Disqus - Latest Comments for teemu

Re: Headlines

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 08:06:50 -0000

Fred can correct me if I interpreted wrong, but I think he meant that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al would use these tools to automatically penalize clickbait titles. It would create a big incentive to write better, more accurate headlines.

Re: Headlines

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 08:01:21 -0000

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other internet watering holes could also do multiple actions:
1. indicate a clickbait title with a small visualization next to submission (reddit actually provides mechanism to do this kind of things manually)
2. provide users an option to filter out clickbait submissions
3. automatically penalize sources that use clickbait headlines

Re: Mass-market use cases — Benedict Evans

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 27 May 2014 07:31:59 -0000

The interesting observation is that in some level jet setters and low-income immigrants have similar problems: keeping touch with a global friend network, international calls, moving money efficiently around the globe.

Re: App Constellations

Teemu Kurppa — Mon, 19 May 2014 12:17:59 -0000

Since Nokia S60 times I've thought that the mobile phone home screen is the most valuable "virtual estate" in the world. And the land grab is going on as we speak. Because the "virtual estate" is so limited, it will be insanely valuable to own even a little corner of users' home screen.

The small remedy for this rich get richer scheme is to change home screen behaviour to be much more dynamic. I could imagine a working model where apps are launched mainly through search (voice and text) and "the most recently used" lists.

Re: Whatsapp and $19bn — Benedict Evans

Teemu Kurppa — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:14:35 -0000

The price of the deal was exceptional, but so is 450 million active users. In the history of tech acquisitions only the 2nd Skype deal is comparable. See https://public.brightside.i...

And if compare the cost per user of other famous tech acquisitions, WhatsApp is not an outlier at all: https://public.brightside.i...

Re: Task Management

Teemu Kurppa — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 10:25:55 -0000

I think a calendar is a great task management tool for your work, because, I assume, the life of VC is organized around meetings. Thus, a separate task list is an extra chore.

Contrast this with a life of the development team. You have initial plans sketched out, but new tasks pop up all the time when you dive deeper designing and implementing a feature because you understand the details only then. On what priority and especially when these tasks should be handled is a totally different game, and calendar is not a good fit for that process flow.

Re: DIY Data Science

Teemu Kurppa — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:19:08 -0000

It would be fantastic if you could write a blog post report about Structure/Data conference!

Re: Hobbyists

Teemu Kurppa — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:24:52 -0000

We are working on something close to this. Although we have dubbed it as "Excel for Touch Device Era", but the larger vision is a platform for important numbers of your life.

Re: DIY Data Science

Teemu Kurppa — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:16:27 -0000

And when everyman starts applying ML to their own health measurements, the shift how we approach health care might change considerably. We are moving to age of connected devices that can produce a lot of data about your body and well-being.

For example, I just talked to a person with type 1 diabetes, who is really looking for innovative cloud-connected devices for blood glucose monitoring that help him to take better responsibility of his own personal health. Just think the possibilities, if he can combine real-time glucose measurements with all the other data of his body.

Re: Hobbyists

Teemu Kurppa — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:25:13 -0000

Biohacking and self-measurement. Quantified Self movement is on the rise and people are interested in semi-scientific self-experimentation.

Re: Should Startups Announce Their Funding?

Teemu Kurppa — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 07:32:47 -0000

Mark, great post. What's your take on the order of the product launch and the funding announcement. Let's say a startup gets funding from respected angels or seed stage VCs and it takes a few months from that to the first product launch.

Is it generally better to tell about the funding before the product launch or some time after it? I've seen one case where announcing a funding before the launch backfired. It was an interesting and innovative MMO game but which had a few rough edges at the time of the launch. It was dissed quite heavily by an important game review site because reviewers knew about their $2M funding.

Re: Rethinking Mobile First

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:27:13 -0000

My idea of the mobile-first strategy (or it's younger sibling: a tablet-first strategy) is that in it's core it defines how you approach user interaction design. In the future, most of consumer internet services and a significant number of business tools are primarily used via mobile devices and tablets. In my opinion, this is a safe bet to make and startups starting today should make that bet.

