Forum Virium and DIMES Annual Seminar on user generated services
Miikka Kukkosuo
The Annual Seminar of Forum Virium Helsinki and DIMES ry will be held on February 28th starting at 11am at Vanha Ylioppilastalo, Helsinki.
The topic for this year is “Odottava Oranssi - Waiting for User Generated Services”. There will be keynotes given by Jari Pasanen (Nokia), Luis M. Correia (Technical University of Lisbon), and a special guest media artist Marita Liulia. In addition the organisers Jarmo Eskelinen (Forum Virium Helsinki) and Kimmo Ojuva (Dimes ry) will give a joint presentation. Also a variety of social media experts will be on stage, including Taru From (Ego/Taivas). Naturally the event includes also a networking part.
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:05 am
I assume the title of the forum virium seminar is ironic? (If it truly is meant to be ironic, then I apologize for the below but will write it anyway cause it applies in other contexts as well…)
First, perhaps I misunderstand a subtle difference between user generated services / user generated content, but at least they seems to be used interchangeably on the internet.i.e.
“Social networking sites are massive on the internet and we’re bringing that model to mobile to create new communities over the 3 network. Clearly it’s working, with over 350,000 messages between kinksters every day - this is already a vibrant community in just two months. With over 3.75 million customers, 3 has a fantastic opportunity to create new communities. User-generated services are driving the development of new revenue streams over mobile in a whole range of ways.” Graham Oxby, 3’s marketing director.
If they are the same or similar, then they are already here in a significant way. Do there really need to be more trials, pilots, whatever? We just need to use what is out there and extend it with other offerings (I am thinking about innovative ways to use things like Floobs and tens of other apps, some developed here and some not). In order to use them, we need to know what they are – ie somebody needs to do marketing and promotion in mainstream channels in a significant way.
Second, it is obvious that any implication that you “wait” instead of “do” is counterproductive. This gets back to the post here on why finland is lagging on innovation: invention is there, but then the whole system tends to wait for somebody else to commercialize it. NFC is a great example. We had global leading trials in Lahti about 3 years ago, and now? More and more trials, few (or more likely no) real rollouts. What does it mean? Somebody else makes the money.
I like the post on the software Growth Forum and it is a great initiative. I think that the “Finnish system” can support a lot more of the growth phase than it does today (though obviously not all of it) if more effort/money (it takes a lot of both!) is put into marketing and promoting the services. It really kills your time to market when you cannot demonstrate as a software company your “local traction”. It does not matter the € size of the domestic opportunity as much as that there is significant traffic, and share of traffic in your segment. Nice to show it working in Local Partner Company X’s labs, but whole different thing to be able to show real users using it regularly.
Forum Virium doing great things, no doubt about it, but I would just really like to see in the consumer mobile software segment more action-based promotion — matching the written/spoken message with what physically is going on out there, which is actually a lot…