The autumn rains are definitely here at least today.

According to AKT, the men on board the ship are paid about 450 USD a month, which includes everything (overpay, bonuses, etc.). The Tornio stevedores had denied to service the ship since 30th of May and now the owner sent a letter to the local union warning of potential damages that the halt would cause and claims to these damages. This warning was the issue for the strike. First in Tornio and then a support strike all over Finland.

This single strike could cause damages in foreign trade and its collateral of up to 100M euros. All, because of a dispute in a local port in Northern Finland.

It’s a novel idea to support the working standards of foreign employees traveling to Finland on board foreign ships, but I find it tough to find truth in this – especially considering the union’s past stunts. The union has a culture of aggressively demanding their rights and causing damages to Finnish businesses at large. The letter warning of damage claims due to the illegal denial of service was the thing to hit the ego and culture of the union.

The strike has largely caused outrage and anger in Finland. During a time when Finland is struggling to get back to her feet with decreasing exports, it’s hard to find justification for a damage this large.

In my opinion, this is a desperate cry from the union in trying to find meaning, justifying to the members that the membership matters. The more questionable the union membership becomes, the more justified the union will find support strikes for all kinds of things that would win it meaning.

Another thorn in the unions’ flesh is the discussion around the right to tax deductions on the membership fees. I think that this discussion just received more fuel opposing the current legislation. Time has passed unions in their current form.

They have failed to renew themselves and it’s only just that creative destruction make room for a better tomorrow.

I’ve been helping Greg and Dmitri whenever they wanted to reach out with a request for contacts or anything else, but other than that I’ve kept out completely. I hired both Greg and Dmitri to ArcticStartup and later on ended up selling the rights to the company and business to them as the original founders, me included, wanted to step back due a short runway.

While I got a big bunch of new contacts and friends out of this year’s event, the bigger outcome for me was the learning experience of what a motivated and passionate team can do. Greg and Dmitri were easy choices for me back when I hired them.

I hired Greg within 24 hours of meeting him and Dmitri after talking to him on the phone for about 45 minutes. I only met Dmitri when we signed our contract. I never felt even a bit of regret for the fast pace nor the choices I made. Both gents are top notch and clearly proved it with Arctic15 this year.

It would be inappropriate to say that only Arctic15 has come a long way. ArcticStartup has also achieved better metrics based on the ones that it measures its success and engagement of the community on.

I’m incredibly happy for what Greg and Dmitri have achieved and wish them all the best with ArcticStartup and Arctic15 in the future. I’m glad to offer my help if its ever needed. If one could and would call this an exit, I’d say this was clearly a successful one.

We never set out to make money with ArcticStartup. On the contrary, our mission from the start was to “create a radically optimistic startup culture in the Nordics and Baltics”. Ville, Miikka, Karri and me – we all shared this and truly believed in it.

One of the best things I’ve learned throughout the years is to keep on asking myself the same question (something I like asking new entrepreneurs as well in their newly chosen path); if there was no money involved – would you still be doing it? Whenever I get too hesitant to say yes, it’s time to re-motivate myself.

This learning was also one of the reasons we ended up selling the rights to ArcticStartup to Greg and Dmitri for the price of 10 euros.

Money wasn’t part of the equation when we founded ArcticStartup and we didn’t want it to be part of the equation as we let go of it.

Greg, Dmitri, Jan and the team of awesome volunteers you had at Arctic15 – thank you so much, you really showed me and the world that ArcticStartup has a great mission and special place in the Nordics and Baltics.

Godspeed.

I’ve also become a relatively active WhatsApp user. It’s a great way to create cross platform discussions with my family and friends. The application is not available on any other device, forcing you to run it on your mobile. Another fact is that you don’t close WhatsApp as often as you would close Skype.

I believe that WhatsApp’s ultimate success was defined by the fact that they designed a product which was non-intrusive enough so people ended up running it in the background constantly.

It wasn’t the features WhatsApp offered, but the benefit of being able to reach people in a similarly effective manner to that of SMS.

Skype is an excellent application, but without the value of being able to contact people whenever you want – it’s just another application. WhatsApp on the other hand, is much more comparable to your OS level applications on your phone, because it is kept online all the time.

And that’s where the true value and success of the product, in my opinion, is derived from.

Ben Horowitz was interviewed by Kevin Rose for his Foundation series in November 2012 at Google Ventures CEO Summit. The video paints an excellent picture of Ben and his views on entrepreneurship. Strongly suggested, below 40 minutes in length.

