Blip.tv. The appearances include:
– Jochi Ito’s keynote on MMORPGs
– Martin Varsavsky’s keynote on Fon
… and 8-minute lightning speeches, including
– Joshua Ramo on Personal Velocity
– Saul Griffith on People Making Stuff
– Arwen O’Reilly on the DIY Renaissance
– Danah Boyd on MySpace
– Matt Jones and Matt Webb on Digital Parkour
… and many more beautiful acts. Enjoy!

A huge thanks to Merci Hammon and Justin Hall for the camerawork and production.

Last but not least: if you watch only one thing, make it Cory Doctorow’s brilliant closing speech, captured Loic Lemeur.

Petteri Koponen, who I co-founded Jaiku with, is now blogging on Vox as Serial Trier. He’s punning on the Finnish expression for ‘entrepreneur’ and I’m glad he’s got the chutzpah to do that. No intention to blow the national trumpet but I do find Finnish expressions have a tendency to cut through the fluff: entrepreneurship, indeed, is about trying.

Petteri notes that the local startup scene is waking back to life. I share that belief and would add that the new wave of ‘triers’ is better positioned because they can build on a generation of entrepreneurs like him who’ve already once been around the block. The conditions for current-day style entreprenurship only really came about in Finland after the Soviet collapse.

Here’s Petteri:

There does not exist a good word for entrepreneur in Finnish. The closest one is “yrittäjä”, which can be translated as “trier”. According to Oxford American Dictionaries, a trier is “a person who always makes an effort, however unsuccesful they may be”. It is no wonder Finland was recently ranked the 26th country (out of 35 countries) in the ratio of entrepreneurs/triers per capita, which was less than 5%. It is encouraging, however, that the general start-up scene in Finland seems to be revitalizing and there are already a few success stores such as Habbo/Sulake and a number of game or 3D graphics boutiques.

A journalist friend asked me for some things to watch in the online world. Here’s what I came up with off the top of my head:

1. Internet TV

BitTorrent, YouTube, Blip.tv, Toodou, MetaCafe, Google Video, the ‘Venice project‘

2. Webware

Writely, DabbleDB, ZohoWriter, Stikkit, Wikia

3. Aggregators

Netvibes, Google Personalized Home, Vox

4. Places

World of Warcraft, Second Life, SketchUp

5. Recommendation-based music

Last.fm, Rhapsody

6. Mobile 2.0

Fon, Wi-Fi handsets, Skype Mobile

7. Lightweight project management

Basecamp, Writeboard, Campfire

8. Open IM

Jabber, Meebo, Google Talk

9. Presence

Plazes, Twttr, Jaiku

10. Shared calendars

Upcoming, Eventful, Meetup, Google Calendar

11. Structured data

Microformats, Google Base, Thinglink

12. Classfifieds

Craigslist, TheAdCloud, Google Local

13. Toys

Stardoll, WeeWorld

14. Customization

Etsy, Threadless, Spreadshirt, MooCards

Phew… what did I miss?

Matt Biddulph kindly agreed to give an Aula Talk while he’s visiting Helsinki this coming week.

The talk is on the Open Data Movement and it will take place on Thursday, August 17th, 18:00 at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). HIIT is located on the 6th floor in the Pinta-building at High Tech Center (HTC) in Ruoholahti. The address is Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki.

Here’s a leader to the talk:

The Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg of information that is becoming freely accessible on the internet. Following the success of open source, an open data movement is occurring online that seeks to gather, publish and enable the reuse of rich machine-readable datasets – like all programs ever broadcasted by the BBC.

By opening up these wellsprings of information, which were previously only accessible to large institutions, the open data movement has unleashed a new wave of creativity on the Web. Programmers, students, and companies are building mashups by overlaying photos, blog posts, and other objects to open datasets like the BBC Programme Catalogue, Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, and Thinglink.

As a case in point, Biddulph will describe how the BBC’s database of programming from the 1920s to the present day was transformed from an internal green-screen application to a public Web 2.0 service using Ruby on Rails.

Expect to see some playful examples of what you can do with the BBC Programme Catalogue, Thinglink, and other open datasets.

Big thanks to Ulla for organizing this.

Tantek, I, Ryan, and Ulla looking jovial after lunch in SoMa (photo by Kevin)

Episode 2 of the Verkko2 podcast is now available for download. The topic is microformats, featuring Tantec Çelik and Ryan King from microformats.org and Technorati. There’s a Finnish intro but the interview is in English. It was recorded in April when Ulla and I visited Technorati. Towards the end, I ask Tantek and Ryan to describe the future of microformats. Tantek calls it a revolution:

I think we’ll see more and more sites publishing their data in microformats. And that is the start of the real revolution. Just like RSS has enabled complete decentralization of episodic content on the Web, we see microformats as enabling total decentralization of contact information, of event information, of reviews.

According to Tantek, the microformat revolution benefits everybody:

The beauty is that even in a situation like that, where all the data is distributed, all these centralized sites that are currently keeping this data, by syndicating their data out, they become part of this larger network of information. So it’s good for them as well. It’s good for everybody – not just individuals; we think it’s good for corporations as well.

He sees three waves in the rise of microformats: the microformats themselves emerging first, then a growth in the quantity of microformatted content, and third the appearance of new microformat-specific tools:

The first wave is the rise of different kinds of microformats. We’re seeing the rise of that now and we think it’ll totally take off in the next year. Trailing that is a wave of content published using microformats. And trailing that is a third wave of tools. You’ll start to see toolvendors say ‘Hey, there are millions of hCards out there! Maybe I should start developing tools that could read those and do interesting things with them.’

In the long run, Tantek believes microformats will become as ubiquitous as HTML:

At some point we’re just going to take microformats for granted, like we now take HTML for granted. I truly believe that’s the path we’re on and that this is only a matter of time.

To learn more about microformats, check the Wikipedia. There’s more about microformats on microformats.org. And here’s a slide presentation titled ‘What Are Microformats?‘ by Tantek Çelik.

A quote from Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters starts off one of the chapters in my PhD thesis. Now Graham’s got some tips on presenting to investors. Hear him out.

This situation is constantly repeated when startups present to investors: people who are bad at explaining, talking to people who are bad at understanding.

I guess that’s the voice of experience talking.

Here are Graham’s tips:

1. Explain what you’re doing
2. Get rapidly to demo
3. Better a narrow description than a vague one
4. Don’t talk and drive (my favorite!)
5. Don’t talk about secondary matters at length
6. Don’t get too deeply into business models
7. Talk slowly and clearly at the audience
8. Have one person talk
9. Seem confident
10. Don’t try to seem more than you are
11. Don’t put too many words on slides
12. Specific numbers are good
13. Tell stories about users
14. Make a soundbite stick in their heads

Amy Jo Kim wrote one of the classics on Web community design. AJ and Scott her puzzlemaster husband and their vivacious 7-year old son were in town for AJ’s consulting work, and the four of us had delicious breakfast at Scandic. I like AJ’s take on community. She has a background in psychology and it shows. These are her nine timeless design strategies:

1. Define and articulate your PURPOSE
2. Build flexible, extensible gathering PLACES
3. Create meaningful and evolving member PROFILES
4. Design for a range of ROLES
5. Develop a strong LEADERSHIP program
6. Encourage appropriate ETIQUETTE
7. Promote cyclic EVENTS
8. Integrate the RITUALS of community life
9. Facilitate member-run SUBGROUPS

More excerpts here.