Casual Connect Kiev

Kiev at night

This week I participated in Casual Connect in Kiev, Ukraine. It’s a gaming industry event with participants not only from Eastern Europe, but also from other parts of Europe and Asia. On my flight to Kiev I saw colleagues from Fortumo and Creative Mobile – both companies are our investors and mentors – also heading there.

The event was good with some interesting sessions and good networking where I managed to get some useful contacts and spread the word of GameFounders and our next batch. In both evenings there were also parties thrown by conference sponsors.

It was my first time in Kiev and Ukraine. A few things I noticed:

Big Apple tackling obesity

Would you EAT these sugar cubes? No? Then why on earth would you DRINK them?!

The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has imposed a very controversial legislation. Beginning March 12 next year, the city will prohibit restaurants, delis and other food serving places from selling sugary drinks in cups or containers larger than 16 ounces (a bit less than half a litre). You could still drink more, but you’d have to order two drinks to do that. According to mr. Bloomberg, this legislation is the first serious step in fighting ever-increasing problem of obesity.

I exit LogistIT

Last Monday I sold my shares in LogistIT to my fellow shareholders there. For the last 9 months I’ve been so busy with GameFounders that I haven’t had almost any time to do anything for LogistIT, so this was a practical step forward. There’s only so much time that you can be a passive shareholder in a startup. We departed on very friendly terms and I’m glad that the guys are continuing work on the product and with customers from 2 countries that we already have.

Book Review: The Art of Being Unreasonable by Eli Broad

The Art of Being Unreasonable by Eli Broad was a featured book in The Economist about a month ago. The description seemed intigueging enough, so after finishing the magazine I bought the book right away from Amazon. An easy read, it took me less than a week to go through it after work.

After reading it, I’m convinced that the guy paid for being featured in The Economist (yes, that can be done). That said, the book was not that bad at all. In fact, the first half of the book I would seriously recommend to any entrepreneur looking for some inspiration. The second half of the book is quite useless for the reader: one self-promotion chapter after another. He describes in detail how he gave money to yet another public gallery or museum, all of them named after him, strangely enough. 🙂

Although clearly a self promotion book, it does contain some good thoughts and hints. Here are my notes:

How To Gamify Your Life

Cycling gamified

As a co-founder in the first gaming accelerator in Europe, I’m constantly looking for ways to apply the stuff I see and learn at GameFounders. One of the really cool things to do is to find ways to bring more meaning into my daily life and doings. How to do that? Gamify!

The thing is, nothing has to be boring. Everything you do can be turned into a game. The only question is how to do it.

Through trial and error I’ve made two main discoveries: