I’m playing with the Nokia’s new service Nokia Friend View as I type this. I downloaded the software on my phone this morning and been using it through out the day.

In short the service wants to be a location aware microbloggin service.

I’m not blown away, nor have I completely lost hope with Nokia. They are trying fairly hard. The service is very Nokia-like in that it’s not very user friendly compared to some others that have emerged from the west coast of US. The UI is rather ugly and after you start using it feels that someone has designed it on paper, but never really used it herself as it’s not logical all the way through. Similarly the service is still very buggy, not loading the map on the web browser, eating one’s battery in no time …the list goes on and has still some really retarded features like the fact that the nick name is case sensitive. I registered as villevesterinen and now wondering whether there will be another VilleVesterinen. Does not really help you finding your friends from the service if there’s two of each name.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty, data portability etc. yet as Nokia is still in developing the service and I haven’t used it long enough to get down and dirty with the features. Similarly, I won’t go into how it could be integrated with Nokia Chat and the Ovi.com service in general for the simple reason that I don’t use Ovi.com, since it only replicates other services I use like Flickr and MobileMe. Who knows, maybe Friend View lures me to use all of Nokia’s services, but I’m not there yet. Nor is Nokia for that matter.





It’s not all downhill though and this, after all, is still an early Beta. I don’t know how my Nokia Friend View usage will evolve and where it becomes the most useful. I’d imagine I’d like to use it when I’m traveling and planning to meet people in a city at a given time. It would be very nice to see where their train is coming or see their plane above the Atlantic, but there’s still a bit go before that. That said, it would be nice to see when my girlfriend is coming from work and see when she’s just behind the corner or if she hasn’t left from the office yet. But as many (In Finnish) communicated, they’d like to be able to control the level of privacy between the different contacts. The more of these services advance, the more privacy they invade. Nevertheless, I can find uses for the service already.

The sad part of this new service is that Nokia once had ‘the next big thing’ right in front of it:  Jaiku was build right on Nokia’s front porch and is doing much of what Nokia Friend View tries to do without the location bit. Add location to Jaiku and Voilà! One of Jaiku’s co-founders and the father of the idea, Jyri Engeström, even worked at Nokia at one time, but of course it was too risky for the mobile phone giant at the time: It could not possibly put its weight behind a venture that is not already ubiquitous like microbloggin services now. That would be risky, which does not go very well with the Finnish management ideology. To make the irony complete Jaiku conversation threads are currently the best places to find out about how the Friend View works (or does not work in many cases), and Jaiku is still better service than Nokia Friend View, Twitter, Plazes and FriendFeed combined.

Now that Nokia has found the new focus for its strategy from the online services arena to go along with the hardware business, it should also embrace the new ways of working. Jaiku went to Google and nothing wrong with that, but if Nokia wants to be an innovative player in the online services field it needs to embrace different kinds of risks compared to ones it has before. This does not deal with mobile phone design, but rather with new behavior in communication as the web evolves. This risk involves betting on smart people, but not in a way Nokia has done before. I’m not talking about hard core MBA heavy hitters that can manage the hell out of any firm, but rather people who are the real pirates of the Internet. I’m talking about entrepreneurs.

Nokia needs to look at how Google has approached this issue by acquiring early stage startups and getting a boat load of smart people along with it. Nokia should start seeing the value in these energetic and smart people who want to change the way we communicate and won’t stop until they do.

Similarly, Stefan Constantinescu, who’s telling about the service in the YouTube clip made by Nokia, is also one of the best evangelist Nokia could hope for as the guy is super active and vocal in for example Jaiku. Let’s hope that Nokia has learned its lesson and sees the value in what Stefan is doing and tunes into the Jaiku channels for community feedback.

I received several phone calls yesterday where I was asked about what is happening at Nokia and whether they are buying the Finnish SMS based social intention broadcasting application Zipiko.

The whole thing started when the Zipiko gang shared a taxi from the Nokia House located in Espoo, Finland with Prashant Agarwal, The director of Product Strategy at Fjord.  Prashant Jaikued about it where it was picked up by the Jaiku co-founder Petteri Koponen who proposed that Nokia is about to acquire the small company.

This was enough to start a chain reaction in the Finnish social media and got it really boiling which eventually reached US and at that point it had already crossed over from Jaiku to Twitter. Co-incidentally the Zipiko servers where down just at the time that US was waking up and checking their Twitter feeds for the morning. All this would imply that Zipiko.com had received enough traffic, ignited by the news from the taxi ride, that their servers couldn’t handle it anymore .

Just a week earlier I had been watching Zipiko lead developer’s presentation on Google App Engine that they are using. Knowing that they use the App Engine lets me figure out exactly the amount of traffic that the service received to go down. Google App Engine manages up to 5 million views per month before letting the service go down. Now, that would be a rather remarkable amount of traffic ignited globally by just Jaiku and Twitter messages.

This makes would make a very interesting story if the protagonist herself, the Zipipop* CEO Helene Auramo, wouldn’t have admitted to me that the juicy rumor was just that, a rumor. Also their service was down from some unrelated reason. So it seems that Nokia is not yet going after this Finnish startup.

But the question remains: What did Zipiko do in the Nokia house in the first place?

*Zipiko is an app made by Zipipop and has part of the company working exclusively on it.

Note: This is a guest blog post by Märt Ridala from Estonia.

