Only slightly bent

As the season enters the dark period, most people in Finland also turn gloomy and bitchy like I’ve often noted. To get my share of it out of my system, here are some of my pet peeves of the season. Thanks to this outlet, I can then get back to one of my favorite hobbies of being happy in the middle of all the chronically sullen folks. Even if the primary goal fails and the joy and smile aren’t contagious, few things confuse & annoy the unhappy people more than seeing happy people

Oh it’s just a small shower … of three weeks!

This photo here resembles something I really hate, especially when it lasts. Unless you can tell, it’s a photo of a cloudy, misty, drizzly, dark day in Finland.

You see, in Finland the climate is strange when it comes to rain. Let’s say it needs to rain 20mm. In any country with a normal climate, this is accomplished with a relatively short period of rain, maybe over a few hours or even one heavy, short shower. After that things return to normal and sunny.

But no, not in Finland. In Finland the same amount of rain must come down over a two-week continuous drizzle. Ugh.

The ashtray that never quits burning

Smoking is, IMO, gross. Anyhow, if you must smoke for some incomprehensible reason, it’s good to use an ashtray and not dump the butts on the ground. It’s also nice that ashtrays have been designed so that whenever you put a burning cigarette end there, it’s automatically extinguished.

In theory, that is. Too often these ash receptacles are like the one on the right here – burning quite happily and pouring out more smoke than any smoker could. The smoke smells disgusting and most likely consists of 99,9% of carcinogens. How difficult can it be to make these things work?

Oh, and to the smokers who have to draw last panicky smokes two seconds before boarding a bus or entering a meeting or whatever and you think you don’t smell? FYI: you stink. Please at least breathe normal, unpolluted air for a few times first.

Outta my way!

It’s a fact of life in cities that people are in a hurry. It doesn’t matter whether the hurry is real or imaginary, it’s movement that counts. And when you’re walking somewhere briskly, generally feeling good and slaloming past the slow people, the last thing you want to see in front of you is a) a person standing on the wrong side of an escalator, blocking the way, b) some idiot getting in your face trying to beg money for an organization or sell something or stick a free newspaper in your hand or c) cars stopped in the middle of the crosswalk.

And then we have the trains, trams and subways. Considering Finns use public transportation relatively much at least in Helsinki, they’re relatively idiotic in their behavior in doing that. More often than not nobody gives a damn about the people that need to get out of the train/tram/subway before trying to cram themselves in it. It’d be so easy to stand aside, let the people flow out and then walk in but no, they have to stand in front of the doors so that people who get out are forced to resort to mild violence just to get out. And why? Just so that everyone can cram in at the first possible second so that nobody steals their fictitiously reserved seat – the one where they don’t have to sit next to or opposite to anyway. Whatever they can humanly do to avoid, good grief, exchanging a look or, worse, a word or a touch with a stranger!

Of course they conveniently forget that by blocking the exit, they are in fact begging to not only be touched but be elbowed or shoved by strangers.

Something like half a year ago, there was a short article in the Economist that highlighted a fascinating chart made by Vattenfall, one version of which is below. The issue is about reducing carbon emissions and the cost of cutting them. Different measures cost different amounts of money. In the chart below, the measures below the horizontal line have a negative abatement cost – by doing these things, all parties involved would cut consumption and save money. As pointed out in the article, at a macroeconomic level they would therefore boost, rather than reduce, economic growth. And the good news is that there are quite a few of these “low-hanging fruit” also; check out the chart (click to enlarge):

So it would appear that these “win-win-win” cases are the actions that we should take immediately without any hesitation – the result is so clear that of course these things are already being done, right? Right?!

I wish. Stuff like lighting improvements and better insulation pays themselves back in remarkably short times, yet almost nobody cares about doing anything about it. Again quoting the Economist article:

People find their electricity bills too boring to think about [..] people clearly do not care enough about cost.

How incredibly sad.

For more information, see the resources below. I would recommend checking out at least the Vattenfall PDF presentation and the short Economist article.

Resources:

• Economist: Irrational incandescence
• Vattenfall: curbing climate change
• Vattenfall: Global Mapping of Greenhouse Gas Abatement Opportunities
• Australian Government Greenhouse Gas Abatement Programme
• Compact fluorescent bulbs from bulbs.com (for 110V only)

It’s always fun to see how people end up in various places on the web. Like, for example, this site. Like I pointed out a couple of years ago, search terms that lead to here are generally quite boring (most actually have to do with Nokia S60 applications or some of the reviews I’ve written), but since there have been over 800 different keywords directing here over the past month alone, there are the occasional gems also. Samples below, along with my not-very-helpful advice:

my bearded dragon has been sleeping really long

Right, well, that may be winter hibernation what he’s doing. They can sleep for months without ill effect. Though seriously, you should know about these things before you get your pet, so read up on your pet!

how do victims of prejudice often behave

I don’t know. Maybe they’re easily irritated on certain topics if they’ve been victims of prejudice for long?

how much will cable tv cost in 2027?

This is one interesting question and I would love to know the motives behind such a question. Like are you maybe going to wait for 20 years to get cable TV if it’ll cost significantly less than today? Seriously though, it’s my semi-professional opinion that we will no longer have cable TV 20 years from now – or at least it’ll be in serious decline from the pressure of IP-TV.

how do you feel being in love

Oh you’ll know when you’re in love.

how high is finnish bread supposed to rise

Not very high. But higher than naan-bread anyway.

having problems holding things with mittens

Riiight, ookay.. Hmm. Take the mittens off, maybe? Get better mittens?

do i have to hibernate my russian tortoise

For a long & healthy and as-natural-as-possible life for your tortoise, yes you do.

I can’t remember when was the last time I laughed – genuinely, not out of sympathy shame – at an operator ad, but this DNA ad I saw this morning did the trick. Maybe I was tired or something but I still found it funny.

Sorry for the lousy picture quality, I had to use my cellphone.. Click to see an even bigger and fuzzier version.

Update: they also have this long TV spot on the same topic. Also quite funny.

Here’s the second part of fall photos and some text to fill in the blanks

By now one could say that we’re in the late stages of the fall, with nighttime temperatures occasionally dropping below freezing and daytime temperatures of single digits Celsius. I still like it – with the bright leaves everywhere and the sunshine during the days everything looks nice for a while longer. What I don’t like is the fact that today for the first time this season I had to resort to using my winter jacket when walking outside.

(as usual, click on the thumbnails to get the full photos – and make sure you view this in your browser for that to work)




I don’t know what it is with leaves on the ground, but whenever there is a bigger pile of them covering the path or the sidewalk, I just have to kick them while walking. I love the swish-swoosh rustling sound they make, how they fly a little and settle somewhere close by to be kicked by the next pedestrian. It’s just one of the small, simple pleasures of life.



As the fall begins to into winter, even these lonely boats below right will have to be lifted out of the water or face the merciless cruelty of water turning to crushing ice. There’s still a while to go before that happens, but the dark evenings are already here and the days are getting shorter by over five minutes each passing day.. At the same time, Finns turn inwards and with the fleeting sun, so also departs all the extroverted joy and happiness that was still lingering there after the summer. The country seems to transform into one giant melancholic movie with none of the actors having any lines, just the unnatural capability of cruising through an entire season with expressionless faces and depressing clothes.


Now this clothes issue is actually quite annoying as well as topical. I’ve often wondered what it is with Finnish retailers and their selection of colors for winter clothes. It’s like the Model T – they’re available in any color, as long as it’s black. It’s as if with practically zero sunlight the country isn’t dark enough already, you can’t even dress in anything else than black! Come on! Is there a countrywide moratorium on using dyes or what!?

Okay, but let’s try to end on a more positive note – there’s still some time to go until the worst part of the year, so why not try to make it more tolerable. How about doing something seeming small – like smiling to a stranger, once every day, all through winter? Even if the other person is dressed in black.

How about starting today so it’s easier to remember when the darkness really hits home? Because while we can’t help the planet’s tilt, we can at least let our inner sun shine on others – it doesn’t need to set with the other sun.

Ever since getting involved in the credit card business almost a decade ago, I’ve been interested in multi-sided platform business strategies. Unfortunately time hasn’t permitted me to get as intimately acquainted with them as I would’ve liked. Now it seems multi-sided businesses are all the rage even though they have existed for about as long as business itself. Catalyst code: The strategies behind the world’s most dynamic companies by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee (published by Harvard Business School Press) looks a bit deeper into the platform business model and provides clear guidance to analyzing either existing or new catalyst businesses.

So what really is a catalyst or a multi-sided business? The latter term is, to an extent, self-explanatory. In short, it’s a business that caters to more than one group of customers and the dealing with the groups might need significantly differing strategies. Dating services are one of the easiest examples to understand; a dating service needs both men and women to participate – without the other group present, members of the other group will also fail to materialize. And as it happens, dating services also provide an example of one of the common features with catalysts: you often have to treat the other side of your business dramatically different from the other side. In most cases of dating services, this means the men pay (more) and women may even be given incentives to participate. Of course, there can be more than two sides to a multi-sided business, but Catalyst Code mostly focuses on those with two sides to serve.

After starting off with an introduction as to what really is a “catalyst” here, the book goes on to building the catalyst inception and survival strategy through the following six-step process, breaking them further down into actionable, concrete advice and lessons to heed:

1. Identify the platform community
2. Establish a pricing structure
3. Design the catalyst for success
4. Focus on profitability
5. Compete strategically with other catalysts
6. Experiment and evolve

Now this list may sound self-evident and to an extent, it is. But as always, the devil is in the details and Catalyst Code provides plenty of details as well as examples on successful (and not-so successful) catalyst businesses and, I believe, manages to give a fresh perspective on the catalyst business to all but the people most knowledgeable about the model. Did you, for example, know about the detailed and deliberate strategies that Roppongi Hills has pursued? Or how the Fox network rose to current success from a one-hour talk show? Or how malls floor plans are (at least in US.. Kamppi Center take note!) carefully constructed to optimize things both to the consumers and to the merchants?

It’s worth noting that many of the most successful companies of our times, like Microsoft, employ a catalyst model. But it’s equally interesting to note that so do many businesses that we don’t immediately think of as acting as catalysts – like shopping malls, which are in effect as clear a catalyst as there is once you start thinking about it. But of course merely identifying catalysts is easy, it’s the operational details that are interesting. For example, it’s interesting to note that as innocuous-sounding things like incentive misalignment can bring down (and has brought down) many catalysts – something not very likely to happen to single-sided businesses.

But so how is Catalyst Code as a book? In short, it’s good. It’s a thorough analysis of the multi-sided business models and provides a great basic “roadmap” to anyone looking to launch a potential future catalyst. That alone makes it essential reading for the catalyst entrepreneur. But it’s also a great read in case you’re “just” interested in how the multi-sided market operates. Being filled with numerous real-life examples keeps the theory interesting, lively and relevant and makes for a nice read.

Now, does it tell you how to solve the chicken-and-egg problem many catalysts run into? No. But it does provide examples how others have done it before. Does it tell you in a fool-proof way how to run a catalyst so that it’s always successful? Of course not. But it does give you pointers and things to watch out for that you may not have thought of otherwise. And what more can you really hope from a genuinely useful business book? No snake oil or silver bullets but actionable, useful advice if you put some of your own thinking into the process also.