DIRTyAURA

Summary of my talk: “Love Your Users”

Teemu Kurppa — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 08:27:02 +0000

Charlotta from AaltoES, did a great summary of my talk on Wednesday. If you are interested what I had to say, go read it.

I also mentioned a couple of slideshows or videos to watch, here are direct links to them.

How Did X Get Traction – a Q&A threads on Quora. Lots of nuggets of wisdom about acquiring your initial audience.
visit site to read more]

Talking today at Aalto Venture Garage for Summer of Startups

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:07:16 +0000

I’m giving a talk today for a bunch of young and energetic startups that are part of the Summer of Startups program.

I’m going to talk about a few topics related to tech startups that I know something about. It’s a bit random selection of topics, but I thought it would offer a better background for a free-form discussion after the talk than a very focused one topic talk.

Topics are, in the order of raising importance for an early stage … [visit site to read more]

How to learn to be a big company manager?

Teemu Kurppa — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:26:03 +0000

I’ve an academic interest on a topic of big company management. An armchair variety of an academic interest, to be precise.

What they teach in management schools? That question has intrigued me for a long time. Either they teach wrong things or getting thousands of employees to stay motivated and work efficiently is a really tough if not an unsolvable problem.

Today I accidentally encountered a succinct description of management that resonated with me. visit site to read more]

Demoing our UI technology today at MobileDevCamp

Teemu Kurppa — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:00:17 +0000

My company Huikea Experience released our first game Facetap last week. It’s a fun casual game about faces of your Facebook friends. Get it to your iPhone from the App Store.
However, visit site to read more]

The new era of user interface design: iPhone and touch UIs

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:29:20 +0000

I was visiting a friend a couple of weeks ago and saw a one-and-half-year-old girl using an iPhone and it got me thinking. Touch interfaces are going to change modern graphical user interfaces more than anything in the past 25 years.

The smart young lady wasn’t the first toddler I have seen using an iPhone or a mobile phone in general. It’s only a natural part of their development that children imitate things that their parents do. Many seem to figure out TV remote controls almost on … [visit site to read more]

Insights from Facebook Mobile Usage

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:16:29 +0000

Search versus socializing

We don’t carry our mobile phones for a search of information, but to communicate with people.

It seems that Facebook has become one of the major drivers for growth of mobile internet usage. It was last year when mobile operator ads in London Tube started to highlight Facebook instead of Google search as a reason to use mobile internet. During 2009 Facebook’s mobile usage has grown from 20 … [visit site to read more]

Programmer-friendly virtual private server hosts

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:30:48 +0000

I did a quick research of virtual private server hosts that would suit Huikea’s needs. What we wanted at this point is a VPS slice host, that offers an easy and fast way to get new slices with standard Linux distro. No bells and whistles. Transparent pricing.

We decided that we don’t go for Amazon EC2. As we are focusing on mobile, we will likely not get web-scale load-spikes even in a case of surprising success. Using Amazon S3 – or any other truly scalable … [visit site to read more]

Getting married today

Teemu Kurppa — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:25:53 +0000

To share my earthly wandering – the only stroll that I have – with someone so different from me that her mystery fills the journey with thrill and excitement; and so alike me that every day I feel at home; makes me the happiest wanderer in the … [visit site to read more]

Mobile startups and small payments opportunity

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:33:10 +0000

I gave a presentation at the TechStart event of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society on mobile and startups. Why mobile is now an interesting opportunity for a small early-stage startup?

In short, App Store and it’s rivals are solving a distribution problem so that it’s very cost-efficient for a small startup to test an idea, reach users and try to get traction in mobile. This wasn’t possible just 3 … [visit site to read more]

TechStart event at Aalto Entrepreneurship Society today

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:01:53 +0000

I’ll be giving a talk at TechStart event at Aalto Entrepreneurship Society today. The talk will be from a bit different view point than before. I’ll explore why focusing on mobile is suddenly interesting for small startup companies. The event is sold-out, but there is an after-event … [visit site to read more]

ArcticEvening panel in Stockholm tonight

Teemu Kurppa — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:13:36 +0000

I’ll be discussing about startups and the future of mobile in a panel at ArcticEvening in Stockholm tonight. Feel free to come to discuss after the panel. I’m interested in various topics including but not limited to:

startups
protopunk
Brixton, London
visit site to read more]

Leaks & Zombies – an intro to iPhone memory management

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:24:49 +0000

In addition to the Platform = Stage – How to choose a mobile development platform talk I gave in MobileDevCamp Helsinki, I gave a short BarCamp presentation about iPhone memory management practices titled Leaks & Zombies. It’s a more technical presentation, targeted to novice and intermediate iPhone programmers.

visit site to read more]

MobileDevCamp slides: Platform = Stage

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:15:21 +0000

Here are slides of a talk that I gave a few weeks ago in MobileDevCamp Helsinki. It’s a modified version of a similar talk that I gave in Slush Helsinki conference last fall.

Talk discusses an … [visit site to read more]

Enthusiasm vs. Hype. True offline virality of Travian

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:28:37 +0000

Have you ever heard of Travian? No? That’s what I thought. Have you heard of Second Life? Probably.

Travian is a browser based free strategy game, a phenomenon that almost nobody has heard of.

But look the graph below. That is what we call true virality: almost zero news about Travian anywhere, but it’s growing steadily and it’s big. People join Travian because they heard about it from other people, who are so … [visit site to read more]

Business on internet: Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:33:10 +0000

This is a must-see. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen talks about services and making business in internet.

Among other juicy bits the interview includes stories about testing ideas and concepts via Google Ads and early days of Twitter … [visit site to read more]

Three good reasons to come to MobileDevCamp on Saturday

Teemu Kurppa — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:03:54 +0000

I’m giving a talk in MobileDevCamp Helsinki on this Saturday (Feb 23th 2009). MobileDevCamp is an event for people interested in innovating and developing on mobile phones. It is held at Vanha Ylioppilastalo, right in the city center of Helsinki.

There’s at least three good reasons to attend in addition to the fact that event is free of charge.

visit site to read more]

Is selling mobile applications a new business fad?

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:51:12 +0000

Selling iPhone apps is becoming a new business fad that people make fun of. It’s adopting a role of clown that an ad based model of free web services has held for a while.

However truth is that App Store is nothing short of success. In January Apple announced that there had been visit site to read more]

iPod Touch – The Christmas present of 2008?

Teemu Kurppa — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:13:09 +0000

A short followup to my previous analysis of AdMob’s data. AdMob released a December 2008 report and it contains a fascinating data point: iPod Touch requests doubled overnight on Christmas. Worldwide there were 3.4 times more monthly requests and for example in UK requests grew … [visit site to read more]

Worldwide mobile internet usage stats: Nokia biggest but iPhone growing fast

Teemu Kurppa — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:22:30 +0000

There are precious few public numbers about actual internet usage of different mobile devices although this information is valuable for businesses developing mobile internet applications and web sites. For example many site owners have noticed iPhone’s importance and Google representative revealed shocking effect of this iPhone phenomenon, but there aren’t much public stats out there to … [visit site to read more]

Platform = Stage. How to choose a mobile development platform.

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:56:46 +0000

Yesterday I gave a presentation at Slush Helsinki conference. Slush Helsinki was a great gathering for startups – organized by startups. A big thanks to organizers for making it possible.

A topic of my talk was the current shift that is happening in mobile platforms and how developers and entrepreneurs should think about a choice of platform that they develop on. Developers are often excited about technical possibilities that enable us to do cool … [visit site to read more]