However, it doesn't dictate neither your initial distribution strategies or your platform or technology choices today. For example you design a mobile user experience, but implement it with HTML 5 and Javascript and wrap that implementation to an app for distribution (and payment) purposes. Or you implement that as a native app because at the moment you can create a smoother experience that way. Or you skip the app part and build just an easy mobile web experience to make on-boarding easy. Distribution tactics and technologies change as mobile platforms evolve, but the fact you need to design for mobile usage doesn't.

Our new startup is doing serious data analysis tool, but from the surface it looks like a very simple tool. We believe this simplicity is essential to succeed in the world where our service will be mainly used via tablets and mobile phones.

Re: What Has Changed

Teemu Kurppa — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 16:21:07 -0000

I've been following a few Bitcoin companies here in Finland, and as an earlier Bitcoin sceptic, I was surprised how much activity and money there is already in Bitcoin economy. I think a lot of investors are underestimating what's going on in Bitcoin world, because it's still so far away from the mainstream.

But many truly disruptive things were viewed as toys or pure idiocy in the early days. I'm speaking from the experience here. When we started Jaiku, a microblogging service similar to Twitter, in 2006, before Twitter and before Facebook's activity stream. At that time, a lot of people said that broadcasting and reading short mundane thoughts was the stupidest idea they had ever heard of. Fast-forward a few years and hundred of millions of people are doing it everyday.

Based on what I've seen, I'm starting to think that Bitcoin might be a similar phenomenon.

Re: The Salary Survey Results Are In

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 11:01:41 -0000

If you have a typical early employee equity, say 0.5-2% before dilution (the pool for employees is usually 10%), I don't think it's reasonable to expect that you work for peanuts. Purely from monetary perspective, the opportunity cost for a quality developer is quite huge even in highly taxed Finland. If they get 2500€/mo in a startup versus +4500€/mo in a more typical software company, they lose tens of thousands of euros over a few years for a lottery ticket that may bring one or two hundred grands.

1% in case of a small acquihire (10M) is 100k. 1% in a case of a medium exit (40-100M) has likely diluted a lot, so it isn't more than a few hundred grands. Larger exists are so rare that unless the company is really special that I would put their probability to zero.

Of course, working for a startup is much more rewarding in other aspects that you might expect a bit smaller pay, but a well-funded startup should pay a reasonable salary for quality developers.

Re: Flight Control soars to 2 million sales

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:48:27 -0000

Thanks for sharing the data! Seems that peak weeks are really critical to sales.

Did I estimate correctly that low 4 months from the end of Aug to end of Dec contributed about 200K of sales, while the initial peak contributed same about in 2 weeks?

Re: Age (and ARPPU) ain’t nothing but a number: Data on how age impacts social gaming monetization

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:06:22 -0000

Susan, any chance that you could post more detailed split of 20-29 age group? Is it heavily skewed so that 20-22 generate most of the revenues and 25-30 is similar to 30-39 age group?

Re: The Definitive Guide to iPhone App Market Sizing

Teemu Kurppa — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:26:18 -0000

Good stuff Jonathan. I'm personally a big fan of back-of-the-envelope calculations to sanity-check and direct my thinking.

Regarding other platforms: although there might be a lot of Blackberries out there, it might not be easy to support them all, and penetration rates can be way lower than for iPhone. I have given a couple of presentations with back-of-the-envelope calculations that discusses this. They are from S60/Symbian vs. iPhone viewpoint, though, but I think it's somewhat applicable to Blackberry too.

http://dirtyaura.org/blog/2...

I explain the numbers in the comments:
http://dirtyaura.org/blog/2...

Re: What happened to Windows Mobile 7?

Teemu Kurppa — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:03:26 -0000

They are cooking up something totally different and cancelled the release? WinMo has been proceeding so slowly that either Microsoft has grown too big to get anything out, or they made a radical change in strategy. Or a bit of both.