innovation

I'm letting you know about a really cool new innovation that in essence turns all cell phones that have a SIM card into GPS enabled devices (even the old ones)!

It's a Finnish founded & lead company called BlueSky Positioning and you can find their interwebz pages here:

http://www.blueskypositioning.com

The company is founded by CEO Mr. Risto Savolainen who worked together with me on Taika Technologies. I consider Risto to be one of my mentors.

They have discovered quite an innovation: a way to cheaply mass-manufacture SIM cards that have a highly accurate GPS receiver and a proprietary antenna built into the card itself. To my understanding particularly the antenna is a very unique invention. This is very significant for a couple of reasons:

1) It turns all cell phones (even old ones) into GPS devices and allows a whole range of data-intensive apps to be run on them like never before. This is probably as close as it gets to the "wet dream of the telco carriers", as it drives up data traffic and revenue potentially by huge amounts.

2) The product is a huge game changer for all SIM card manufacturers: who have seen their profits become increasingly slim and prices go down. They sell SIM cards for less than 1 EUR each these days, and a product like this is a dramatic game changer for them: they can once again manufacture a high-value-adding product that will have more than 10-fold the price and far better margins.

3) The EU and the US are coming up with legislation (namely the E112 and E911 respectively) that requires accurate positioning information to be provided by the phone for emergency services in case of an emergency call. There probably isn't a better way to comply with this legislation than this particular product.

CC Attribution: Un Manué@Flickr

I have understood that this product of theirs is unique and nobody can do the same stuff better at the moment. The company announced a strategic partnership with Sagem Orga, one of the world's largest SIM card manufacturers a few days ago. The press release about that is here.

Also one significant thing about this product is that it is way cheaper to manufacture and get into phones than building new fancy GPS phones has ever been. Phone manufacturers like Nokia would probably do a better job economically by abandoning the expensive and complex tech used for GPS now and switching into this SIM-based solution instead. Could save boatloads of green with their high volumes.

I'm pretty hyped up about this because it is such a cool and useful invention, but also because its from a person I know and respect, and has strong Finnish roots. They have been very low profile so far, but looks like they are "out" now with the partnership announcement and all. Hopefully they will conquer the world - realizing the dream of every startup!

What do you think - is there a market for something like this? Trouble on the horizon? Competition coming up?

Added the "Good Morning Finland" talk clip to MuxlimTV, with somewhat of a permission from the show itself. This is related to previous posts:

http://tane.li/2008/good-morning-finland-wednesday-morning
http://tane.li/2008/innovation-services-and-business-ideas-or-just-tech

Embedded here (in finnish, (sorry)):

On Muxlim: Muxlim has received coverage from about 25 different international media in recent days. Lots of new pretty exciting deals closing and new opportunities stirring up! Looking good.

I did a podcast episode yesterday evening with Tuija Aalto and Sonja Kangas about disruptive innovation, and how organization could make it happen.

Tuija has a full blog entry about that up here.

You can download the podcast as an mp3 (english language spoken) from this link here.

We touch on topics like:

- Using the web is not only about crowdsourcing. Utilize the web inside your organization.
- Organizations online - about dialogue. There are many larger companies that ban their employees from social networks. Brands That Suck on Twitter.
- LinkedIn campaign: Southwest Airlines (link to a story about it)
- Employees online as individuals
- Working with active users: There is strong desire in consumers to be co-creators of value: Example Jamba Juice
Consumer internet companies usually do this with test groups, lead user groups, alpha user groups.
- Eric von Hippel. The more possibilities the better. Little Big Planet
- Rewarding active users: Social status, products, items, credits.
- IP rights: Terms of use establish the rights for the company to use test users' ideas
- Use brokers and bridges: Teams and small groups of people who come from completely different backgrounds. This typically gets done in conferences. Quite rarely done with purpose and with concrete goals. Aula (founded in 2000) was to be a cross-disciplinary network of people
Role play: When organising ideation events, I invite people from different departments, and put people in different roles (marketer to comment as designer and so on)

As a followup note I can only say: I expect the companies I invest in (even the big ones, like Coca-Cola) to embrace disruptive innovation and to strive for it. The reality however is that not many of them do. Lots of opportunities are lost - but then again, is that just more opportunities out there for startups to grasp? One could claim that they are better at disruptive innovation than large corporations.

