I took a call with a few Nokians today about innovation. Constrained by the 140-character limit on microblogs I crammed the bottom line of my hour-long argument into three points. The note started getting comments on Jaiku and pick-up on other blogs, so I thought I’d post them here:

1. binge on your own dogfood
2. live by usage stats
3. iterate like mad

Like @constantine notes in the Jaiku thread, the real decision power comes from executing on this. A lot of people ‘get it’ but that’s not enough.

People also misinterpret the third point to mean you should release constantly without any quality control.

Those folks miss that there’s a progression here: keep dogfooding and only release when you can no longer not release. Then iterate based on what features get usage.

The secret is actually not included in my list. It is to hit the right feature set for launch.

A lot of startups end up in feature-shaving mode. One day they wake up to the painful reality that their product is too complex because they tried out a lot of different ideas.

Although obesity is not a great starting point, there are examples of successful overhauls. For instance, the first version of Flickr was a Flash application with real time chat and photo sharing. Few if any of those early features remain on Flickr today.

I believe turnaround always requires external shock. Often comes in the form of a change in leadership. When I asked a friend on the Flickr team if some specific event took place that enabled the company to execute such a drastic change of course, he replied smugly: “Caterina happened”.

I’ve also been asked many times if industry gatherings are a waste of time for startups. This conversation happened after LeWeb and it seems to recur every time an event splits attendees’ opinions.

Personally I’ve found that events and partnerships that go live on a certain date are great ways to force a big bang release. They help the team to focus and create a building sense of urgency. And it’s gratifying to ship just in time for a party :)

There’s probably lots more to be said. Feel free to add your points to the list.

We launched a new version of the Jaiku beta. Everyone on Jaiku now gets a presence stream where they can post updates about everyday things as they happen – what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, where you’re going.

Jaiku works from the Web browser and mobile phones. You can also configure it to add an update to your presence stream when you update your Web feeds.

Here are the main features. You can:

1. Start a presence stream at yourname.jaiku.com:

– Post presence updates
– Add icons to your messages
– Set your location
– Add your Web feeds

2. Add contacts, get their updates:

– Add your friends
– Get an overview of their latest updates
– Exchange comments

3. Use Jaiku from your phone:

– Text presence updates from any phone
– Download Jaiku Mobile to your Nokia S60 smartphone

Our group of friends is turning into a focused startup, and pieces are falling into place. Web developers Andy Smith and Juha Törönen joined our team. Andy previously worked at Flock and lives in Amsterdam. Juha is a Helsinki local who’s worked on projects with me before. I really like working with both of them. We also found an office space in a former factory close to the center of town.

Renaissance man Saul Griffith, founder of Squid Labs and inventor of Low Cost Eyeglasses, raised a $10M Series A round from Google for his new alternative energy start-up Makani Power. Congratulations Saul!

Here’s Saul’s talk from Aula 2006.

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.

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 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

Jaiku is the new startup I co-founded with Petteri Koponen, Mika Raento and Teemu Kurppa. It’s a social phonebook that displays the real-time availability and location of your contacts. We call this rich presence.

With the Jaiku mobile application, you can share your location (neighborhood, city, country) based on cell tower positioning; your availability (based on whether your phone’s ringer is on or off); an IM-style presence line; current and upcoming calendar events; people and devices nearby (based on Bluetooth scanning); and how long your phone has been idle.

You can share this information with your contacts’ mobile phones. You can also create a badge for your blog, MySpace profile or any other Web page that shows your real-time presence on the Web.

Here’s my real-time presence badge:

The beta version of the mobile application is for Nokia S60 Second Edition phones only (see the list of compatible models). We’re planning to make versions for other models in the future, and enable anybody to update their rich presence on the Web or from any mobile by sending in simple text messages.

Jaiku doesn’t include rich presence from Web feeds yet – but I think it will be cool to show the latest blog post / photo / bookmark, or the music track you last listened to.

Give it a spin and post your comments on the Jaikido blog!

Paul Fisher compared VC funding for Web 2.0 startups in the U.S. and Europe. As one would assume Europe lags behind, but the discrepancy he reports is pretty startling:

In 2005, US-based Web2.0 companies reported raising £200mn whilst European businesses raised just £24mn.

This is in line with my anecdotal experience. A local entrepreneur / angel investor friend of mine recently asked a number of the local VCs if they’re getting much Web 2.0 dealflow. The major VC firm said they hadn’t received any business plans.

