The Travelling Salesman is back – Part 1

In October 2010, we left Kristoffer Lawson with his plan to visit Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark in search of promising tech startups. After many vicissitudes, the trip is now over and he’s back. With a presentation held the 16th of December in the premises of Aalto Venture Garage, he went on retelling his legendary journey of networking and (self) discovery.

Good trip, but luck
“When I started thinking about this journey,” began Kristoffer, “it was always on my mind that I wanted to do it in a Landrover, because I wanted to visit a lot of remote places – I crossed six rivers in Iceland – and my intended 10,000 km drive actually turned out to be at least 13,000. I used Ville’s car and I loved it, even though it was hard to drive on the twisty Norwegian roads and long Danish motorways”, said Kristoffer handing the keys back reluctantly.

The trip, he admits, hasn’t been an easy one. When asked about the most difficult moments, he recalls: “We* had a hard time when the car was broken into in Umeå. Not only was the stereo stolen, but the windows were gone too… We found a garage in Gothenburg that could replace them with plexiglas pieces which worked surprisingly well. I lost my winter gear, got a stomach bug for three days in Copenhagen…This doesn’t compare to the Finnish couple we met though. They’d just had their house burned down, losing all their memories…what can you say to something like that? We didn’t have much but we gifted them with a printer.”

Sweden: Struggling to get it together
Dramas aside, Kristoffer found out some interesting – and somewhat unexpected – details about nordic tech startups during his time on the road. “Finance is what everybody is struggling with,” comments Kristoffer. He says it’s possibly even worse in Sweden than in Finland and that the two contries complain about the same things. “If you do some consumer-level technology or software, nobody knows about that, nobody wants to invest in that kind of thing. If you are looking for €100k-500k, it’s hard to get that kind of investment. All the people who have succeeded got money from abroad one way or the other. In Finland we have Tekes funding and they have something similar over there, so that’s at least something…”

He believes that in Finland, however, there is more of a joint effort going on between startups and students – Aalto Venture Garage being one example. “That’s really good,” he says, “as in Sweden everybody seemed to be a bit isolated, kind of taking care of everything alone, or more like not taking care of it. For example, there was no drive to approach the media.”

Norway: Fisherman’s friend
“Norway was perhaps the most difficult. Great companies…but not many of them. Aside from in Oslo, everything is energy- or fishing-related. For example in Stavanger I went to the business incubator, a place meant to boost entrepreneurship, and asked about software companies, web startups, anything…the answer was almost always: “Software…what does that mean?” After my host thought about it for a while, she said: “All right, we have one company here that does simulation of oil rigs”. Not exactly what I had in mind. Then I found a couple of startups, but we were out of time and we didn’t manage to meet.”

Continuing on?
So maybe Norway deserves a second visit at a later stage. What about the rest? The tale of the Travelling Salesman continues in the next post of this very same blog with impressions from Denmark, Iceland, best practices and organizational issues. Meanwhile, if someone from the Swedish or Norwegian start up scene wants to share some insight, we would be very happy to hear from them.

* some entrepreneur, talent scouts and friends joined Kristoffer here and there along the way.

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Crowdsourcing crime part II: the net has eyes

Along with tea, politeness and Prince William, one of the things the U.K is famous for is CCTV. These days the streets and shopping malls of London are heaving with surveillance cameras.

Nobody knows how many there are, but it’s generally agreed Britain is one of the most watched countries in the world. You have to wonder what this nation of polite tea-drinkers would do if they turned all the cameras off: loot Oxford Street? Storm Buckingham palace? Queue jump?

Okay, fun as laughing at the Brits is, I do have a point here. CCTV only works if someone’s watching at the other end. With such a massive network of cameras, there aren’t enough professionals to monitor every feed and, in any case, small businesses struggle to pay for full time security.

See it, report it!
Step forward Internet Eyes (with a name like that it’s like they’re trying to sound creepy). Subscribers pay £13 (around $20) a year and get access to live video feeds from convenience store cameras. Every crime you spot earns points, get enough points and there’s money to be made – up to £1000 for the top spotter each month.

The idea of net-based surveillance isn’t popular with everyone. What if an Internet Eye subscriber was racist, or particularly disliked old ladies with small dogs? Might they issue alerts which lead to innocent people getting harassed? Does giving out rewards make people too keen to see crime?

