Our trip in New York is on it’s last hours. We’ve enjoyed the city and got the mobile office working quite well, too. Yesterday we got our flights rebooked to Lufthansa and we’re returning home on Saturday.

These days stranded in New York had us thinking about the world in the sense of mobile working and expanding our business abroad. We have been networking and doing the projects back home, plus making concepts for future business. Our giving-back-to-the-community project Bolder Academy has had a totally new direction and this trip has surely given a spur on making those things happen.

We set ourselves a deadline to January 2011. By then, we’ll be having a mobile office or even a branch outside of Finland. Now that we said it publicly, it’s more closer to happening. Why not?

In the 99% conference we had the possibility to see Square in action. Square is a new venture by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. It makes credit card payments possible with iPhones and iPads in a convenient way. The real catch is that there is no contracts or monthly payments. You just pay a fee of the payments you accept.

The service also has an interface for the shopkeeper, in which you can create a collection of items to sell and have all the receipts archived. It helps even with the customer loyalty programs.

All the conference stuff was sold in a booth, and the credit card payments were received with a small device connected to iPhone’s miniplug. A swipe and they sent the receipt to my email. This is a simple innovation which combines the bits and atoms, and I love it!

We met Scott Belsky, the founder and CEO of Behance, in the 99% conference. He and his company have been doing great job in organizing the creative world. Their web community, products along 99% think tank and conference are getting the creative world more networked and getting more things done.

Scott published his book, Making Ideas Happen (which by the way is great), a week ago. He has done six years of research on how creative people in different organizations and jobs are getting things done. He has defined the formula of an organization that aims in making ideas into reality.

Making Ideas Happen = (Creativity) + Organization + Communal forces + Leadership capabilities

I think I’ll post a review of the book a bit later.

Anyway, he will be talking in the Bolder Academy event in Helsinki in the fall. We’re going to have a great lineup there! Maybe I’ll tell more about Bolder Academy’s plans in this blog, too?

We had the pleasure to visit one of the most influential creative companies in the world, IDEO. The company has been working with such innovations as the original Apple’s computer mouse and Bank of America’s Keep the change. 

Our host was the gifted designer Ellen Sitkin who introduced the company and their New York premises to us.

Key learnings from IDEO

• Design is all about people and empathy. You always design to people and the key is to step into their shoes. For example IDEO staff spent days in a hospital bed without moving, trying to empathize with paralyzed people.
• “It’s not about the industry, it’s about the way we think” - IDEO works with customers accross all industries. This enables them to learn from each case, think wider and take best practices from industry to another.
• IDEO staff works with only one project at a time. Sadly, very few Finnish companies are even able to hire six creatives for a month’s project in concept design.
• “If we want to work with the most creative companies in the world, we also have to be on the list of them.” - PR is everything for a creative company. You have to be recognized as and idea machine.

The meeting was very encouraging in the sense that we are on the right path. Maybe it was also a wake up call for us to aim the more international markets.

We work mainly with our laptops and communicate all the time. The number one necessity in our mobile office is definately the wireless network and a possibility to recharge your laptop while working.

Today, we spent quite a lot of time finding a good hotel that could provide us with this necessity. We ended up finding the Pod Hotel in Eastern 51st Street in Manhattan. This hotel has a lobby with many different tables, sofas and chairs to work on and sufficient recharging stations.

Although, the wireless connection could be a lot faster – we have gotten used to a 200M connection in Helsinki - step one is considered completed.

We have been thinking a lot about the concepts of time and place related to our work lately. We are a Helsinki based company but we are young people with a drive to see the world and get inspired by cities and people around the globe.

Our work is done pretty much with computers and our minds. Yes, we do meet our customers quite often, brainstorm together and have put a lot of time and effort in designing our own office a perfect place to work. But could we use some portion of our time abroad, away from the constrains of the codified environment?

We have noticed that always when we are travelling, our minds start to get new ideas and we see the things we’ve been haggling with from another perspective. This is due to meeting new people, seeing things done differently and experiencing how different cultures come accross in customer service, design and societal dynamics.

Bolder New York is a testing platform for making things happen away from home. What do we need? How do we work? What do we get done?

Nuoret yrittäjät perustivat väliaikaisen sivukonttorin New Yorkiin tulivuorenpurkauksen takia

Lentoliikenne on saanut miljoonat ihmiset perumaan matkasuunnitelmiansa ja ruuhkauttamaan lentoyhtiöiden puhelinlinjat. Nuoret helsinkiläisyrittäjät päättivät kuitenkin käyttää tilannetta hyödykseen ja perustivat yritykselleen väliaikaisen sivukonttorin New Yorkiin.

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