update on Mobile Africa

Dear friends of Mobile Africa,

I am happy to be able to deliver a great progress report on Mobile Africa – Europe’s largest and most innovative happening on mobile opportunities in Africa. This magnificent event will take place on September 30th in Helsinki, Finland.

The day will be opened by His Excellency, LMS Mngqikana, Ambassador of the Republic of South Africa to Finland and Estonia, followed by insightful keynotes from Mr. Esko Aho, Executive Vice President, Corporate Relations and Responsibility, Nokia and Mr. Hossein Moiin, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia Siemens Networks.

These corporate keynotes are followed by inspirational and lively interactive discussions with Mr. Marlon Parker, a South African mobile web entrepreneur and founder of JamiiX (tbc), and Ms. Jessica Colaco, a TED fellow and founder of iHub, Kenya (tbc).

During lunch, we will be launching three interactive clinics for building mobile solutions and business relations around applications, solutions and supportive funding. Expo area is open all day, for interesting demos, briefs and other mobile offering.

The afternoon is all about start-ups and developers. We are bringing on stage the most innovative young entrepreneurs from both North Europe and various African nations. Don’t miss this unique line-up. A live online bridge to a parallel Mobile Web in Africa event is opened at 5 pm, launching a developer debate between Helsinki and Johannesburg.

Take advantage of the normal ticket prices during August, and register your attendance via Mobile Africa. All registrations during August will take part in a draw for 50 pcs of Suntrica SolarStraps for charging your mobile devices.

Welcome to sunny Helsinki!

Making mobile work for social entrepreneurs

I’m meeting Stephen Wolak from Vodafone and Betavine tomorrow. Betavine is an open community, run by Vodafone R&D, where developers can create applications, learn, and discuss developer related stuff.

It ‘s also a social exchange between developers and NGO’s. I’d like to learn more about this, so I will report back after my meeting with Stephen.

They will run a workshop on June 12, titled “Making Mobile Technology work for Social Entrepreneurs“. The agenda looks pretty interesting, and even spotting some Mobile Brain Bank folks there, too.

Update June 7th

So I met with Stephen in London the other week.  He walked me through the Betavine initiative, massively interesting. Betavine was launched back in 2007 by Vodafone R&D with the objective to bringing web 2.0 ways of working to mobile development environment. Since then, the initiative has experienced re-births and incremental upgrades, and today is a lively co munity members, partners and other contributors. mmunity of com

From their blog post January 31, 2007

“Inspired by the discussion around Web 2.0, Vodafone Betavine applies some of the principles of Web 2.0 to R&D in the mobile and Internet communications space, in particular, openness, collaboration and collective intelligence.

We hope that the website will become a place where developers, students and early adoptors can meet as peers to work together on new concepts and technologies in the mobile and Internet communications space. Vodafone Betavine is truly a “beta” website, we are launching with basic functionality today and seeking our users feedback and input on the future development of the site.”

I’m impressed by the variety of technologies supported in the community, ranging from Linux, Symbian to web, M2M etc.

Mobile Brain Bank is present in the upcoming Betavine Mobile Technology for Social Entrepreneurs event, taking place at the Vodafone HQ in London on June 12.  Thibaut Rouffineau, a Mobile Brain Bank ambassador is speaking on behalf of his current employee WIP Jam and putting in a good word on behalf of MoBB.

Betavine also has a strong link to African developers. This is of course very interesting to us, as we are the organizers of Europe’s largest event on mobile opportunities in Africa. I hope my flyers, sent from Finland, find their way to the participants of the Betavine afternoon.

Helsinki Twestival

Twestival, the Twitter festival, is a global charity event that takes place in 250+ cities on March 25th 2010. Mobile Brain Bank is proud to co-organize Helsinki’s part of the chain.

Helsinki Twestival will be a great party where people meet offline for one night, have fun and do some good for an important cause in the process.  This year’s theme is the importance of education. Global fundraising goes to Concern Worldwide, providing education to the world’s poorest children.

Helsinki has chosen to raise funds for Concern’s Education For Girls and Teacher Training campaigns. Evening event on March 25, 2010 from 8pm in Nude Lounge & Club http://helsinki.twestival.com/

You can help in the fundraising, not only by coming to the party, but via donations and sponsorship. For more information on sponsorship opportunities, please contact us.

You never know

A nice story in the newspaper today about a  small construction company who was called to fix a lady’s wall because her dog had scratched it. The entrepreneur was not too big-headed to take the job. The lady liked their work so much that she asked the company to renovate her whole house. A bit later her employer needed a renovation to 20 offices, and the rest is history.

You never know where success lures.

Drinks & Pitch in London

Next London synapse is held on April 13, at 6 pm at the Clachan Pub in SoHo. Drinks and start-up pitches, kindly offered by Grow VC. More information and registration here

Vote for mobi Enthusiast

Holly Kolman, our active MoBB and .mobi driver has been nominated to San Diego Blogger of the year contest with mobi Enthusiast blog. The blog and site give valuable information on .mobi domains, web standards and anything one can imagine a .mobi site host needs to know.

Holly has also been incredibly active in Mobile Brain Bank, helping both in front and behind the scenes.

Let’s give a MoBB fellow a boost, and vote for her blog to succeed in the competition. To vote, go to http://vote.influencesd.com/items/Holly_Kolman_of_mobiEnthusiast_mobi?c=1 and click on the arrow next to her avatar.

Thumbs up!

Salo Synapse

Salo kickoff was held on Wednesday March 10th at the local Protomo facilites. We were a crowd of around 15 people, not too many but just enough to have the possibility to talk to everyone and get to know each other.

Everyone had an interesting story to tell, including Jorma Nieminen, founder of Benefon, Anu Torkkeli, founder of Paljon Hyvää, and Igor Burattini and Mikko Rindell, founders of BoostTurku.

We also some interesting Promoto projects, including a ready prototype of MAX-isol construction elements.  I was extremely happy with the evening, and look forward to another one of these either in Salo or in Turku.

If you were there, or otherwise have an opinion how we should continue, either leave a comment here, or go to guestbook to give feedback.

Stammtisch

The Symbian Stammtisch was hosted last night in Helsinki. Big thanks to Sasken for making it happen. The room was full of people, with people arriving from Tallinn, Tampere and other places.

The discussion was much on Symbian opportunities, devices, and of course Qt and other new Symbian stuff for developers.

Great night, we should definately do it again. If you would like to sponsor a Symbian Stammtisch, please contace me.

MoBB Salo (a.k.a the Finnish SXSW)

Are you from Finland? Cannot make it to SXSW? No worries. What Finnish city better represents Austin than … Salo!

There has been many requests to host a MoBB synapse in both Salo and Turku. As Salo recently opened its own Protomo, it feel natural to start the cooperation there. We hope that people from Turku can come to Salo for this time. We’ll be happy to host one also in Turku, please volunteer to host and sponsor.

If you are from the region, and would like to pitch your startup then please contact me. If you’d just like to come, please register here http://www.mobilebrainbank.org/Events.html

Grow VC

I met Jouko Ahvenainen, Chairman of Grow VC at Mobile World Congress, and immediately joined the service when got back.

Grow VC is a crowdsourcing funding company. Investors (funders) sign up to the service with a small monthly fee (I started with 20 dollars per month), and get to choose from a number of startups they’d like to invest in. Startups list their information, how much they’d like to raise, and what % of shares are available.

The service could use more companies, so if you are collecting money, please sign up to the Grow VC service now.