cool new stuff

As many of you know I have spent the last 9months+ or so as the CEO of a new startup project in the field of medical software systems for genetic-based cancer treatment etc.

We got that startup "off to ground" so to speak, gathered a great very senior team, acquired potential pilot customers in the US and closed a financing round (my 11th round so far).

However, now due to a few reasons we have decided to discontinue the company alltogether. Meaning that we will dismantle the whole thing and won't in fact execute our plans any further. This is one of those "sometimes It's smart to know when to quit" -kind of moments. If setbacks like this were to never happen - then simply I would not be taking enough risk.

What it also means that I currently don't have an operative main project (otherwise known as the "day job") going on, so I'm looking around and considering different things.

Here's some posts & roles I am interested in:

- Leading a brilliant startup towards international waters (CEO post most interesting, also considering all top team posts)

- Leading a new venture of a bigger corporation into new hot space (these are rare to see - rare to find, and it has been about 4 years or so since I last worked as the president of a publicly listed bigger company, so it might be a time for a comeback into that different kind of "startup" space)

- Being an internal entrepreneur inside a bigger coporration, championing onwards a future key area of growth and competitive advantage.

- Full time, or almost full time, Chairman of the board in a superstar company. (this is often a non-operative, "back seat", role. Still however very interesting, depending on the case.)

I am currently engaged in a number of discussions. It's positively amazing how fast people react and move when they hear one is free to consider new things again. Despite of the ongoing discussions I am always willing to look at new opportunities to do something amazing together!

So: if something comes to mind, you know about an opportunity, or hear about a post, please be in touch. Contact info there in the top-tab labelled "contact".

And happy holidays to you all!

A while back there I joined Netcycler as an advisor. It's been motivating and interesting to be a part of a startup with great green values. Focus on something that potentially makes a big impact; recycling and swapping secondhand stuff amongst us instead of just throwing it away to a landfill "someplace".

I bet many of you have seen "The Story of Stuff", right? if you haven't, go check it out at:

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

The Story of Stuff is a very nicely done fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our (arguably unsustainable) production and consumption patterns. Basically the ugly truth is that we consume too much and mindlessly throw away valuable resources and raw materials, waste energy and pollute our environment in the process of doing so.

A little more than a decade ago (or a few decades) there wasn't such an industry as "the self-storage industry". Now days that segment alone is worth more than 20 billion USD annually (already past 20Bn in 2007). That means that people (and some companies) pay up more than 20 billion USD a year to lock away their unused stuff & crap to decay in a storage facility someplace.

Besides the housing bubble we have pretty much had every other sort of economic bubble since the late 80's: people have been going crazy with their credit cards and amount of personal debt. Way above sustainable levels. People have bought so much stuff that the storage space they have isn't enough to pile it all up: hence the fast growth and the emergence of the self-storage industry. It sounds crazy, right?: to have a separate storage rented out somewhere just to throw your unused treadmills, exercise equipment, dirt bikes, canoes and other stuff in.. Well, it IS crazy, and there's a better way to do this, there has to be.

Netcycler is a service that allows you to swap stuff you don't need (or are willing to give away, if you get something good back) for other stuff that has more value to you. For example: you could swap the pair of shoes you only wore twice for an iPod.

Netcycler does very effective swapping with a little help from computational power and mathematical science (one of their founders has a PhD in physics). Netcycler finds long swap-chains of stuff; so that the chances of getting something excellent back, when you let your old skateboard go, are excellent. In fact they are exponentially excellent; the more people Netcycler has in their system, the more swap-chains they can form and the better value it will be for everyone.

Here's a simple pic to illustrate how it works:

I want a trombone and give away my old iPod. Somebody else wants an iPod and gives away a pair of shoes.. To somebody else who wants the pair of shoes and gives away the trombone. Netcycler already has swap-chains that extend to 5 people, and they are just getting started.

