Juha Christensen's Mobile Experiences

Sonopia's Angels

Meet Marina, Violetta and Svitlana, Sonopia's answer to Charlie's Angels; the dedicated, hard working trio that keeps the Sonopians in Kyiv organized, fed, motivated and with a roof over their heads.

Unwirepark

Had a quick 30 min coffee with a group of really smart guys in Copenhagen.

They have created a very interesting business around solving the age old problem of getting cool applications onto your phone. Their service can get cool Entertainment, Games, Business, Lifestyle, e-Books and Utilities apps onto your device. Their UI is clean, and the service has a level of transparency I haven't seen from similar services from other companies.

Umar, Babar and Farrukh are solid guys. They have a good balance between vision and reality. I was impressed by particularly one reach deal they had signed with someone in the channel I know very well.

Developers Developers Developers

A few of us were meeting with one of our partner companies here in Ukraine, and talking about the APIs in the Sonopia Platform and about the timing of launching our developer program (not in the near future). Our partners will, however, get lots of developer opportunities early, before we kick off the program.

In thinking about how we help partners Develop, Test/Certify and Deploy I got to think of the Mobile2Market program we launched at Microsoft here at the Microsoft MDC (Mobility Developer Conference, me on stage launching the program):

Henning Damkiær leaving Denmark - 22 years ago

Caught up last week with Henning over a cocktail after presenting for two hours to CEO members of DI (Dansk Industry, the Confederation of Danish Industries) in Copenhagen. Henning and I had not met for 20 years, so it was great to catch up on all the things that have happened since then.

Henning went home and found some scary pictures from 1985.

Henning in very smart leather cap. The guy in the white shirt? Me age 20.

The guy in the bordeaux sweater is a very young Michael Mathiesen (founder of Dataco, 2M Invest, current gig is Cellpoint)

Delivering on Projects

I am spending a lot of time in Kyiv on working on engineering review cycles, Program Management processes and reporting, and generally making sure Sonopia delivers reliably against what Product Management, UI Design and Art Direction needs.

In thinking about the general topic of delivey, this cartoon always comes to mind (click on the drawing):

Solar Eclipse in Kyiv

The first real spring day here in Kyiv coincided with a solar eclipse, which I watched with a bunch of other Sonopians thorugh various approaches, ranging from looking at the sun as a reflection in a muddy puddle through to punching a small hole in a business card and looking at the reflection onto a piece of paper. The latter worked well, the former left a good part of the Kyiv based Sonopia team blinded for the afternoon.

Turning Torso

Teleca Board meeting at Turning Torso

Went to the new Turning Torso building for an all-day board meeting in Teleca. We were guineapigs in the newly completed conference facility on the 53rd Floor, being the first to try out the new facilities.

Turning Torso was designed by Spanish Atchitect Santiago Calatrava, who managed the project down to minute details. Woodwork, fixtures, doorknobs and other details were chosen to match the dramatically twisting building, the tallest building in Scandinavia.