Archive for the ‘Silicon Valley’ Category

Robots At Our Doorstep

There’s a really, really interesting blog post that talks about robots a little bit. It’s by Paul Miller on IEEE Spectrum and draws a parallel between how the personal computing industry got started and the state of robot development today. Specifically, it talks about hardware hackers. If you want to dig even deeper, there’s another [...]

How Mergers and Acquisitions May Actually Narrows the Scope of Innovation

Be it Automobile , Aviation or Heavy Metal Industries, everyone felt the heat of recession but regardless IT fared better than most. In spite of worst economic meltdowns in history, acquisitions among big vendors continued to reshape the market, operating-system wars extended to mobile battlefields, microblogging became a powerful source of real-time information, and the take-up [...]

The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible. Sarah Lacy writes [...]

Political & Commercial World Powers and the Dynamics of Education

As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, [...]

Summary of visit to Silicon Valley

Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there. UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies. Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the [...]

My theory of the firm

Inspired by the Grasshopper podcast on Venture Voice. Har har, Vincent Like Unlike

A Study Trip to California, full of Finns this time

Since last September, I’ve been taking a Ph.D. level course on the future of internet, IT and related fields called Bit Bang at Helsinki University of Technology’s Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy. The students are all Ph.D. students from either TKK (HUT), University of Art and Design Helsinki or my own Helsinki School of Economics. [...]

The truth about headquarter locations

One of the first thesis topics that was proposed to me, as part of my strategic management master, was to research why companies are located where they are. Turned out that this is some super-secret thing and there hardly is any data on it. Our assumption was that this must hence be strategically significant. I [...]

How to Research Innovation

Where does most radical innovation come from? Where, as an individual, can you expect to get plenty of access to that type of information? If your answer isn’t universities, please let me know! As promised, I’ll be focussing more on innovation on Tech IT Easy these coming months, and you can be sure that my [...]

Networking: Weak ties, strong ties, and their implications

Just briefly… I did a practice defence for my thesis yesterday, was certainly interesting, and got to listen to a whole lot of other entrepreneurship-students (and potential entrepreneurs) on their own thesis-topics. Why I love universities is, of course, because of all the smart people I meet, but also because there usually isn’t a confidentiality [...]

The (pre-) entrepreneurial process

As I’m currently applying for jobs, I naturally often get asked what my dream job is. I hate that question, as there’s no simple answer. My dream “job” is to set up companies, which is really a great number of jobs. Following series of steps is the way I visualise this process, seen from a [...]

An additional view to “Copyright or the Right-to-eat”

I was just commenting on Vince’s last article Copyright or the Right-to-Eat and realized that my comment was getting so long that I should better write an article on the subject. This actually funny because I was about to write a piece on exactly the same subject, and for most of it with the same [...]

Visual Thinking : a conference with Dan Roam

Hello, Fidji here. I remember that, for one of my first articles on Tech It Easy, I spoke about it with Jeremy and he told me “that’s interesting, but there is no way you are going to make your point if you don’t draw something to show it”. And I didn’t, because I couldn’t find [...]

The Wanna? announcement post: TechTour & Converteo404

This post is aimed at helping friends bootstrap projects (although they certainly don’t need me to turn everything into gold, especially these ones). I apologize for the inconvenience caused to readers coming for content, not announcements, but these are 2 AMAZING projects that definitely deserve exposure. Unfortunately, a number of readers won’t be able to [...]

Breaking news: TechCrunch acquires TechITEasy!

We are proud to announce you that you can be proud of your favorite high tech blog. The rumour was spreading fast and it is now official: Tech IT Easy’s just been acquired by California-based web startup news media TechCrunch for an undisclosed amount (7 figures is all I can say)! The trigger was double-legged: [...]