It’s been quite a month. We are getting settled to the new office. Things, tables and people are slowly but surely migrating to their optimal places and furniture + shelving are being upgraded piece by piece while we discover the things we really need.
Last week was the Slush week. Media coverage was plenty so I’m not going to repeat the obvious but I’ll just say it was and awesome and HUGE event. Having been loosely partial to the first Slush at Korjaamo in 2008 and a speaker at last year’s event at Kaapeli, this year really felt like Slush has finally grown up into a well oiled, enjoyable and efficient machine to all things startup. Well done, team.
Most of our team were hard at work last week, but I managed to have a peek at the festival, courtesy of our startup client Usetrace. Despite us having no paid sponsorship or anything at the event, it turns out our work was still rather visible throughout the event. Our friends Tellybean were pitching like crazy at Reaktor Polte stand, Demos Helsinki‘s sustainable startup accelerator Peloton had their own stage on wednesday and a large booth on Thursday. Newest of the bunch, Usetrace had a booth there where they showed off the product we helped to improve. They also managed to close impressive amount of new users at Kaapeli. The coolest thing is they announced this week a seed round of €120 000 from undisclosed angel investors to grow the product. Congrats to all — our friends success makes us happy campers too!
Another big one last week was Long Play bringing home the €250 000 main prize of Uutisraivaaja competition, announced at Slush main stage on Wednesday evening. Long Play is a startup figuring out the future of long form journalism and we have been working with them on this since the last summer. The team has worked hard on a product which has 9 issues, or singles on LP-speak out, plenty of paying customers already in Finland and basically a proven concept. What we’re doing is helping them out to figure the service, scalability and of course visual identity. First major release of our work should be out by the end of year, watch this space… :)
In other news, Interaction Awards 2014 shortlist was out as well, and we’re representing Finland there with our interactive lawmaking / visualization tool Finlex Lainvalmistelu. Finalists are out in December, keep your fingers crossed for us!
Project update
Projects at the moment include: Panu & Tuukka working on a new multifaceted retail / ecommerce thing which will be piloted early next year.
Timo is working with an analytics startup building a serious competitor in that space with a team spread in three countries on two continents.
Teppo & Sauli are respectively chin-deep on various things at our teleoperator friend’s core business, and I’m putting final touches on a strategic thing related to this as well.
Matti is taking over Teppo on a large b2b project which will eventually have a huge impact on how businesses run their daily business.
Jukka is back from Japan after a month, and hit the ground running working with me on a banking client on designing the next versions of a few services, and also while on it coming up ways & stories to bring their whole online presence a new level.
Lauri is putting final touches on a short design fiction / concept video as a part of a larger technology concept work. Some parts of this were out in the open last week, but our lips are sealed for now.
I’m working few ends and couple of new exciting beginnings. Android pitches, new ways of working, our future offering, figuring out product design, on Nordkapp future & strategy with Ilkka, Panu & Marko. All kinds of exciting nuggets. It should be noted that our new (interim) website is slowly revealing itself while you read this. So go check it out.
One more thing – there is an IxDA Helsinki event at our office-in-progress tonight. Check out the details from here, and do join in!
Long Play photo:
Kimmo Hokkanen and Eva Persson at Uutisraivaaja blog
