Lari Kangas: Are you excitable?

I'm not easily moved, but every now and again when something truly new is created I get excited. Run DMC did it in 1986, by introducing me to HipHop. Salvador Dali did it for me in the so-called classical art and I've always been a geek when it comes to new technological innovations. At best technology and art becomes one, it moves you.

My biggest accomplishments to date can both be linked to IT and somehow even to open source ideology. When I was a pre-teen in Helsinki Toukola-Kumpula-Käpylä region, we had a group of guys that used to crack games for Commodore 64 and later to Amiga 500. Our group was called Syntax Error Cracking Club - S.E.C.C., and without making any profit from the work, we achieved global recognition. Our cracked games, the c-casette tapes, had been copied and circulated as far away places as Bangladesh and Chile. Maybe some of you old-timers remember the S.E.C.C. -logo before the games started. This was in the early- and mid-1980's. The times of the above-mentioned music of Run DMC and Public Enemy. By the end of that decade we were already catching soundtrack loops from Eric B. Rakim, Salt 'n Pepa and The Beastie Boys. We were kids of 10 to 15 years old. The first real computer generation.

The second and perhaps even cooler innovation that I was fortunate to be part of was the web-based database to serve as a conflict prevention network for various political, media and civil society actors in so-called fragile states. We did the program under the visionary leadership of Ms. Anne Palm and celebrated every cent we got for the KATU project from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Truly innovative, a facebook for conflict prevention actors of sorts, one could never claim for ignorance anymore, when planning for strategy to intervene into a conflict, like the UN troops had done few years earlier during the Rwanda and Burundi genocide. The contacts to know what's going on, on the ground and do the research were there, like in Rauli Virtanen's diary. All the contacts were accessible like from the Yellow Pages, but most importantly every contact had the possibility to contribute independently into the database just like in modern day social media. This initiative was but for few years from 1998 to the turn of the new Millennium.

Both IT highlights of my life were short-lived, like 15-minutes of fame, although especially the latter attracted wide interest with the large Finnish media houses especially and then influenced what was to be known as the government civil crisis management database. Far less innovative version of the original.

The first small Nokia phones were exciting and moved us all with especially the SMS technology that came with them. Suddenly you had cheap means to be in touch with the World. Similarly the VHS videos were awesome by popularizing professional recording to nearly every household. Linux innovation of open source operating system was just mind-blowing! Youtube was like home-videos re-invented inside the internet. Awesome!

Innovations are exciting. They are art that moves you. Apple OS, the operating system that Microsoft and Windows copied, was exciting. Nokia 770, later to be copied to become the world-known tablet iPad, was exciting. iPhone was exciting for leading the evolution to touch-screen smartphones. And I remember when once driving Jutta Urpilainen home from some boring SDP seminar (I'm just joking, I'm sure it was brilliant!), I kept convincing her that every politician must get into Facebook to communicate with the electorate. Soon after she joined and so did many others. Then Obama took the social media campaigning to another exciting levels altogether. Re-invented political campaigning, if you will. Exciting. Yes, they did. It was a movement.

But innovations don't seem happen every day. Nor do they seem to come around more often than before. New and truly fresh ideas are few and far apart. Most of the so-called new things on the market are just something old re-packaged. I mean whatever has Samsung innovated - speed for a smartphone or a bigger screen? And now everyone's raving about it as if it was the latest of something.

So long story short, today is also one of those days, when I'm excited. Something new has happened. Revolutionary Jolla smartphone and most of all it's Sailfish OS were launched to public. They are exciting, because the OS is open source like Linux, but is able to hybrid with the open Android application development as well.

Whether Jolla brand will stand the pressures of competition or the Sailfish OS will become worldwide phenomena remains to be seen. Capitalism and market shares are a lot about money spent to marketing and the best tech innovations don't always prevail. But what is clear from today, is that they are the first of their kind. They did to smartphones what Linus Torvald's Linux did to your home PC operating systems. Jolla is not just a smartphone with a new operating system. Jolla is a movement where everyone can personalize, create and innovate their own smartphone. It's a movement like Obama re-created politics. And that, regardless of the brand success, is going to be the future of mobile technology.

Jolla movement is special and it's exciting.