• Understand how to make the most of distributing their content to consumers around the world via Ovi Store by Nokia.
• Learn directly from Nokia professionals about future technologies, trends, and market potential in South Africa and beyond.
• Get hands-on training using Nokia-recommended technologies.
• Network with industry peers from the developer community as well as strategic business players (including Operators, Professors, and Nokia executives).

Register

http://www.prewise.com
http://www.greyarealabs.com/
https://www.scred.com/


On Friday morning we all headed to the Helsinki Living Lab which also has the Arabia factory. They are known for their design with the brand Ittala.


Mika told me about Barcamp Helsinki, so decided to head there on saturday and hang with a few Finn geeks. Interestingly, i found some of the same challenges faced in South Africa for startups are faced in Finland, just like in South Africa, failure is not an option and if you have failed it is often viewed negatively.

• In built antenna
• Camera, Video, Audi codecs
• Speaking clock, for blind people
• Graphic interfaces
• First accelerometer in a mobile phone in 2002
• Ambient & Environmental sensing / Sensorplanet.org
• Visual Radio
• Mobile TV
• Braille Reader (Converts an SMS to Braille)

Some of the inventions that came about from R & D related to emerging economies

• Prepaid tracker, which shows your prepaid balance on the screen while making a call. Useful when people share phones or when someone sells minutes to people.
• Flashlight & Non Slippery Surface
• Shoot to Translate, take a picture of text and it can be converted to your home language
• Talking phrasebook and sentance translator

We also visited the Nokia VIP lounge, which is kind of a demo area with all the new phones (Like the new 9000, it runs Linux!!), and also all the classic phones. We also got to play with some Vertu Phones, they only cost between $2,000 and 30,000. I even saw one of my old phones in the ‘history’ wall and a few bricks.


We got an overview of Nokia Life tools, which provides Market, Pricing information and weather to farmers in India allowing them to get the best pricing for their produce.


In the afternoon, we got an overview of Nokia Money, and how it works, as you would expect it provides Person to person transactions, accepting of mobile payments, and depositing of cash as well as utility payments via mobile. The service has been launched in India together with obopay.


The day ended at Nokia with discussions on usability, in particular usability on mobile applications.


From Nokia, we headed to the Design Factory a co-creation space created for designers, researchers, industry and startups. Some of the startups based there are quite interesting such as Powerkiss who are developing a wireless charging solution. The event was organised by the AAlto Entrepreneurship Society a student organisation that is part of the Aaalto university. They seem to be really active in promoting entrepreneurship amongst students.  They organise regular events, trips to sillicon valley etc. There have also been talks about setting up a Finnish incubator modeled on Y-Combinator.


Some of the students presented the projects that they were working on, and what struck me was how different the projects in the Finnish universities are compared to South African ones. For example, the typical final year project for in South Africa would be something like ‘You have been contacted by Company X, they currently have the following problems… xyz, how would you resolve their problems’. The students then go off, follow the waterfall approach do months of requirements planning and a ton of documentation and develop it.


Where as here, the focus seems to be “We want you to build a startup, as quick as possible”.


In other words, in South Africa we are grooming students to “Sell Hours” where as in Finland they groom the students to be entrepreneurs.


I also found the Design factory environment extremely unique and interesting, a space dedicated to design, And not just design in the sense of graphics but industrial design, product design etc. I think in South Africa we need to think carefully if massive science parks with huge costs are the way to go, or maybe this way of working is better. Small micro-clusters dedicated to a specific type of function.

• High investment in R & D
• High Quality Research & Innovation
• Entrepreneurship
• Funding of Research

One of the programmes run by Tekes is vigo, which is a startup accelerator and provides funding and coaching to startups to fast track their progress.


From Tekes, we headed to Tieke is the Finish information society development centre, that is a non-profit and neutral player in Finland. They often act as a mediator between the different parties such as government, entrepreneurs and research organisations. One of the core focuses of Tieke is to assist SMME’s who may not know how to make use of technology to assist their business. They also developed the Computer Driving License which was eventually licensed and became what is now known as the ICDL.