I interviewed Valentin Ivanov, the founder of Bizi, which is a new startup launched in Estonia last week. The service Bizi offers could be called “Estonian Twitter” with some minor modifications – possibility to add video and pictures. Valentin is an Estonian entrepreneur with international experience, having spent the last decade working in IT developing online applications for the mobile, gambling and entertainment industries in positions ranging from developer, technical manager to Chief Executive Officer. Valentin is also Founder and CEO at Yaika.com, which enables anyone to start their own live TV or radio channel for free. Let’s hear it from Valentin.

1. What is BIZI in a nutshell?

BIZI is a life-moments exchange network. Through BIZI, we aim to unite family members, friends and just other people together via letting them share their short news, feelings and emotions as short messages, small photos or 15 seconds long video records. All this can be done very easily over web, mobile and (very soon) over SMS as well! All this can be done free of charge and will stay free.

There are lots of ideas how to use BIZI for both personal and organizational purposes; either commercially, or non-commercially. Those, who will keep an eye on our press, blogs and other forums will find a lot about it very soon.

2. Why should a person use BIZI instead of Twitter?

The most important reason to use BIZI instead of any other foreign service is the opportunity to speak in your own language to others, who want to do exactly the same.

BIZI offers a bit more than just a Short Text Messages Exchange service – our features are a bit different and definitely more innovative than Twitter, Facebook.com or Orkut.com have. Thus, providing a list of features for real micro-blogging, BIZI lets users to enhance their text posts with 15 seconds long video-audio or just a voice record right from their webcam and microphone. Or, users can add a photo or any other illustration instead!

While developing, we were trying to cover all the needs and requests of our friends, colleagues and also those people, who live in our country and use Twitter, Friendsfeed.com and other similar services over the Internet. BIZI has been made in Estonia and for Estonia.

3. Is BIZI meant for Estonian market? Do you have plans regarding other markets?

As for now, BIZI has been made for Estonian market only. Regarding extending BIZI to other markets, may be one day…

4. What is your general opinion about making local copies of global social-networking services? Is it reasonable to make them? Why people prefer the local copies?

To be very honest, creating BIZI is quite an old idea, which was growing inside me for quite a few years. But as I expect nobody will believe me, I will try to answer your question as-is: my general opinion of bringing something extremely good to local countries in local language and tuned up to be mentally local as well is definitely excellent. How much reasonable is to create such projects is normally a business question to the one trying to that. My reason is a longing for something exciting, something that I can use personally in a home way, and the opportunity to share it with my friends and relatives – people I love and people I want to be part of my life. With all our projects - both BIZI, Yaika.com and the others we are heavily working on - we want to bring a grain of positive emotion to people, to make them happier, more friendly and open.

Now, answering why people prefer local copies, I would first like to ask you back – why do we always prefer everything to be “in my language”: a recipe in the medicine shop to be easily understandable, a movie to be either fully adopted or enhanced with subtitles? Why do we normally prefer everything to be “in my way”? Just because we always prefer to feel ourselves much more secure and comfortable, when we are fully after the situation.

5. How does BIZI plan to make money?

We expect BIZI to get profit form selling advertizing and receiving
sponsorships. Once in the future.

Helene Auramo, Zipipop CEO, hinted ArcticStartup that the colorful Finnish start-up is finally preparing for taking in investments.

Zipipop will head to San Francisco to present in Mobile 2.0 on the 3rd November after winning at the Mobile 2.0 Europe. This will also be a good change to kick-start the talks with potential investors on both sides of the Atlantic.

On a related note, we just heard that Zipiko CTO/CPO Stefano J. Attardi (Taro being the CTO of Zipipop in large) was approached by four(!) Bay Area startups to join their ranks. He interviewed with all of them but finally rejected all their offers to join Zipipop instead. Acrctic Startup congratulates Stefano for the choice.

Stefano told us that shortly after he joined Zipipop, Biz Stone, the Twitter co-founder, heard about him and asked him join Twitter. According to Stefano, Biz was “excited to speak to him” for a position as an interface designer and front-end developer. Stefano decided to turn down the offer.

Incidentally, another CEO wrote to him again last week renewing the offer he made earlier saying that they still haven’t found anyone as good as Stefano. Stefano prefers not to name all the start-ups in question.

Stefano further explains that the reason he turned down the San Francisco offers was because he wanted to start a project of his own and Zipiko gave him the possibility to do that. He started Zipiko as a collaboration with Zipipop Creative Director Richard von Kauffman.

Here’s Stefano on Technology Gazette Podcast talking about Zipiko service, how it compares to Twitter and what they have in plans for the future.

Below you can find Zipipop’s latest presentation (in Finnish).

We’ve been speculating about Jaiku moving the Google App Engine and on Wednesday when Jaiku came back up after a period of down time many believed the move had happened. Yet, Jyri clarified that this is not the case yet and the actual move is still ahead.

During the weekend and early this week when Jaiku was down, it was only moved as far as to the Google data center. Nevertheless, as it came back up it was already lighting fast compared to what it had been before and equally important the invitations opened up and are now unlimited.

And there’s more in the cards. For example, the new Jaiku API will support OAuth, which in itself is already fantastic. If the service can also handle an ever increasing user traffic without slowing down significantly or crashing it will be interesting to see whether it can still make itself a serious competitor for Twitter. We certainly hope so.

Edit: If you’d like to have an invite, ask for one in the comments (and do leave your real e-mail in the field provided) - we’re more than happy to spread the good around.