David Speers of SkyNews Australia interviewed Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and CEO of News Corp. about a ton of different things. They also touched on the issues of Australian immigration laws and while Murdoch defended the more multicultural and liberal immigration approach, but disapproved of extremists and while doing so, this 78-year old business tycoon gave them the finger!

I strongly suggest you watch the interview, if Rupert Murdoch is previously unknown or unfamiliar to you. It’s less than 40 minutes and gives a very good overview of the man and his ideology towards the world. For example, the thing that keeps on intrigueing me is the fact that he is constantly on the edge of things in the online world and has very strong opinions about it.

I also think that he is partially misunderstood for his views on paid news. I do agree he has a point in there. However, where he goes wrong in my opinion is that he defends the loyalty people have towards newspapers and thinks the world is partially wrong for not supporting loyalty or longer term subscriptions of news, be that in paper or digital format.

The problem is that while we believe paid news in their current format being served online do not work very well, Murdoch defends the future of news in the format of being commercial. I also believe the non-existence of a good digital push channel brings in challenges to the picture. Newspapers have been so successful in the past as they were one of the only “on-demand” ways of consuming news. It was up to you to decide when you wanted to enjoy them, compared to the television for example where you had to be in front of the box at a certain time to enjoy them.

I see that there is some future for paid news in the format that they are “pushed” or made more available to me than in their current format where I have to go and fetch them from a website, be that through a computer browser or its mobile counterpart. I’m thinking of something in the line of digital readers like Kindle and Nook.

However, I strongly suggest you take the time to watch this interview. Even though it does not go into great depth in many of the topics they cover, it does explain a lot of his views on the world and why he does things the way he does.

The reason is simple, we have enough jealousy in our society that unfortunately does not work in a motivating manner to improve. These tax records simply grow that jealousy and thus increase unhappiness in our society. One “evidence” of this is the fact that Helsingin Sanomat had a quick poll on their site (and I do recognize this does not qualify as an academic poll) and the question asked weather the wealthy people pay enough tax in our society. Below is the status of the poll with a little over 5000 answers.

Another interesting question to ask is that how much is enough? I have no envy towards rich people enjoying their wealth and find the above answer just sad. Just to be clear, I’m not one of the rich people either – I voluntary let go well over a third of my salary to go and run my own company. However, I do realise that a few rich people pay a lot of taxes and thus easily cover for a lot larger crowd of people not so well off.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense here, kind of tired from a long start to the week. One thing is clear though, I’d be very happy to see these tax records kept for the purpose of the government only. I mean how many would like to see your medical records become public?

I had transferred SIM cards recently as I had my operator changed to Saunalahti from DNA. After Joikuspot went online to do the transfer, it returned with a message “transfer failed”. Nothing else, I was left there wondering what the problem could have been. Being the geek that I am, I thought that maybe they allow a certain amount of license transfers to the license per user. I had recently changed the license to my Nokia E75 from my previous phone as I had changed phones.

So, here I am, unable to change the software I own to a new mobile configuration (if you can call it that after a SIM change). Luckily we have received a few Joikuspot codes for ArcticStartup for a competition and we had few of those left over for our use. I managed to find one unused code and installed the software with it. So a happy end to my story, but this raises interesting questions to ownership of digital products.

First of all, licenses should be always people centric and they shouldn’t depend on machines or the amount of machines. Naturally, companies should check that only one machine is used at a time. However, in most cases where any user has to deal with these sort of licenses – they do not understand the logic behind the approval or denial process and neither do they have to. They own the product and they should be able to use it as they wish.

So why is this a big deal then? Well, everytime something like this happens it degrades the trust in digital services and products from ordinary consumers. And as long as this continues to happen, we won’t see the mainstream jump on this bandwagon of buying these wonderful apps and services.

While the products in general might be good, a lot of effort should also be put into thinking the logic for ownership of the product or service that is sold. In 2009 I should not have to worry about the logic of using software and what is expected from me when I receive a “transfer failed” message.

We still have a long way to go.

However, I wanted to jot down some thoughts I’ve had in these 1,5 months on entrepreneurship and being in charge of every little aspect of your company. I also have to state that I’ve been the demon at ArcticStartup that argues, sometimes to the point of ridicule, to keep our costs down so we don’t use many external services to run our business. The only business service we use is a professional book keeper and all they do is the bare minimum of keeping our books in their proper order. So outside the domain of keeping our books sorted out, I take care of everything else there is to running a business.

While this may not sound like a very big thing, I do believe there is a larger question behind all this. When you’re forced to put your hands down and go through everything there is to know about running a business from taxes, government agencies, paying salaries to insurance and all the other stuff that there is – only then do you begin to understand the wrath of things you need to be on top to be successful. While it does not make any sense to do these things your self all the way to the multinational -company size – I believe it makes a lot of sense so that you understand how these things work together. Not to forget, there’s a lot of variety in each day.

