Want 250k€ to develop your media company?
Last night Helsingin Sanomat Foundation held an event where they launched Uutisraivaaja, a competition where participants can win up to 250 000 euros to develop their killer media product, with a few "ifs" on the side. While the event was held completely in Finnish leaving English speaking out of the equation at his point, the fantastic part of all this is that the competition is open to everyone, be it companies, individual people or non-Finnish citizens for that matter. Creating an innovative media product isn't easy. Helsingin Sanomat Foundation is obviously looking to speed up innovation in this sector and I applaud them for it.
However, there are a few terms to the deal that I didn't like too much. While the 250 000 euros is up for grabs, the criteria to win it are partly debatable. There are basically three criteria participants must meet: 1) the idea should be groundbreaking, 2) the idea must first be tested in Finland on a national level or a local level and 3) (the part I don't like too much) if digital technology is used, it should be open source in such a way that anyone is able to use it afterwards.
I understand the Foundation's interest in arranging this competition easily. However, I do wish there was more incentive for the innovator to keep hold of the technology in the form of IPR and perhaps license it to those wishing to use it. While I'm all for sharing and being open, good innovators must have an incentive and a means to protect their immaterial property. In essence, they're letting go of that in this competition.
Nevertheless, it's a great iniative from a large organisation on behalf of commercialisation of innovative ideas. While in the event, I also had a chance to have a quick talk about Topiikki with Otto Utti, whose the founder of the company.
Topiikki - having a go at breaking the status quo
Topiikki is a refreshingly innovative news site in Finland, that's keeping their editorial team thin and agile. Every day, they post on business and politics - curating their news from about 250 different sources online and for that matter, sharing the link love by giving readers tips on where to continue reading on the topic.
There are two basic concepts within Topiikki that set them apart from the traditional news media. The first one is called "wide angle" where they write about a timely issue and link five different sources to the post writing about it. The second one is 10X, where they post the 10 most important news items for that day.
While they're starting off small, Topiikki has managed to attract some thousands of unique visitors a week. A very good start in only six weeks for sure. I talked to Otto Utti in a short video interview about the drivers that went into starting a media startup among other things.
Disclosure: Ville Vesterinen, our editor is an advisor at York Media, the company behind Topiikki.
That sounds like a great effort. We need more of those.
My small analysis on the rules:
1) there are very few *truly groundbreaking ideas*. Facebook, Youtube, and even Google weren't, they were just new spins on existing, often failed concepts.
2) I explained in my talk in HMEA (http://rameen.mysites.com/-media/entrepreneurship-tuesday.wmv) that the notion that Finland should be a test market can be super harmful. In general, I think it's wiser for companies to go for their real target market, not just test things here because it's more convenient.
3) Open source has a big impact on monetization and strategy.
I'm afraid that this sets a bias towards a very niche set of ideas (maybe that's the goal), or worse, attract people who will try to fit the criteria and take them lightly.
I love seeing these kinds of efforts here, and I'm a big fan of open source, so I hope it inspires the right guys to create awesome things.
Good thoughts Antti ja Ramine - we had a long discussion with a couple of people after the event and kudos to them for explaining the concerns the developers might have on open source. The model to demand open source is adapted after Knight Foundation’s successful example. I’m not a developer, but here’s my few cents on the concerns people seem to have. This are just my views and don't necessarily reflect those of HS Säätiös:
1)“Innovators right to keep hold of the IPR & licence it”.
EveryBlock, past winner of Knight’s challenge, released their sourcecode at http://code.google.com/p/ebcode/ but decided to keep the design/ui out of the bundle and only include the basic HTML templates. It’s still probably one of the biggest contributions to Django with the clearly documented standalone code snippets, helping the community out WHILE making a successful exit to MSNBC. (so two times hooray)
All code developed during the funding period should be released. What happens before or after the funding is totally up to the team. The funding period depends on the application and budget estimate the team itself develops. Meaning, if you only need 5k to hire the UI guy and use the funding for that, you only need to release those files. Of course the ideas are judged and chosen according to their openness, so these kinds of initiatives are not a priority.
2) Rapid iteration & the role of open source in innovation.
As you mentioned open source has proven to be a cost-efficient way of testing new ideas and concepts.