In the evening we were hosted for a networking dinner by Advansis, the company that supports the SAFIPA programme in Finland. We were also joined by Hanna from the Ministry of foriegn affairs in Finland.

Why GeoProp Mike?

“After someone saw Plak they suggested I do the same thing for the property market… Mainly because most real estate web sites have horrible confusing search interfaces.”

Is it free?

“Yes, Google Ads to cover the cost of providing a free service.”

When did you launch and how did it take you?

“Well, not long at all, basically a copy of Plak. I launched it 2 weeks ago. Great response, over 221 registrations already.”

Well any last words?
“GeoProp and Plak are the ONLY Google Maps based sites for South Africa that actually provide working driving directions – Both text and graphical. And that GeoProp has data for close on 27 000 schools in South Africa so that property buyers can see the proximity od schools to a potential purchase.”

We wish Mike all the best with this one:)

MIKE ROGER: Founder of Blat, Feedbase and Wizz RSS New Reader.

Finland has the 3rd highest average speeds at 22mbps and one of the highest percentage of broadband penetration: 80%, and to top it all off it’s extremely cheap just $2.77. Often operators make the argument that South Africa cannot support cheap broadband due to the market size (Finlands population is just 5 million).

I say:

Actual name of a sweet

Today we spent most of the day at Aalto University, and we were hosted by Professor Matti Hämäläinen. During the morning session Sandeep Shah gave us an overview of Otaniemi, “the sillicon valley” of Finland. Some of the key points was the creation of “micro-clusters”, they have identified key strengths but found that the players in these markets were scattered (i.e 3d graphics, nano technology etc.). The project aims to bring them physically closer together to increase collaboration between private, academic and the public entities.


Ismo Rantala provided us with an overview of what the Finish Mobile association.


Prof Matti Hämäläinen, covered living labs as a platform for research, education and innovation. He also covered a case study of OtaSizzle / SizzleLab where they study mobile and social interaction amongst students using a bunch of mobile social media tools.


From there we headed to Technopolis Ventures. An incubator and organization that supports entrepreneurs. It seems like a very scrappy environment, the buildings are simple prefab style but this is where the startups are based, i guess this is the equivalent to starting in your garage in the US but with the added benefit of support structures. They had about 417 applications for the 3 month pre-incubation programme during 2008, 113 of those were accepted and 86 of them eventually graduated into full incubation which lasts between 1-3 years. Compare this to the Maxum pre-incubation programme? a mere +- 35! Is there a lack of entrepreneurs or is there little value in these programmes that discourages entrepreneurs from applying?


Later, Professor Martti Mäntylä director of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology gave us an overview of some of the interesting research areas at HIIT, which includes research into Future Internet. Answering the question, what would the internet look like if it was designed today? Taking into consideration things like mobile and ubiquitous computing, trust, privacy etc. Basically overcoming some of the shortcomings of the current TCP/IP protocol and the challenges faced on the Internet. The Future Internet becomes information aware (Data now has a unique identifier, similar to how a device currently has an IP address)


Another interesting story, was the history of how Jaiku was founded. Jaiku was founded in February 2006, and launched in July (Twitter’s first tweet was on the 21st of March twitter). Both the services seem to have begun developing their services around the same time. However the most interesting part is that the first prototype for Jaiku was actually based on research done at HIIT on small group phenomena, in particular how mobile tech can enhance transparency of mobile communities. The source code for the research was released under open source and this was used as the basis for Jaiku.


We ended the day with elevator pitches, some networking and arranged meetings for the rest of the week. All in all it was a very interesting day with a ton of useful information.

Sumea, to Digital Chocolate in 2004

Animoi to Macromedia in 2004

Mr. Goodliving to RealNetworks in 2005

InnoDB to Oracle in 2005

Smartner to Seven in 2005

Hybrid Graphics to Nvidia in 2006

BitBoys to ATI in 2006

Hantro to ON2 in 2007

MySQL to Sun Microsystems in 2007

Jaiku to Google in 2007

Solid to IBM in 2007

Dopplr to Nokia in 2009

Some of the organisations i will be visiting

• Nokia
• AAlto University
• Helsinki University of Technology
• Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
• Technopolis Ventures
• Tekes / Tekie
• Advansis
• Grey Area Labs
• Scred
• Floobs

Check back here for updates, and you can also follow the hastag #KEFinland on twitter or follow me on twitter.