The reason is pretty simple as well, when you understand the ins and outs of the machine completely you’re running, only then are you able to take well calculated risks and push the machine itself to the edge to take the most out of the opportunity you have at hand. That’s something I’m really looking forwards to, taking this machine called ArcticStartup for the ride of my lifetime.

This time I resorted to video to share my thoughts. Might do more of these in the future.

With the transition of jobs one month ago, I decided to join the Helsinki Warriors course for beginners. Yesterday was the last day of the course and it was all worth it. Great game with a lot of need for physical strength. A great way to get in shape and build up endurance.

The more I understand of the sport, the more it reminds me of entrepreneurship as well. Both need a great team to succeed as well as in both no team will get far if team doesn’t work together. Furthermore, to succeed in entrepreneurship and rugby you need a great idea (tactics) and the best possible way (game plan) to execute it. Last, but not least you need quite a bit of courage, luck as well as determination in both to be running against insurmountable odds; everyone on the field is trying to bring you down.

Little along the lines of Al Pacino’s speech in Any Given Sunday is this Heineken ad that describes rugby as a sport. Couldn’t agree more. Despite the slight injuries I’ve already received, I’m loving every bit of it.

ArcticStartup is partnering with Mindtrek to host the Startup Launchpad at the event. We’ll kickstart the stream at 1pm and finish around 3.30pm. I’ll be hosting the stream, so don’t hesitate to come and say hello once were finished.

Anyone else seen anything similar?

Update (30.9.2009 @ 8pm): The hack actually did occur. Later that day I noticed a weightloss status update on my wall, done by me – which I clearly didn’t do. Unfortunately I haven’t lost any weight recently to brag about it :)

Facebook acted fast and took down the status update without reporting to me. After something like this I’d hope the service provider would contact me regarding this privacy breach and make me change my password. Needless to say I did this, but FB could have been a bit more proactive on this.

According to the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK), 61% of the Finnish labour force is working in the largest companies (more than 250 employees). Only 3% of the labour force is working the micro companies of the economy (less than 10 people), even though the micro companies count for 47% of the Finnish companies out there. There aren’t very many countries like this in Europe. Other countries that have a similar structure in their economy are the Netherlands, Germany and UK.

So what is the problem with this?

The problem I see with this is that our economy is not prepared for a long tail of companies – something that I believe the shift will be towards in the future. By the long tail of companies I’m referring to the structure of the economy regarding companies. If you look at Europe in general, there are around 19 million companies in the old continent. 99% of these are micro-, small- and medium-sized employing more than 70% of the European work force. Also, the most common European company is a micro-sized company employing less than 10 people.

I’m not stating that Finland will, in 10-20 years, become a country flushed with micro companies. However, the shift in the future will be towards smaller company sizes. This has already happened with many of the largest companies in Finland – many are moving labour overseas as they are competing in bulk product markets where cost management is a key competitive factor.

If Finland’s competitive advantage in the future is to rely on creative and knowledge intensive industries, many of those companies are small and medium-sized. This in turns means that our politics must change their attitude to better support the ambitions of smaller companies.

This is a huge change that many politicians have yet to realise. I’ve been working with small companies my whole career. There are many incentives that can be created on a national level to incentivise smaller companies. This will, in the future, have a huge effect on the possibilities of employing people and thus creating wealth as well as true welfare for our economy.

The column had a very simple point that she is doing a doctoral thesis on as well. She argues that governments’ books should be kept so that they follow the same accounting rules as corporations do. She argues that if Finland would be put to follow the same accounting rules -our country would have to declare for bankruptcy. I’m not surprised.

The thinking behind all this is that you have to balance your expenses to your income, just as companies have to. Well, not every year but if companies decide to neglect this simple rule for long enough – they’re forced out of business. Governments accounting rules are different – there are no bigger organisations that govern the ways their books are kept (roughly put).

The shocking fact is that according to Heikkinen-Jarnola’s study, would Finland have followed corporate accounting rules, Finland would have had only one positive year (in term of profits) between the years 1999 – 2008. These have been very successful years for Finland, not counting the dotcom bubble years 2001 and 2002. These figures exclude the sales of government owned corporations and dividents from government organisations. Looking at our economy from this perspective – we’re constantly running a slight deficit in terms of national income. Not a very positive thing in the end.

The government’s role with regard to the economy is to keep the annual budget balanced. That is at least how I believe many see it. If someone would introduce a CEO to me whose job is to keep the company’s budget balanced, I’d think there’s got to be something wrong with the business – why aren’t they trying to grow or create a profit?

To keep the budget balanced, if there is a possibility of deficit (like there is this year), governments take debt. Who pays the debt? The taxpayers naturally. In a way, each of us is a shareholder in a corporation called Finland and we’re not very active in running our company. This year will accrue each shareholder of Finland a future liability of approximately 2600 euros (Finland takes around 13 billion euros of debt this year to balance its budget).

Update: Just to clarify – I’m totally for Heikkinen-Jarnola’s initiative. I’m a big supporter of running governments more as large corporations.