Fisher ends on a positive note, though:

Frequently, we see European VC software investment trends trailing the US by anywhere from 3 – 12 months. I’m pretty excited by the range of European Web2.0 entrepreneurs that I’m meeting today. I also know there are some interesting deals currently “in process” at many VC houses. I’m looking forward to seeing the European numbers catch-up.

Again, my anecdotal experience from recent Euro events (DLD, LIFT) suggests there are some cool startups in the process of landing VC investment. Perhaps characteristically of Europe, they seem to have more of a mobile angle.

Perhaps the world is ready for a new mobile device that will become the icon of the real mobile internet revolution.

What would the device do? Most likely it would work first in Wi-Fi hotspots, connecting from further afield as the range of 802.11-based access points grows and other wireless networks emerge. It would probably do VoIP and IM exceedingly well. It would possibly also do email, RSS, and music. All these we can pretty much take for granted. More interestingly, it may start doing completely different things. Its ability to go where laptops can’t go, and do things that mobile phones can’t do, will create new needs and new opportunities, which make people write new apps.

It might be used to access place and event information in the form of annotated maps for instance. Or it might be used to download and watch TV shows. Or make them in the spirit of podcasting and vlogging. When high bandwidth mobile data becomes free, some of those old mobile service ideas that history left for dead might suddenly begin to make a lot more sense. The fact is, we don’t know what the device will be used for. That’s why the code base has to be kept open.

What might the device look like? It would need to be small and afford effortless one-handed use, incorporating the best learnings from over two decades of mobile phone design. This points to a Blackberry-style roller wheel to scroll up and down the buddy list, the email inbox, and the RSS feeds. However, it would also need to have a QWERTY keyboard or some radical new key layout if it’s going to do text input well. The large footprint of a full keyboard suggests a flip design of some sort. But it would have to be extremely slim.

Here are a few sketches.

On the software side, the limited screen real estate requires that the active application must occupy the full screen. IM would probably be the default active app because the presence status of buddies has to be visible at a glance. Switching between apps would need to be extremely simple and smooth, like control-tab on the PC. Perhaps quick switching is important enough to warrant a dedicated button on the side of the device. Click! From IM to email. Click! From email to RSS. And so on.

Here’s a sketch about the ‘full-context switching’ between apps (I looted the term from Chris).

I’m presenting a poster about my PhD thesis at the SSIT5 workshop at LSE. It’s the first time I’ll talk about my doctoral research in public! Here’s the short text from the poster:

The Practice of Innovation: How New Technology Gets Defined as Sustaining or Disruptive

My thesis is an ethnography about Nokia’s efforts to renew itself through corporate venturing. The proliferation of Nokia’s main product—the mobile phone—is extraordinary, and social scientists across the spectrum have recognized its implications as important. Still, the design and development practices of the mobile phone have been little investigated.

As the case of Nokia illustrates, these practices take place in corporations faced with the pressures to innovate and grow. Here, the technical and the organizational work through each other. In Nokia’s case, the historical context was one where the company had reinvented itself once before, and now faced a situation where it needed to do the same again. My interest centres on how innovation in this situation was performed by way of an institutional arrangement known as internal corporate venturing, which was linked with the notion of organizational ‘renewal.’ It was not just about coming up with the next new technology; it was about giving the organization a new life.

At the same time, the study is also about something much more general. Prevailing thinking on innovation assumes that new technologies are inherently either sustaining or disruptive to the organization. In aligning myself with the practice turn in social theory, I argue that the sustaining or disruptive character of innovation is not a given; it is achieved through practices of alignment that work on and through materials and stories.

I justify this argument by showing how the ventures at Nokia aligned themselves in relation to the company’s strategic narratives and other practices in the outside world. The work of alignment involved the ordering of materials to support the stories that the ventures told about themselves. A venture’s success in the internal competition for resources depended on its ability to make the materials speak for its potency in the context of prescriptive frameworks, which the management of the company mobilized to make resource allocation decisions. I discuss how these frameworks were reproduced and reconfigured, and reflect on how my own role as an ethnographer evolved from an apprentice, to a participant, to a commentator who responded with an alternate framework for conceptualising the relationship between the ventures and the main business. I suggest that coming to grips with interventions of this kind is practice theory’s most compelling promise, as well as its toughest future challenge.