Microwork for the next billion – We bring dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty

Dolores Labs writes:

We have been working with Samasource for a while now — they are a fantastic local non-profit that brings computer based work to people in Africa. We send tasks to one of their hardest to employ groups: a Kenyan refugee camp.

The people are extremely motivated, speak fluent English and even have high speed internet. But sometimes there are downtime issues (due to floods, satellite failure, etc.) and sometimes there are data quality issues (due to cultural misunderstandings), which makes it hard for them to compete for traditional outsourcing work. Fortunately, our dynamic routing and quality control technology can resolve these problems gracefully.

When you complete a task on your iPhone, your work is paired with the work of someone in Kenya.  iPhone users results are used for quality control

You can outsource your work for this using Crowd Flower , On the order page you need to select Samasource and Iphone.

Though, what are your thoughts on the service? As an African, do you find it insulting that the work needs to be ‘verified’ by people in the ‘first-world’? I think though offering work and training to people will always be a benefit!

ViaLynx.com is the first dual profile networking website giving users experiences through allowing social and professional networking features in one portal.

The Social Profile holds information such as personality traits, favourite music, relationship status, interests, activities etc. By switching over to the Business Profile information such as educational background, employment history, testimonials and a resume can be found.

The websites name, ViaLynx was created as a symbol of how people on the network are connected to each other through linking connections and the spelling of links as “Lynx” derives from the founders love for cats.

Louis-Junior Tshakoane the co-founder and Joint-CEO of ViaLynx.com, who’s a certified 3D Designer, Character Animator and Special Effects Specialist says “ViaLynx.com is a web service that provides convenience to users allowing them to stay in one portal to have access to all their social and business needs. ViaLynx implements a corporate culture that epitomises entrepreneurship and freedom to its users, clients and employees”.

“It is evident to us that our main goal is to expand the business with sufficient capital reserves as we prepare for rapid user growth, simply because there is no doubt in our minds that ViaLynx will be one of the most popular online networking services in the world”, says Charl Rademan, co-founder and Joint-CEO of ViaLynx.com who is graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Strategy and Management later this year.

As the duo founded their web development and media services company in late January 2009 from Charl’s bedroom they follow in the footsteps of well known South African technology entrepreneurs such as Mark Shuttleworth, Charl and Louis are an example of the new post-apartheid generation that shows the fruits of the freedom struggle allowing black and white people to achieve success hand-in-hand in business.

ViaLynx.com currently generates revenue from advertising sponsored by Google Adsense with future plans of adding as much as three more business models under development, “We plan to launch a constant array of new ways of making money with an In-house Ad Agency, a File Hosting service and Job Posting platform to be launched in the very near future”.

Louis has worked with the likes of Sir Richard Branson, after him personally donating a community gymnasium with $200 000 worth of training equipment in honour of Louis and his father, at the age of 16. “When I met Richard in 2006, I was very excited and humbled by how down to earth he is and learnt a lot from him, especially as an entrepreneur so now is the time to showcase what I am capable of on an international level by launching ViaLynx”.

We wish Louis and the team all the best!

Bush Streaming - Barcamp 2008

It’s another year, and  time for another Barcamp Jozi, last year we had a total blast and learnt a ton and this year should be the same. So if you are in Jozi, pop in.

Date: 10/11 October 2009

Where?: Centre of Innovation and Learning in Midrand (http://www.cil.net/main.html) – Map: http://tinyurl.com/cil-centre

The directions from Johannesburg:

• Olifantsfontein off-ramp, go east.
• At the first traffic light, left into Old Johannesburg/Old Pretoria
• At the first traffic light, right, under the Gautrain. Nyala Road.
• At the Stop turn right, into security area.
• Number 21

Register at over at the Wiki