In the U.S they’ve gone one further. Texas Police have set up cameras specifically for net watchers to virtually patrol the Mexican border. There’s no money involved this time, the crowd does it out of sheer patriotic duty.

Gaming the system
Human rights issues aside, there’s been some fascinating stuff written on the idea of turning dull, repetitive jobs – like monitoring CCTV feeds – into more exciting, game-like experiences. At Seriosity, a consultancy that aims to get more gaming into work, they’ve experimented with inserting realistic looking, dummy bad guys into live video feeds, so security guards constantly have something to look out for, becoming more alert and engaged.

And if you can insert game mechanics into work, why not insert a little work into games? A stint watching camera feeds could become an optional level in online games, with virtual gold, points or level rewards.

The crowd is watching
The idea of a huge crowd of online informants, ruthlessly alerting the police to any hint of suspicious behavior isn’t exactly comforting (this is a neat of satire on the whole idea of getting rewards for ratting people out). But the sheer number of apps and sites show there’s a genuine desire from the crowd to get involved in crime prevention. It’s up to the innovators – the people who dream up and design these apps, to make sure it’s always really the bad guys who the crowd ends up going after.

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Crowdsourcing: amateur and proud

Other than politicians and bankers, few types of people come in for as much abuse as amateurs. The word itself is practically an insult: a goal gets fumbled, an actor forgets his lines and what time is it? Amateur hour. Maybe it’s just me, but a guy who says he’s “an amateur” usually has a weird look in his eyes and talks a lot about steam trains.

But perhaps it’s time to think again when it comes to non-professionals. Jeff Howe, one of crowdsourcing’s founding fathers, certainly thinks so. In his recent book Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business, Howe devotes a whole chapter to the valuable role played by amateurs through history. Looking back nearly 400 years, he discusses how the “gentleman scientists” of the 17th century collaborated, by mail, to form a major scientific institution – the Royal Society (or the invisible college as it was quaintly known).

Virtually the whole concept of crowdsourcing depends on self-driven enthusiasm. From T-shirt making to crowd funding – without interested men and women prepared to invest their free time the crowd simply wouldn’t exist. Today’s equivalent of the Royal Society is surely crowdsourcing sites like InnoCentive, which give citizens who aren’t tenured professors the chance to contribute to scientific discovery.

Working Definitions
The project that must rank as the ultimate example of pre-web amateur collaboration began in 1857. That was year the (appropriately Victorian sounding) London Philological Society started the immense task of creating a dictionary that included every word in the English language. As well as professional editors, the project involved a distributed army of volunteers. Hundreds of people, from all over England, sent in obscure words, quotations and whole entries. Hours of personal time were given, by amateurs, to create what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Okay, removing my rose tinted lenses I have to admit that for all its 19th century glory, the Oxford Dictionary ain’t a patch on the distributed labors of Wikipedia contributors. OED volunteers took 50 years to produce 12 volumes. Jimmy Wales’ and Larry Sanger’s little helpers have tapped out over 3 million English language articles in under a decade (and kicked off a few never ending disputed page wars but hey, every century has its ups and downs). But, even if 21st century technology is light years beyond the 19th, it’s fair to say the impulse driving the OED and Wikipedia crowds was/is the same: the urge to collect, share and add to the sum of available knowledge.

Next generation collaboration
In a recent interview in Wired magazine, net heavyweight Clay Shirky points out that, for the first time in recent history, young people are watching less TV than their parents. Instead, kids are online. They’ve swapped, Shirky claims, an essentially passive form of entertainment for something you can actively engage with. He isn’t claiming young people are somehow superior (at least half of them are Justin Bieber fans after all), or that everything online is worthwhile. But that, given the choice, people go for a medium they can contribute to, as well as consume.

According to both Wiktionary and the OED, the root of the word amateur comes from a Latin term meaning “to love”. So how about we all get back to our roots, shake off amateur prejudice, and give the crowd some credit for participating in the stuff they love.