I you have the patience to sit through 40 minutes of that, please send a comment my way. Thank you!

Back in February of 2007 I was invited by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to be the only outside keynote speaker in their yearly main event, "the communications forum 2007". The topics of discussion where about communications policy, new action plans and initiatives etc. Speakers where the Ministry's chief of staff, the minister herself, and me. Audience members where pretty much everyone with an impressive title from the Finnish "who's who in telecommunications and media", all the major CEO's etc. Every major parliamentary group had their chairman there, with plenty of parliament members and high-level officials around.

I was with www.IRC-Galleria.net at that time so I had to speak about something interesting concerning it. I went for a dual topic instead: first using IG as an example of brilliant and changing youth culture in Finland, and then bridging that to copyright, IPR and shared creative culture. I borrowed some stuff from Larry Lessig's excellent talks (and remembered to mention it as an attribution :)) and talked about how the youth view the politicians as "dinosaur old farts and the Taliban of creative culture oppression". The main point was; how much the youth disagree with their view of what creative culture means and has to mean. This issue is a lot more than merely different opinion - it is quite deeply rooted in conceptions about ethics and what is morally right.

Needles to say my key note sparked some controversy there, and I ended up answering the minister's questions on the microphone for about 15 minutes after it. Later there was a panel discussion with all the parliamentary group heads in it - some from the audience asked questions about what's going to be done about copyright in the next (elections where close) parliament, changes were promised, as they always are.

This same issue remains today, burning as ever, and the youth disagree with the politicians about it possibly more than even before. Kids are born with no notion of artificial copyright restrictions, and it is quite natural human behaviour to have a read/write -culture as your standard notion of what culture should be, as opposed to the politicians' view of read-only (with their permission) -culture. The massive failure of DRM with music and movies kind of proves that it's not just youth who disagree - it is almost everybody.

Joi (who's an investor in Dopplr and whom I have had the privilege to work with a bit) posted the Creative Commons new video to his blog.

I wish all the politicians would go and watch this, would get to know CC and the issue, and would start to finally wake up and act towards the right direction:

Attribution: Jesse Dylan @ Creative Commons
Full list of Attributions for stuff used in the video is here.

The video is CC licenced with the "Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike" licence.

This morning I had a "live on TV" chat in Good Morning Finland with Dr. Risto Penttilä about innovation, innovation policy, the economic downturn, Russia, etc. Its unfortunately all in finnish, but you can check it out from: http://www.mtv3.fi/huomentasuomi/

After the chat I continued talking about the topics for a good while with Dr. Penttilä (who kindly dropper me off in his Alpha Romeo) Some thoughts to blog about as followup:

"Innovation" in Finland has traditionally meant something technical, perhaps a gadget or something, but definitely something that you apply a technical patent for etc. This view should be ancient history by now. There is "no chance in hell" that Finland will be able to continue or hold its own in the future by concentrating just on high quality engineering work and gadgets.

I have the feeling that service innovation and business idea innovation are the kinds of areas that are underfunded, under-focused, and thus under-appreciated as a result. And this seems to hold true for most of the world, except for the places where it happens "organically" as in = people making it happen without a governmental system supporting it that much (places like India, I would argue).

What is service innovation then? New service models, services that preferably in a radical way retune the game and come up with totally new offerings. Examples may wary from novel modern web 2.0 services to classic old school stuff "done better" like online banking and personalized medical services.

Business Idea innovation is a much more elusive cookie then. This area is often nothing but radical, game-changing and "blue ocean" by nature: coming up with totally new business ideas, concepts and unique combinations in ways to do business. You cloud claim that the banking industry has been quite creative with this: banking is thousands of years old, and they pretty much only have a very few basic products: they either buy or sell money. They have managed the re-package and re-model that same basic stuff over and over again, up to the point were it ends up being something as complex as "de-commoditized mortgage-backed securities" or some other mumbo-jumbo stuff. A great example of a business idea innovation is the Canadian circus group Cirquedu Soleil who have managed to move from near-bankrupt classic circus to an audiovisual live entertainment powerhouse worth billions - simultaneously changing their ticket prize from 12 dollars to over a 100.

Right now would be an excellent time for any startup to develop a few service or business idea innovations and roll them out fully once the brainwaves of our economic mental-patient take a turn towards the better, which might be rather soon if all goes well..