Summer in the city is nice, but summer holiday in the countryside is something else. (please remember that this is only my 3rd summer in the country, so feel free to ignore the extra excitement). I can't stop thanking in my mind the late Mrs. Kaipainen ("kaipaiska"), the fist owner of this house in the 50's, and a gardener to the former prime minister Väinö Tanner, whose mansion, Sorkki, is the center of this village. Mrs. Kaipainen was a courageous and open-minded woman, who not only tended the farming and gardens of minister Tanner, also brought new plants from central-Europe to Finland during 1950s. I am now enjoying a verdant and green garden, thanks to Mrs. Kaipainen (btw, if you want to read about the Sorkki mansion, minister Tanner, his wife and even Mrs. Kaipainen, I recommend "Linda kulkee keskellä tietä".

Today was a nice hot day, so I took a lot of pictures from the garden. You can see them in Flicr. At the same time I uploaded new pics from the greenhouse where competition between me and husband is extremely tense. While his tomatoes are blooming, mine are much much taller. However, during these hot hot days, it's not the tomatoes I'm thankful for. It's the mint. I don't know who has planted the mint here, whether it was Mrs. Kaipainen or someone living here after her, I now have a fresh and endless supply of Mojito ingredients. Fab-u-lous!

While uploading the garden and flower images to Flicr, I tried to name as many of the plants as I could. As someone who was collecting plants as a hobby as a kid, I was very disappointed with my performance. Coincidentally I remembered that on Monday while driving to city to get some rum for those Mojitos's I heard from the radio that a group of hobbyists had set up a web tool for identifying flora and fauna species. They call it NatureGate, and it's a patented species-identifying tool. At its current stage, while still being developed, it works on four different feature sets:

• 1. Geographical location where you found the plant; time of blooming; characteristics of the terrain.
• 2. Characteristics of the flower and inflorescence.
• 3. Characteristics of leaves/leaflets.
• 4. Other features that help identification, including height, hairiness, lack of chlorophyll.

I think this is a nice service, and I'm happy to see Nokia's logo there on the website. However, I still think that the best ever service for someone who'se out in the nature is a mobile servce. I have high hopes for Point and Find to become the nature lover's best friend. I've tried to get a trial ongoing for mapping the Finnish mushrooms into a Point and Find database, but so far have failed in ensuring Nokia's leadership that people would pay for such a service: When picking mushrooms in the forest just point at the mushroom you find, and the system tells you what it is, is it eatible, and may even recommend some recipe's or advertise other ingredients to go with the meal.

In a recent closing event with my MBA class, we did start to envision business cases for this mushroom Point&Find service, and identified at least the following:

1. users themselves want to pay per view (1 view is 1 mushrooom)
2. advertisers will pay for an ad next to the image - cream, seasonings, recipes etc.
3. operators are happy for additional data traffic
4. Ministry of environment  and other public bodies will want to map mushroom reserves on national and regional scale
5. Travel and outdoor industry will pay for maps generated from individual mushroom views
6. Land owners will want to pay for those maps not to be public (I would, I have a fantastic chanterelle place in my forest)

If you would want a mobile species recognition tool available from Nokia, please leave a comment to this entry and I will forward inside Nokia. Let's show the world what a bunch of geeky nature lovers can do.