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Bringing anarchy to the creative process – When distributed work meets interesting web content

Tommaso: Ida, would you like to write a blog post for us, sharing your ideas on crowdsourcing?
Ida: Sure, sounds good! I already have a few thoughts…

Two weeks later. The first idea that pops into my head is a text written like a ninth grade “creative essay”. You know, the one where you write a few words, fold the paper and hand it to the next person who continues the story with words of his own. NO. This is clearly not the way to bring the crowdsourcing idea to the process of creating interesting web content. Or maybe it might work by chance – but just once.

My work in Vapa Media revolves around interesting, up to date and good web content in general. The first questions arise when one must decide, what good content actually is, and what it is not. To make it simple I think that good web content has an audience, while bad content doesn’t. What is not interesting, doesn’t exist. The same philosophy applies to business in general.

Naturally there are ways to crowdsource when it comes to tagging web content, but could crowds actually help create the content? Good content equals quality and for quality you need a mixture of great ideas, hard work and vision. Could a crowd have a shared vision or is the idea of microtasking doomed to fail in the first place when it comes to content creation processes?

The more I delve into the idea, the more I think that something can be done. At Vapa we are almost intoxicated by trying to get into the minds of our site’s followers and readers. Whether it is with articles, videos, blogs or random piece of texts, we aim to please our readers. So what could be crowdsourced in this process? The writing process itself might be hard to share, though there are exceptions. Ever heard of the sci-fi book Metro 2033? Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky started publishing chapters of his unfinished book on the web while he was still writing the book. Glukhovsky wanted the readers to have their say on the storyline – and they did! Thousands people rewrote the chapter and in the end the novel reached 2 million online readers before it was printed.

Glukhovsky’s story was a happy one (ahem, except for the nuclear apocalypse part, of course), but business-wise it’s probably more convenient and easy to share the idea rather than the final product. Instead of crowdsourcing the final content, why not make the creative project public? In reality that would mean publishing just the rough idea and aims of the project. This could happen by gathering a panel of people from different backgrounds while sharing and modifying the creative process: wikidea.

Of course anarchy would result. Spread the creative process to masses and beware. Various opinions, point of views, likes and interests crashing to each other and trying to stand out in the process of creating the killer application – or in this case: the winning content concept. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be a nice bed of roses. But the creative project never is. It gives you a headache. So why not crowdsource the creative pain?

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I Plead Not Guilty

After a holiday season rich in the joys of eating, drinking and general overindulgence, I sometimes feel a tad glum. The obvious cause is my body telling me to ease up on the rich food (I’m convinced the alcohol has nothing to do with it), but for a while now I have suspected another cause.

Rather than food or alcohol, I blame people. Not just any people, I’m talking about those who instead of celebrating this season of frenzied consumption and family time, dread it. Whether it’s due to an amplified feeling of loneliness or increased financial hardship, Christmas is a rough time for many people. Granted it’s not my fault that people are poor and lonely. But it still makes me feel a little uncomfortable (poor me, I hear you say).

This year, instead of wallowing in my bloated guilt, I decided to try to alleviate it with volunteer work. This very thought made me feel much better, until I looked out the window. And it was cold outside. So, so cold…

Fortunately for me, one no longer needs to leave the house to get a do-gooder fix. Instead of braving the cold, I took my volunteering skills into cyberspace, where I discovered myriad ways to help out my fellow man, NGO or not-for-profit. The tasks are varied, and the amount of help you provide can vary from a few minutes’ microwork, to upwards of several days of sweet, sweet guilt relief.

For those interested, a good place to start looking is the website The Extraordinaries. There, amongst numerous opportunities to tag photos for museums and galleries, I found a call to write messages of encouragement to children in extreme poverty. Although unsure if such a gesture really makes anyone feel better but me, I wrote a message before continuing my search.

Other sites such as the UN’s online volunteering site gave me the chance to create educational materials for children. Noting this for later, I then stumbled across a site that, amongst other offerings, requested a week’s help advising on the rearing of pigs. Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling that guilty.

Then, just as food and alcohol induced drowsiness threatened to derail my whole project, it hit me. A blog! A blog to tell other people how they can volunteer their services online. A blog whose repercussions would more than cure my malaise.

So, blog completed, I sit here with the weight of the world lifted off my shoulders. I have to say this volunteering really works wonders. You should try it some time. As for myself, I’m heading back to the kitchen for some more dessert.

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