Category Archives: Golden Stories

The Fifth Protocol

Posted on by
2

multipass smallNaval is at it again. His vision of bitcoin is comprehensive and compelling. In his mind he sees bitcoin and its myriad of descendants powering large sectors of our financial infrastructure. He sees a true revolutionary technology in the making, our multipass towards financial freedom and innovation. A true fifth protocol. But is he right?

I believe his vision points us towards right direction, but is not entirely correct. One major problem I see with cryptocurrencies is the creation of money by mining. This is straightforward in its’ way and for some purposes serves perfectly fine. But this does not map so well to the money creation people (or machines) might truly prefer. I see this mostly as an ethics and fairness problem. If compelling alternative with different money creation mechanism appears I believe many will choose that option instead (or alongside) cryptocurrencies

Platforms like classic Ripple tried to approach this problem from different perspective. They failed for good reasons and everyone moved their focus to blockchain. I still believe there is a third option. And on this belief I founded my startup Centibel 🙂

Mobile First

Posted on by
Reply

mobile firstThere is a huge backlog of books and blogs I’m planning to read. Mobile First has been on my to-be-read list for quite a while now, but in my recent flight to CES 2014 I finally read it through.

This is good book. I knew some of this stuff already, but found the book to be an entertaining and informative read. If you are interested on this area I would recommend this book.

CES 2014

Posted on by
Reply

CES 2014 very digital zoomed mobile capture with Lumia 1020

This year I visited CES for the first time. Lots of widgets and things to see. I enjoyed the trip and even won a bit in casino. Feeling wealthy for a day I upgraded my return flight and got auto-upgraded further to first class. Lucky me 😉

Many big companies had a massive presence at CES. I was however most impressed with smaller players who had invented a nice new idea and implemented solid product around this. For example one company demonstrated a nice looking little device which allows you to put any mobile/tablet/phablet next to it so that it automatically boosts your mobile sound output. No cables, bluetooth or magic. Just a battery, microphone, speakers and bits of software in one package. Very nice!

I have never been an exhibitor at trade show, but it was sort of fun trying to analyze the sales and conversion processes going on. Some companies had a good presence and others failed utterly. Few companies clearly had unclear focus and no clear reason for being there. But the most prominent failure I encountered was an exhibitor alone in his stall who spoke only few words of English 🙂

My new Lumia 1020 phone really proved itself on this trip. Click the small images below and see for yourself how detailed images one can now take with a phone camera. Note that in most browsers you need to click again to zoom further. Simply amazing!

CES 2014 LA to LVCES 2014 My HotelCES 2014 mobile capture with Lumia 1020

Predictable Revenue

Posted on by
Reply

predictable revenue bookThis book had great ratings and I’m interested on the area, so I pressed the buy button on Amazon. I originally thought this book would have equal parts sales and lead generation, but focus was more on the lead generation side.

This book is reasonably well written and fairly interesting. There are good aspects, but also bad sides to this book. From my view focus is bit too much on US markets and tools. As I have earlier read several books on sales and marketing the amount of actionable new info (for me) was somewhat limited.

Overall this book was reasonably OK read.

Smart People

Posted on by
Reply

smart_peopleWorld is full of smart and inspired people. Internet enables them to reach ever growing audiences and impact the world in new ways. They certainly have impacted my life and worldview.

My thanks to Marc Andreessen, Steve Blank, Andrew Chen, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Jason Cohen, Neil Davidson, Seth Godin, Ben Horowitz, Babak Nivi, Naval Ravikant, Joel Spolsky, Mark Suster, Chris Vargas and so many others.