A great quote by Cus D’Amato to which Ben referred to in the video on courage (which he outlined one of the most important attributes of entrepreneurs they invest into):

“I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you fee.”

We visited the Finnish Museum of Natural History today as the weather wasn’t too good to play outside. I managed to take a bunch of photos at the museum and somehow ended up testing the trial version of Lightroom 5 from Adobe’s website. In short, it’s awesome and I can already see myself paying for it after the 30 day period is over. Brings a new level of enjoyment into photography again.

Fred Wilson had embedded a terrific video of Gary Vaynerchuk being interviewed by Will Cain. I watched it last night and while I knew a lot about Gary, this video had a lot of great storytelling in it. His take on social media for example, is exceptional – not to mention his story as an entrepreneur. Recommended watching.

Little evening fun. I’m trying to build a temperature monitoring system I could deploy at our summer cottage. The Pi would also handle the security camera images and make those available to be viewed on its web server.

CEO Carl Manneh tells WSJ’s Sven Grundberg, “Financially speaking, we have no pressure whatsoever to rush into any new projects. Besides, we have no outside owners that require us to reach any particular goals.”

via ArcticStartup.

The person in control of missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 issued their last communication to air traffic control after the first set of aircraft communications was disabled, Malaysian authorities have confirmed, adding further weight to suspicion that the plane was hijacked.

The latest revelation suggests that the person who delivered the “All right, good night” message to Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers just before the Boeing-777 disappeared from their radar at 1.22am and diverted from its scheduled flightpath to Beijing was also aware that the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System Acars had been manually shut down.

via theguardian.com

The competition in the online storage space intensifies. Google has lowered their prices quite dramatically. I’m expecting Dropbox to do something similar soon. Their prices seem completely outrageous compared to Google’s new pricing, which is about 20% of that of Dropbox.

via Official Google Blog.

Because little things, day by day, usually don’t seem like much in the moment, but over the course of months and years, we are changing and maturing as individuals and it can be so valuable and downright encouraging to be able to look back and see that change.

via Shawn Blanc.

It should be noted that the recent fall of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange, with losses of about $460 million, had much more to do with the lack of oversight at the exchange, and not with Bitcoin as a protocol.

via NYTimes.

I’ve recently switched from Apple’s Mail client to Airmail. I got tired of having to guess whether e-mails to my GMail account were coming through. In many situations they weren’t.

The e-mail client is excellent in terms of productivity. It’s simple and sleek and puts focus in getting those e-mails either read and archived or answered.

There are at least two short comings I came across though.

Firstly, the app doesn’t support multiple e-mail addresses for your contacts. This means that if you have entered two separate e-mail addresses for someone through Apple’s Contacts, the mail client only gives you one of them. This is extremely cumbersome regarding my productivity hack for Pipedrive (huge fan, by the way – go #Estonianmafia!).

The hack is simple. I’ve added my Pipedrive dropbox e-mail to all the contacts I’m commonly in contact with and can access that dropbox e-mail address by typing the person’s name. Mail.app used to show this, but Airmail fails at this.

Secondly, I noticed that for some odd reason it didn’t render my test HTML emails from Mailchimp correctly. They came out as HTML code. Mail.app showed these correctly and I’m 99,9% sure there is nothing wrong with the code. This means that Airmail for some reason doesn’t have very great HTML support. Although, having said that – all other HTML e-mails I’ve received in the past couple of days work perfectly.

The conclusion is that Airmail is a great app for such a low price. It’s on for less than $2.

Norway’s giant oil fund said on Friday that it earned 15.9 percent, or about $115 billion, on its investments last year, profiting from big bets on American and European stocks that offset losses in government bonds from around the world.

via NYTimes.com

WhatsApp Inc., the mobile messaging service that agreed to be acquired last week by Facebook Inc. FB +2.99% for $19 billion, said Monday that it would offer voice calling as early as April, allowing free phone calls among WhatsApps 465 million users.

via WSJ.com

House of Cards is simply put an excellent series. Equally excellent is Netflix’s business model. I subscribed to Netflix for a month to watch season 2 of House of Cards and it cost me 7.99 euros. This comes to about 61 cents per episode. That kind of money I’m willing to pay for quality HD video.

I’m sure that the low cost of actually using Netflix is one of the big reasons why it has become so successful. Other media outlets are still trying to push through their equally expensive prices from the physical storage device era (of CDs, cassettes, etc.). It just doesn’t work.

I watched all the 13 episodes also in about a week. This is also one of the most fundamental differences with traditional media companies as well – Netflix does not dictate how you can enjoy the content you pay for. The disruption will be huge once it really hits the industry. Netflix is one of the few companies biting away at this by producing their own shows.