The interesting thing about very long swap chains is that the value of swapped goods can increase every step of the way. With a little luck you might end up trading away your old iPod and receive a sea-canoe, or even something crazy like a house in return. Swapping a red paperclip for a house is precisely what happened to Kyle MacDonald. Apparently the swap-chain took him a year to execute, and you can read his story from here. So, potentially, if you are extra lucky, you can end up with an amazing swap-chain getting you something much more valuable in the trade than what you are giving away. Remember that the value of stuff is highly subjective. This means that it is possible to get long swap-chains were every swap in the chain is perceived as a "tradeup" to something more valuable, making all participating folks happy. The more stuff you put on Netcycler and the more people are on it, the better the chances of this happening are. In Netcycler you'll see nice lists of the stuff that's available as a swap against your items; so you can pick and choose the things that have the most value for you.

More illustrations on how it works:

First you add your stuff. You can place offers (offer a stuff for something you want) and you can go and click items to your wishlist that would be valuable to you.

Next: the magic happens and Netcycler does the matching. You can end up with a really long swap-chain, or a shorter one. It takes into account anything that's on your offer & wish -lists and tries to optimize the swap-chain for every person involved.

Finally you go and do the swap for real. Or agree how to do it. There are several Netcycler meeting points and using one of them is a good option. If you don't wish to leave your apartment (or your storage room ;-)) you can just mail the item to the other swapper.

One of my things in there is a bodyboard, check it out.

I find the whole idea behind Netcycler exciting. This is certainly something that we, as a very material society, would need. I'm a hamster; which means that I'm the kind of guy that ends up rarely throwing anything away. I just pile up and save way too much stuff; and when I get rid of it, I try to come up with an intelligent way of disposing stuff. Throwing things into the garbage bin just isn't a good option - I much rather give stuff away to friends or somehow put them in recycling or charity. Netcycler hits this need and "consumer behavior" precisely and promises something better; you can actually trade up, not just get rid of stuff.

You can request beta-access to Netcycler from this signup page:
http://www.netcycler.fi/signup

I have joined the board of directors of Balancion (www.balancion.com), a company on a mission to help you save money and organize your personal finances.. Actually I joined the board a while back, blogging about it now because it will soon be grand opening time for Balancion's service.

Probably the most famous startup in this space is Mint (www.mint.com), that has been very successful in attracting customers (they had 1.2 million users in June, according to their CEO as interviewed by PaidContent.org), Mint is focusing on the US markets. There are other players in this field as well, to name a few: www.wesabe.com, www.rudder.com, www.geezo.com, www.xero.com, and Expensr.. All of which are almost solely US-focused.

Balancion is not only bringing the same concept to the Finnish, Scandinavian and EU markets, but also looking to enhance it quite a bit in the process. Currently the company is looking for beta-testers into the Finnish test market launch (go sign up at www.balancion.com), which will be around October this year. Balancion also has a Facebook page with some additional info in there; http://www.facebook.com/balancion

Antti Akonniemi has some (finnish only, sorry) thoughts on Balancion in their "Binesmiehet" site, here.

ArcticStartup just recently wrote an article on Balancion.

Balancion is CEO'd by Mr. Jussi Muurikainen and implemented with the help of the good folks from Idean. The company is financed and BoD-governed by owners & executives from the footwear company Jalas.

The central idea is to offer a service that will automatically keep track of your finances and offer you plenty of help and guidance in how to sort it all out, save some money, and quite probably end up in a situation that is much more financially well off. Naturally its also about more intelligent spending; saving money and using it for the kinds of things that you really want/need; like a good holiday every once and while. "Automatically" in this context means that the service has the capability to read in your credit card, bank account etc statements automatically and build the analysis on those. The targeted use-case here is that after some initial info and registering the user needs only to spend money and the service will be able to sort it all out. Balancion is certainly well on its way in implementation towards this.

Ever heard some rich people say that it's not really in how much you earn, but rather in how little you spend? There's real wisdom in that thought and the evidence of it actually working is quite overwhelming.

The truth is that the personal finances of most people are out of control today. Somehow people have confused being in debt with actually owning something. Many who claim to own their own homes, businesses, cars etc, are in fact up to their ears in debt and the bank is never very far from de facto owning their possessions. People are brought up with this idea that credit and debt equals money from almost since birth. They enter the working life and society with all kinds of funny notions on this topic, and the results of that we see everywhere; bloated housing prices, everyone and their dog up their arses in debt, and you still wonder where the financial crisis did come from? It would do a world of good if people actually bothered to find out how money mechanics work, or even arse themselves to as little as googling what is a "Fiat Currency"....

People desperately need to start loaning less, saving more and living a financially sustainable life.

This would also be a better deal for the banks: financially stable people taking educated risks and well positioned to pay back everything they loan. And they still should loan; where it makes sense, and where they can pay it back, in a sustainable way.

How much debt I have? About a 1000 euros, and its all in my credit card. Why do I even have credit cards? Because I travel and they give you better exchange rates on foreign currencies than the rip-off bereau de change. Plus they have insurances and stuff..

OK enough for the rant there ;-)

Solutions like Balancion are in high demand, and I hope services like these would have some impact on society and people would start to think about financial sustainability, savings, debt, etc in a more educated and successful manner.

It's been a pleasure to be involved with developing another well-backed startup full of enthusiasm and great ideas. Consider joining the beta and checking it out - it's not like you wouldn't need to be more financially successful, right? ;)

There are not that many blogs that any Nordic VCs would write. Can't think of any actually (at least not any good ones have hit my radar..). Until now of course:

http://vcperspectives.com/wordpress/

VC Perspectives is a newish (been around about as long as this blog) VC blog written by Daniel, Fredrik and Stefan of Creandum (the VC behind such companies as Spotify and Videoplaza for example).

The blog describes itself as:

"This is a blog for everyone interested in entrepreneurs, start-ups and venture capital, primarily with a Nordic focus. The idea is to provide insights, comments, and discussions about the Nordic entrepreneurial scene from a venture capital perspective."

I recently had a chat with Daniel Blomquist about the blog and what they are trying to achieve. It is brave and ambitious to bring more transparency to the VC process and "the VC world". Things sometimes seem to be pretty "hush-hush" and quite secretive for no apparent reason. The blog's writers seem to agree with the point of view that more transparency and honest information in how the whole scene works and operates is something that only adds to value for everyone and increases the chances of success.

As an example: I have seen a total of zero news over the years regarding VCs and entrepreneurs jointly telling a success story; for example a successful exit. Many times people think of the Entrepreneurs and the VCs as two separate camps that are somehow opponents to each other. While there might be a little truth in that if you are talking about stuff like negotiating deal terms etc - even at a situation like that it is more about finding some common guidelines and terms that work for and motivate both parties so that they can achieve success together..

Many VCs are former (or current) entrepreneurs (not nearly all of them, but many of the best ones, most successful ones, are), and they are really there in the marketplace to achieve the same end result as entrepreneurs; to build great companies and produce great success stories.

Therefor would it really be that far fetched to see even one single press release made jointly by the entrepreneur team and the VCs announcing a successful exit from a really great company they have built together and sharing the story and insight behind that? I haven't seen any of those kinds of stories around, and would certainly be interested in hearing them.

The VC perspectives blog is almost alone in the Nordic region taking on the challenge of talking more about these topics and showing the world from their point of view. That alone is worth my support and I would love to see them reach the same kind of quality and insight as many US and UK -based VC blogs have at the moment. I listed some of those blogs in my old blog post here.

Some particularly good picks are:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/
http://www.avc.com/
http://www.localglo.be/
http://www.theequitykicker.com/
http://www.ventureblog.com/
http://sapventures.typepad.com/
http://www.feld.com/wp/
http://brotman.blogs.com/vcball/

So!, Go read VC Perspectives and post some comments there, be active and tell them what you would like to hear about the VC world. I think they would greatly appreciate that.

Let me begin by saying that this is "highly cool" yet disturbing and unusual stuff. Perfect for a topic I should let you know about on this blog.

The "long history" of all this starts with my first startup in 1999, Taika Technologies, Ltd. You might remember my War Story about how the company got started and what it was like to go through the whole magic carpet ride in the middle of the dotcom crash.

A co-founder of Taika together with me and the rest was Mr. Jouni Mannonen. Jouni is a pioneer and an "old-timer veteran" of the games industry. He's been involved with the local Game Developers Association for years and has started many games industry companies. At one point Jouni was in the DirectX advisory board at Microsoft, and has since gone into producing PSP games. He's also one of the founders of Hybrid Graphics, a world-class company in 3D graphics that got purchased by the Nvidia Corporation in March of 2006.

Jouni is absolutely brilliant and one of the most creative people I know. Like Bill Gates (and many others) he hasn't really finished any formal education (high school dropout), yet has the knowledge equivalent to debate with specialized PhD's in their own field.

One of Jouni's specialities is neuroscience, psychology and neural networks. He is currently working with his team on a couple of potentially groundbreaking ideas in that field.

A long while back we started talking about how the brain functions, how it's laid out on a logical level etc. And pretty soon that took a turn towards a more juicy topic: how to hack it? How to disrupt the normal function of the brain in order to produce a profound effect that is somewhat unsettling and disturbing to experience?

And we found a way!...

The human brain is laid out as a hierarchical neural network. It has different hierarchical levels of function and role. This is strongly tied to how humans experience their environments through their senses and how babies learn and educate their brains on the way to reach maturity. How patterns are constantly observed, matched, reinforced and eventually accepted by the brain as the dominant pattern.

I'm no scientist and nowhere near the expertise level of Jouni or others, but here's my "Donald Duck" explanation of how it roughly goes; The brain is a pattern matching machine. It tries to match signals into patterns and once it finds a pattern it will strongly stick with it and favor that pattern over those of any potential alternative patterns. This can be seen in human evolution: if you are a human standing in tall grass somewhere in the African steppes, and something big and yellow is rushing towards you fast -> you run immediately because your brain tells you that it is a lion. Lion being the first pattern it matched instantly. You don't start to observe if it might be a gazelle, or vegetation floating in the wind etc. The brain matches the first pattern (that is the strongest) and sticks with it. Not the best pattern, but the first. Same applies pretty much with everything the brain does: if you see the character A in the text here in this blog, the brain matches that to the learned pattern A and doesn't really stop to consider if A might be V upside down etc.

The brain is a hierarchical neural network; meaning that when your eyes see sensory input, they don't know what it is that they are seeing. Only the higher levels of hierarchy match the patterns and later tell the eyes where to focus on; to look at a person's face if it's a person, to look at the text if it's a book, to look away if it's the sun, - and arguably in some cases and with some subjects look at the chest area if it's an attractive woman ;-) etc.

Much of the brain's visual pattern matching is tied to the human face. Humans are very social and one of the most important aspects of social function is to recognize emotions, body language, expressions etc in other humans. Hence the brain is very much wired towards pattern matching in facial expressions, eyes, etc. Happy, sad, angry, scared etc - we can all read these emotions from just looking at a picture, or even better with looking at a real person who is displaying them on her face. The eyes see some sensory input and the higher hierarchical levels of our brains figure out the meaning, example; since her eyes are wider and more open than usual, eyebrows pushed forward and down a bit = she must be a bit angry. etc. Some studies have shown that women are actually about 10 times better than men in reading body language; so women probably must have even more developed and active process like this running in their brains; we men are ignorant to many things and frequently miss out on body language signals that are blatantly obvious to women. (in addition to being the finding in many studies I also personally believe that this is the case).

Teh biarn's pettarn macthing si aslo teh raeosn wyh yuo cna raed tihs txet wihtuot mcuh tourlbe at all.

The brain doesn't only match specific isolated patterns like single letters in a text, but it also matches entire words, sentences, patterns in their relative placement and distance, context, style, relevance, temporal relativity, and whole bunch of other factors.

How humans and their brains react to visual stuff because of all this is quite strong. It is entirely the norm in the modeling, fashion, etc industry to quite dramatically fix the "natural flaws" in models in order to make them more attractive. Models frequently get their eyes moved on their faces, eyes enlarged, neck made longer, not to mention all the small flaws in the skin corrected. Much of this is done through makeup first and photoshop later. The end result being an image that matches so much "beautiful patterns" in our brains that our brain is telling us the girl in the image we are seeing is totally stunning.. even if it's a fake.

Case in point, look at this video from Youtube (its a Dove promo):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFlxSlOKNI

...

My brother happens to be a talented professional photographer and I have the impression that he would be doing that stuff daily. So when Jouni and I came up with the idea of hacking the brain through a couple of mechanisms that hit the hierarchical logic like a tactical nuclear warhead I naturally enlisted the professional photoshop skills of my brother. All thou I must say that he did this "job" pretty much as a hobby and used about 60 minutes doing it (man pros are fast!).

Check out the portfolio of Mikko Tikka from http://www.fotonokka.fi/

..and finally after a very long introduction. Here they are, the brain hacks that will make your eyes sore and your mind feel a bit fucked up:

(C) Mikko Tikka 2008
Click for a larger image
A derivate work from a (CC) Attribution only licensed picture by
Canon in 2D@Flicker.com

(C) Mikko Tikka 2008
Click for a larger image
A derivate work from a (CC) Attribution only licensed picture by
XirannisX back On@Flicker.com

(C) Mikko Tikka 2008
Click for a larger image
A derivate work from a (CC) Attribution only licensed picture by
J>Ro @Flicker.com

....

Most people when they see the images experience some or all of the following:

a) it is very hard to focus your eyes to see the image clearly, it seems blurred.

b) the image is somehow "wrong" and disturbing

c) the image is very memorable and even when it "hurts to look at" you keep on looking at it for a while

d) there is some sort of emotional response: perhaps you hate it, can't stand it, perhaps you feel curious, you feel intrigued

e) some men even get the feel that the girl(s) in the image are quite attractive

Did you experience any of those?

Why does all of that happen then? That's the question. And that precisely is the brain hack we (or mainly Jouni, being the resident expert here) came up with.

Those images mess up (or rather fuck up) the ability of a hierarchical neural network to match the image to a pattern it would already know.

The image forcibly causes a conflict between two logical layers in your brain. The "lower" layer is entirely assured and convinced that the eyes and mouths you are seeing are real eyes and mouths. They are in the right place (on a face) and they even might be pretty blue eyes, etc.

.. while the "higher" logical layer above the lower layer considers a wider and more broad meaning to the visual input; yes they might be real eyes and real mouths, but is the context right? is it a human face or an alien face?

And the higher logical layer doesn't have a pattern: it sees a monster. An alien. Something unnatural.

The lower layer at the same time keeps on insisting inside your brain that the eyes are real, mouths are real, they are pretty, it's a real face.. and the higher layer is screaming "it's a monster!".

That's your brain hacked right there.

The reason why you can't really focus your eyes and the image seems blurred is because your higher logical layer doesn't know how to instruct your eyes to look at the image. It doesn't match a familiar pattern, it's a monster, you can not look at two sets of eyes at one time.

.. perhaps that's enough for now, I'm not going to reveal everything that there is behind these brain hacks. I'm sure you can figure out much of that stuff yourself; keep looking at them for a while and consider what's happening inside your head. Some hints thou: part of the mechanism why they work is also tied to how human babies grow up and experiences these patterns the first times == essentially meaning "what is imprinted inherently inside the brains of us all".

www.runtoshop.com has used these images for advertising and other commercial messages. I can say that the CTR (Click Through Rate) on these images is way above anything I have ever seen. People can't resist clicking on them, or having some kind of reaction. Seeing the picture just causes a WTF?? reaction and you feel quite compelled to click and find out what the heck is all this about.

We first used these images publicly on 22 of August 2008 in RunToShop's party for our Alpha testing group. (The images were made in early July 2008). One of the images was printed on a drink voucher, and on a couple of leaflets. I can say that by looking at people's reactions that alcohol in your blood doesn't really help your brain feel any better about this ;)

There are many more brain hacks that can be done, and people like Jouni know how to fabricate these. Some day images like these may be banned entirely from advertising; after all subliminal frames in videos are banned almost universally.

Please note that the original copyright for the images is with Mikko Tikka. www.runtoshop.com actually uses these to get our messages across, so please don't use them outright.

If you feel like making your own images like that (a pro photoshopper can make them really well) will you please tell where you got the idea from, and link back to this blog? That would be excellent, thank you.

Since the envelope (and the bleeding edge) has to be pushed all the time: I challenge you to design a brainhack that's even more disturbing than this!