awards

Today the Finnish Information Processing Association, FIPA (or TTL, Tietotekniikan Liitto) has chosen me as the opinion leader in ICT along with Angry Birds as the ICT product of the year!

The FIPA is a bit similar kind of organization in Finland as the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is in the USA and worldwide.

It's a very positive surprise to be chosen in the first place, and even more positive to have such great company as Angry Birds by my side.

This honorary title of "Opinion Leader in ICT" (vuoden tietotekniikkavaikuttaja) has been received by some very prestigious people in the past;

Prof. Reino Kurki-Suonio
Prof. Pekka Himanen
Prof. Hannu Jaakkola
Risto Siilasmaa (2007)
Dr. Jyrki Kasvi, Member of Parliament (2008)
Dr. Mikko Kosonen (2009)

And now me for 2010.

What kind of themes I want to introduce in to the discussions?

Finland can no longer succeed with old models and processes of leadership, thinking about the old fashioned nature of work, and having an attitude geared more towards industrial production than for modern innovation.

People are not resources in a production facility.

The amount of work no longer correlates to good results or with more profits - the quality of the work and the brilliance of the idea does instead.

We kind of have an existential crisis in the Finnish economy; we have to be able to innovate and to think of work very differently from what we are used to.

Defining problems is more important than honing your skills in solving them. Independent critical thinking trumps common problem solving skills any time.

The whole world of ICT is full of opportunity for us all; and we have to be able to grasp those. Renew our entire concept of creativity, education, work and what it means to live your life as a contributing creative member of an organization and of society.

One good place to get your mindset right would be to start from reading Rework by 37signals. I have never seen more good thoughts compressed into a book than in Rework.

A finnish language story about this in Tietoviikko.

What do you think: how can we solve our crisis? Renew our thinking? Succeed in global competition?

Muxlim continues it's interesting "path of conquest" or at least "path of success" by grabbing a very prestigious award; the 2009 Internationalization Award. They just announced it today at around 3pm. This is significant noteworthy limelight for a startup; as this award has a history of over 40 years, and not that many startups have ever received it (you could argue that none of the previous winners were startups). In fact they usually go to well-known big corporations that have been international for quite a while. Muxlim now receives the exact same award as Nokia did back in 1999. It's a positive thing for the whole startup community to get recognition to one of its members.

Muxlim's CEO, Mr. M (Mohamed El-Fatatry) is going to attend President Obama's Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Wshington D.C. this spring as well. It looks like "presidential attention" on Muxlim is going to continue, even attention of the binational kind.

Finpro's CEO also comments: "The Internationalization Awards of the President of the Republic highlights concepts and business models as examples for other Finnish companies that are going international. This year, all the award-winners represent highly specialized expertise and the combination of expertise from many different industries. Furthermore, the international service industry has an important role in their businesses,” says Jorma Turunen, President and CEO of Finpro."

The official info continues: "Every year, Finpro looks for candidates for the Internationalization Awards and carries out their preliminary assessment. Based on the evaluation the Board of Directors of Finpro proposes a list of candidates to the President in collaboration with the Association for Finnish Work. The President of the Republic decides the winners of the Internationalization Award. Today’s award ceremony was the 42nd in the history of the award."

Nice to see that a startup has found its way up there ;) Finpro notes that Pictures of the Award winners are here at some point: http://finpro.materials.fi > Events

Now what does this mean to a startup then? Hopefully better recognition and a strong show of support to its legitimacy and right to exists. Startups often lack super-strong reference and concrete evidence to prove their value and usefulness. Recognition like this will certainly carry some weight and should help build trust towards customers, consumers, investors and partners alike. After all, they do check this stuff, make their DD and are careful about who to nominate for these kinds of awards. I am sure any startup would welcome equal fame and recognition with open arms, as any startup will need every advantage out there to pull through and eventually make it big. Looks like Muxlm is well on their way!

Congratulations! Great work Team Muxlim!

www.muxlim.com the world's largest social media site for muslims has been selected to be one of the Red Herring 2008 global finalists.

I am on the board of directors, and one of the business angels funding the company.

You can find the full finalist list with 200 names on it from here:

http://www.herringevents.com/global08/redherring100.html

ActicStartup.com writes about it in here:

http://www.arcticstartup.com/red-herring-global-top-100-finalists-announ...

Additionally Muxlim has received a bunch of publicity lately. Just last week Muxlim did interviews for Abu Dhabi satellite TV, The National, BBC, Reuters, etc.

Blogs have written tons about Muxlim lately. In the last 10 days I have received 63 separate Google Blogs -alerts about new postings on Muxlim.

A blogserach.google.com search for "Muxlim" produces over 35 thousand results, here:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=muxlim&btnG=Sea...

Seems like the very interesting story is finally getting some traction after all.

www.muxlim.com has "did it again" first by being the star of the show at SIME Copenhagen and then winning the nomination for the SIME Awards in the category of "Best Internet Strategy".

Image: Mohamed El-Fatatry speaking at SIME Denmark
Source: the SIME blog at: http://blog.sime.nu/

And as you might remember Muxlim just recently won the World Summit Awards Nomination.

Muxlim is soon starting to be one of the most awarded new startups around in Finland. I think "they had it coming" and they certainly have some momentum building up. Gratz to the whole team, again!

There has been some enthusiastic tweets and blogposts about Muxlim's stardom in Denmark. Here's one by Mads Kristensen. He is saying:

There was one thing, I saw, which stuck with me: Muxlim.com - the worlds largest online community for muslims. Mohamed El-Fatatry, the founder of Muxlim Inc, gave an inspired talk about how they have created this big community for everything related to a muslim lifestyle.

It's nice to see some excellent buzz developing around Muxlim. The funny thing is that with a bit over 2 million monthly uniques Muxlim has just barely scratched the surface of their 500+ million strong market. So no need to go all like Alexander the Great: "When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer."