Back From Summer Holidays

Holidays may be over but the summer needn't to be. Although it seems that, at least in southern Finland, the lovely summer weather only lasted for about a couple of weeks. Considering that most of the working population in Finland return back to the office by mid-August, it is hardly a bother that the weather has already turned autumnal.

Back at work, it takes a while to get into full speed of things, as you need to catch up with unread emails and to remind yourself of ongoing projects you blissfully forgot during the holiday. However, there is something rather comforting in getting back into routine. It’s the back-to-school feeling I always loved!

Right now the job at hand is to participate in organising the Living Lab Innovations vol. 2 Seminar, which takes place in Helsinki on September 24, 2008. This event will pick up from where the successful Living Lab Innovations Seminar in 2007 left, with the programme once again including international speakers as well as concrete local Living Lab cases. See you there!

Hot town, summer in the city?

Even though it's been raining and cloudy for the most of the days in June - still, it's summer. Who cares a damn about a little rain when one can enjoy the nights without darkness, green grass and pretty flowers, and seeing everywhere relaxed people in high spirits.

Forum Virium Helsinki will also relax during July. Our staff is on holidays, and the office will be closed from July 7th to 27th.

Wish you the most relaxing and hottest summer - in town or in the country!
"Come on come on and dance all night!"

The Midsummer Eve

In this time of a year when everyone starts to be really exhausted and tired of working and lean on to the soon-coming holiday it is great to see that there still truly exists an element in Finnish society that unifies us all. Juhannus, the Midsummer Eve is no doubt the most important festivity of the year. Everybody talks about it; some people go to big festivals to celebrate the Midnight Sun while others gather to summer houses by the lake or by the sea to nurture their suppressed primitive instinct in the flaming heat of a bonfire. Friends living abroad organize expat parties with Finnish food and a tent sauna… For unity and collaboration in a society it is very connective and uplifting to have common interests – past week’s public conversations have been about the weather at Juhannus or the possible traffic jams on exit roads. That’s just a healthy way of putting your mind into something totally different for a while.

For a foreigner it can be difficult to understand the importance and mystical power of Juhannus as it manifests the soul of the Finnish summer but for us who are destined to dwell in this remote country of extreme contrasts, Juhannus carries strong message about hope, light and love and it is a praise to ancient gods for giving us the sun after dark and cruel winter.

Pyramid innovations

Wincapita scam has been in the headlines in Finland lately. For those unaware of the case, Wincapita is turning out to be the biggest enonomic crime ever in Finland. The company collected money from the credulous investors, promising 400% profits through revolutionary computerized forex trading system. There are numerous similar kind of trading platforms in the internet, some of them real, quite a few scams.
Wincapita is turning out to be a scam of the worst kind. The company probably never did any forex trading at all. It is a classic Ponzi scheme: the investors were rewarded for recruiting new members, the first ones got their "profits" from the incoming money of new recruitees, and therefore "proved" that the promised profits were realistic. The system worked as long as the cash flow from newcomers was wide enough for the scammers to pay back to the promised cash, but finally the construction became too big, the media paid attention to the shady company, and the thing collapsed, leaving behind thousands of people who lost their savings.
The eagerness with which normally careful Finns paid thousands of euros to a company owned by unknown bodies, registered somewhere in South America and promising unrealistically high profits (I mean, if I could make 400% profits in forex trading, why on earth would I bother to scrape together investments from Finnish farmers?) is stunning. The trick is a combination of jealousy, greed and trust. When your mechanic quits the job because he has enough money for a two-year-holiday in Pattaya and your sister-in-law drives to your courtyard in a brand new Mercedes offering you a piece of the pie, your shields drop. The scam spreads virally, and effectively.
Could we tap into this viral power of communities? User communities have developed for example surfboards, rock´n´roll, so innovation does live in communities. But I suppose we cannot use the traditional child upbringing methods of bribery, threats and blackmail to get the people to participate.
Or could we? Bribery actually works, or at least vanity; Eric Von Hippel has proven in his studies that in lead user communities people search for acceptance from their peers, and are willing to put enormous efforts in finding working solutions for challenges, willingly sharing the results. The method has been effectively used in open source comminities.
Could we also use threat and blackmail? "People. We need YOU to take responsibility for your wellbeing and to develop better P2P social services, or else..." Else what? "...or else we run out of money to take care of you and you need to be happy with less-than-satisfactory healthcare services", maybe.
Or can we use jealousy? "If you participate, you get this nice, tailor-made service, which your neighbor does not have". Would that do the trick and bring also the neighbors in the viral service development pyramid scheme?

ASOCIAL IN INTERNETWORKS

In Forum Virium Helsinki we create new digital services for the people with the people. So we are building networks of people. That means that we are meeting a lot of people and our work is very social in deed.

Being a social person I don’t mind this. And more, most of them are very nice persons to work with. Some of them have even become good mates.

So when I was invited first to LinkedIn I thought why not. I must admit I was a very passive member at first. Then I was explained the benefits of being networked in internet social networks, to put it short internetworks, and I understood that they work as a tool to manage your network of business contacts.

Fine so far. But then I got invited to FaceBook, Jaiku, Proxa, Spock, YouNameIt…

I thought this is enough. Why should all my business mates know all the time where I am, what I am doing, how I feel? I think there is still a difference between friends and business mates and I want to keep a distance between these two. So I want to keep my private life out of my business internetworks.

Another thing is that I’m quite busy as most of us are at work. So I have to choose where I spend my precious time paid by my customers. Do I spend it doing my job or reporting of my moves and moods in these internetworks? So I consider these internetworks as a tool, not as the meaning of life or religions as they seem to be for some.

Or is it again just this generation gap? We 50+ want to have a private life. To choose when we are connected and when not.

Need some money? Want to make a small investment? Don't go to the bank!

"Just like to say thanks very much for helping me buy a car from the current century. Since I got her, me and my dog have zoomed around the Lake District, and got very muddy on various days out. Small dog is well chuffed, and is most appreciative of a heater that works. Thanks again, and have a zen smooch from me and small dog. xxxx"
- applle

"Happy Valentine's Day to all my wonderful borrowers. And thank you for making my lending such a good experience"
- gojuu

These are comments from a lender and a borrower from Zopa, an internet-based business where people lend and borrow money with each other, without the need to go through banks. This process is sometimes referred to as peer-to-peer lending.

According to Zopa's web-pages, "both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because Social Lending is more efficient than the traditional banking model. Banks have massive overheads, with thousands of employees to pay and hundreds of branches to maintain. So they have to take large margins on the money that passes through them."

This all sounds very reasonable - and true. It may also sound a crazy idea that people actually would lend money to total strangers. But it works. Zopa was launched in 2005 in UK. Since then they have also launched the service in Italy and in the US. Thousands of new members are joining Zopa every month. Zopa has also got copycats, such as Prosper in the US, Smava in Germany and Boober in the Netherlands.

One can't borrow really grand sums through Zopa, e.g. for buying real estate, the maximum amount being £15.000, but it is probably just what people need most: money for getting a better car, fixing the house, starting a small business... and all this with a pretty nice rate. And who really likes going to a bank, listening all that blabbering and even paying for it as "a service fee"?? Seriously.

As Patti Smith sings, "people have the power", and this is truly something that should not be overlooked in today's business world.

A thought for the New Year

We have just emerged from the previous year, and this is generally the time when majority of people make resolutions to live the fresh year in a better way. There is, of course, nothing wrong with the tabula rasa way of thinking, but it can put a lot of strain and expectation on a person during a time, when people should not be so tough on themselves. It’s dark and cold outside, and you have spent all your money on Christmas presents and socialising during the festive period. The last thing you need is to consciously push yourself to become a better person in a matter of weeks. Besides, the quick-fix solutions rarely work in the long term.

I read an interesting article about the subconscious in the New Scientist last month (issue 1.12.2007). In it, journalist Kate Douglas wrote about the Ernst Strungmann Forum she had attended in Frankfurt. One discussion at the event, titled ‘Better than conscious’, suggested that the “subconscious thought processes may play a crucial role in many of the mental facilities we prize as uniquely human”, such as learning and creativity. Toying with this idea, I thought that resolutions of any kind could actually be quite useless if the subconscious works in a greater force behind the conscious thought anyway. Human beings already know instinctively, in a more primal level, the good choices from the bad ones, and thus tend to opt for those that will benefit them the most. Survival is one thing, but whether subconscious choices prove to last better than the conscious ones in today’s environment, remains open for more debate and research.

In the above mentioned article, theoretical neuroscientist Peter Dayan at University College London points out that “the subconscious isn’t the dumb cousin of the conscious, but rather a cousin with different skills”. So this year, whether in a work situation or at home, let’s hope individual subconscious thought process will guide us to make the right type of decisions and, whenever possible, avoid us repeating previous mistakes. Happy New Year 2008!