Ultimately it is the licenses to the content that is holding back the industry from transforming to something that users would value more. It has been clear that the old rights holders won’t be willing to change. Hence, the future is extremely bright for companies like Netflix who enable customers the distribution channel and produce content they are able to enjoy, whenever they like and on their device of choice.

The larger companies will wither around for 5 to 10 or so years until they realise that the market has completely changed. Then, it is too late for them to change and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of them being bought by the likes of Netflix for their rights to content. I’m extremely optimistic about the change taking place in the industry and look forwards to better entertainment at a better price for consumers.

Calling for a focus on long-term growth and drawing more start-up ventures, the city contemplates lowering some income and property tax rates for its remaining 700,000 residents, though anemic revenue has plagued the city for years.

via NYTimes.com.

#Kyiv – #Helsinki 1138 km #Helsinki – #Utsjoki 1157 km pic.twitter.com/TKaRpIpSBF

— Martti Tulenheimo (@tulenheimo) February 20, 2014

I’ve followed the images on my Twitter firehose with horror. I don’t want to take sides on the issue of leaning towards east or west, but the violence must end.

What makes this tiny country interesting as a governance benchmark is not just that the people can elect their parliament online or get their taxes back in two days. It is rather that this level of service for citizens does not start from their government building a few web sites. Instead, Estonians started by redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the ground up with openness, privacy, security and future proofing in mind.

via Estonia: The Little Country That Cloud.

After pondering for a long time, I decided to subscribe to the New York Times. The first 12 weeks cost you $0.99 in total, so it’s not exactly a huge burden on your finances. After this, it depends on the package you decide to go with.

The digital access (basically the websites) and the mobile app costs you $3.75 a week, while the digital access and tablet app lightens your wallet by $5.00 each week. The all access package, with both apps and the site costs you $8.75.

Something none of these packages (nor the whole sign-up process) tell you is that nytimes.com is a beautifully designed site, that is responsive. Due to this and the awesome app.nytimes.com (you can see a screenshot above of the app), the apps are pretty much addons.

I’m currently testing the tablet app package to the site, but will most likely downscale after the 12 week trial period to the cheapest package. I’ve always enjoyed reading New York Times articles when people share them online, but I haven’t read the paper consistently. Did it today and it’s a great piece of journalism and coverage on internationally relevant issues. Strongly suggest testing the subscription if you enjoy reading quality journalism.

ps. I pondered between the Economist digital subscription and New York Times, but decided to lean towards the latter. Haven’t regretted a bit.

Finland scored a -1.4% contraction for the last quarter of 2013.

The reality is that Finland’s economy, or GDP more precisely, has been contracting pretty much for the last two years as shown below in the Statistics Finland graph.

If we’re actually specific, the trend might have begun already during the autumn of 2011.

When our GDP is contracting at this rate, our growing debt becomes a bigger problem. However, it isn’t the primary issue in our economy. I believe it is the symptom of the real problem. While Finland’s debt to GDP ratio is still well below the EU average, it should not be taken lightly. Below is a graph on how we rank to the EU average and Euro area average.

These two graphs combined reveal a scary near future. GDP is going down while the country continues to finance its public spending through debt. At the moment we only have frameworks and ideas on how to solve the situation. By solving the situation I am referring mostly to getting rid of the symptom in a sustainable way. The way to do this is fixing the issue of contracting GDP. Once the economy is growing again, we are in a better position to put a stop on the growing debt.

I believe the most important issue at hand should be to find ways in how we can get the economy growing again, even slowly. While planning these changes, Finland should also find ways to cut costs on the public side.

The current political debate in Finland is very much focused on finding a way to minimise the deficit (the gap between public spending and income). This is mostly being discussed to be done either by increasing certain taxes and/or lowering of public spending. Somehow, the national economy at large is taken as given.

I believe the disrespect for the GDP and where it actually comes from, is the biggest problem Finland should tackle. While I am a big believer in liberal values, the government plays an immensely important role in how a society and its economy functions.

If you look at the first graph, the fundamentals of Finnish economy are not working in the current situation. This is the real reason why our debt is growing. Fix the issue of a contracting economy and you are two steps closer to fixing the issue of growing debt.

Once we have the economy growing, we can begin to take steps to minimise the deficit in a sustainable way.

Google says Plus has 540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the social network.

What kind of active users are those who do not visit the social network?

via The Plus in Google Plus? It’s Mostly for Google, New York Times.