There is obviously value in the code: it does stuff. However, I feel that there is so much more awesomeness in the people that build the code, test the product, bring their soul, passion & name to the project that its only a part of the equation.
The idea is also that around 10 finalists will be given a small seed round of money to prototype their idea during March – September. I see a lot of CS students build cool products all alone, as hobbies. For me, Uutisraivaaja seems like a way to fund these projects, contribute to the OS scene and learn about collaborative working (meaning source control, bug trackers, user documentation.. the stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily do for a school project). So, in the end, there will be more than one winner through several ready products/prototypes and contributions to the open source communities.
3) Monetization.
250k is not a prize, it’s development money, so the contest wants to help build sustainable projects, whether run by companies or nonprofits or co-ops or whatever form people want to use to run the projects. At the same time, the competition is open for also non-profits, students, existing companies etc. There’s probably someone who could tell more about the business logics behind open source success stories, but a few things that come to my mind: add-on components developed after the funding period, consulting, integrations, migrations, mobile apps, whitelabeling to other domains… and sure, exits : )
4) Licences. Double-licensing is ok and the contest recommends using GPL or other Free Software Foundation licenses. It’s ok to use proprietary APIs, like Twitter or Facebooks. Find out more details here http://uutisraivaaja.fi/ukk.html > avoin lahdekoodi (in Finnish now, coming soon in English too)
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There’s a lot more experts on open source here among Arctic readers, so please share your thoughts. Maybe later in the spring we could organize a Hacks & Hackers event around this theme, when the ideas are more mature?
/ Disclaimer, if not obvious, been promoting the event for students in school etc.
@Linda Everyblock itself is a bad example as they haven't released almost nothing after initial open sourcing. After little digging it seem that the project was spun off as a proper open source project under OpenBlock:
"OpenBlock is a web application that allows users to browse and search
their local area for "hyper-local news" - to see what's going on
recently in the immediate geographic area.
OpenBlock began life as the open-source code released by
Everyblock.com in June 2009. Originally created by Adrian Holovaty
and the Everyblock team, it is now developed as an open-source (GPL)
project at http://openblockproject.org.
Funding for the initial creation of Everyblock and the ongoing
development of OpenBlock is provided by the Knight Foundation
(http://www.knightfoundation.org/)."
http://github.com/openplans/openblock
I don't know if Everyblock is running OpenBlock as the other option seems to be that they would needed to rewrite the whole platform (correct me if I'm wrong).
Personally I'm not that fond of the fact that the competition is restricted to GPL as it forces the developers to open source everything after the funding period which might harm the company in many ways (security exploits, competition, funding). It's a shame that MIT and BSD based licenses aren't available as far as I know. I guess that this might be a deal breaker for a lot of developers.
Thanks for the awesome conversation, @ramine @jori @linda!
@ramine: absolutely, few ideas are groundbreaking. But often groundbreaking is created by combining existing features, concepts, or patterns.
@jori BSD is allowed license in Uutisraivaaja. Please read more here http://uutisraivaaja.fi/ukk.html > open source, and check the list of licenses http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
For more information, come to the Uutisraivaaja Open Source Clinic to learn more about open source, licenses and business cases, 1.12. in Helsinki.
@jori It is actually vice versa: Everyblock was created on the Knight News Challenge grant. MSNBC bought Everyblock, and before that the code was released according to the KNC rules. Now OpenBlock builds on that with partners.
Anybody interested in learning more about open source, you are the most welcome to the Uutisraivaaja Open Source Clinic to learn more about open source, licenses and business cases, 1.12. in Helsinki.
@Tanja Ok, either I missed the link to list of compatible licences earlier or it was added after I read the list.
Did I understood right that Everyblock was operational for some time before MSNBC bought it and only after that they released the source (sans proper UI)?
On a sidenote, "Are journalisms start-ups being appropriately funded?"
http://charman-anderson.com/2010/10/13/are-journalisms-start-ups-being-appropriately-funded/
@Jori Yes, Everyblock was up and running before it was bought. EB got its KNC award in 2007, and MSNBC bought it 2009, so the site had good time to take its space and prove to be a working concept and bring new value to delivery and information. OpenBlock stems from Everyblock.