Kuldmuna 2010 awards were held last weekend. This year was especially good for us. Woohoo! We got awarded 15 times. Best of all we won the agency of the year award. It is my fifth year in Estonia and we finally got it.
As Kadri said, good things come to those who wait.
Related articles: State of Kuldmuna Digital and What To Do About It?, Estonian Internet Awards 2009, Golden Hammer 2008.
All photos by Annika Haas, Fotobrigaad.
It was talked about in several different places. Last thursday it became reality. First Estonian Internet Awards winners were announced. These are my comments as a member of jury.
Last weekend Kuldmuna awards were given out. Someone is going to be offended by saying this. Level of most of entries shortlisted in Internet design and Digital advertising categories were shamefully low. I know there have been better projects in Estonia during last year. How did this happen?
DISCLAIMER: I work in advertising agency myself. I have been working in advertising agency or online department of advertising agency for last 11 years. Good to remember when you work in advertising and feel offended by reading this.
Today I arrived to sunny Riga to attend 9th Golden Hammer festival. I was invited to be Head of Digital Media Jury. Something I am really looking forward to.
As usual organization of all things has been top notch. Baltic people are absolutely great at organizing events. If any of you readers are here this week drop me a line or tweet. On thursday there will be BadAd party which is definitely worth visiting too.
Small sideproject we just finished with Magnus. My good friend Misko Iho is starting his own company. He directs music videos and television commercials. Site is kept as simple as possible. Let the content speak for itself.
Lates paper issue of Best Marketing magazine had a short story of advertising agency Taevas. There was also short interview of myself. It was shortened quite a lot. Since lots of the stuff I wanted to stress out was missing, I decided to republish the original interview here.
In the early days technical limitations affected everything we did. Browsers were more buggy than now. Bandwith was limited. Servers were extremely expensive. There were no such things as MySQL, PHP or Ruby on Rails. JavaScript was totally unusable. Most of work was done in languages such as Perl which were not actually designed for web work.
Those limitations do not exist anymore. You can concentrate more on the creative idea. Gone are the days when you needed funding to buy servers. Anyone with armed with creditcard can start their company using Amazon EC2 which provides endless computing power. New programming frameworks enable you to write working services in weeks instead of months. People have faster and faster internet connections.
Next two days I will be visiting Internet World exhibition in London. Never been there before So I do not know what to expect. Speaker lineup looks ok. I really hope speakers stay away from giving sales speeches for their own companies.
Anyway I had a point too. New Tallinn airport is really cool. As usual there is free WiFi everywhere. This time there was a boilerplate ad. I do not know if it is the brand, but I did not feel offended by this ad. It was Skype Jobs.
Judge for yourself. It just gives you warm and fuzzy feeling.
Last week Estonian business paper Äripäev made a small research. Their journalist made an online registration to test drive a car. Only three car dealers out of seven replied.
Response from those who failed to answer? “We had some technical problems.”
Before reading further I should mention that Amserv Auto mentioned in this post is our client.
Out of seven dealers contacted following replied.
Finalists of Grand One ‘08 were announced few days ago. Comparing to finalists of 2006 code quality is getting better but there is still lot of room for improvement.
Table below lists finalists from Best B2C service, Best B2B service and Best infodesign categories. Flash sites were left out. Two interesting numbers are listed.
Lines of code for each site was calculated by executing the following on commandline:
>lynx -source http://www.example.com/ | wc
This years winner has amazing 301 validation errors. Award goes to Valve and Plenware produced kauppalehti.fi. Shared second place goes to TietoEnator, Avarko, QBrick produced ClassicLive. and Elisa Verkkokauppa by Mainostoimisto Ego (hey guys, what happen!?). Both sites have 113 validation errors. Second place goes to TietoEnator, Avarko, QBrick produced ClassicLive with 113 validation errors. YLE’s inhouse production yle.fi receives third place with 100 errors.
Elisa Verkkokauppa was fixed few hours after publishing this. Apparently backend coder had forgot to close <img> tags. It fully validates so I am taking away the second prize. (Yes, I used to work in EGO. Yes, I still work in Taivas Group.)
Web application movement is growing in Baltic states. Biggest event in near future will be Barcamp Baltics 2008. It is held 8-10 February in Riga. Barcamp describes itself the following way:
Barcamp is a unique international unconference on new media, blogs, podcasts, social networking, citizen journalism, web 2.0, open source and everything else that is connected with it. Unconference includes open presentations, workshops and workgroups; everything is held by the participants themselves.
Other than Barcamp Jüri Kaljundi has been organizing OpenCoffee Club in Tallinn for a while. I have always had some lame excuse not to attend. Next event will be 6. March. That one I will attend. Now when it is said public I cannot have any excuses
Green White Christmas is Toyota Baltics’ this year christmas greeting. Partners who received the email can plant their own tree into virtual forest. Trees will grow everyday until new years eve.
You can test how it works with demo. Note that demo trees are not saved to database.
Site is built with Ruby on Rails and uses several jQuery plugins: pngfix, form, hoverintent, cookie and last but not least UI.
Cannes Lions Festival started today. I am still disappointed by WiFi. Yes, there is WiFi in the festival area. Bad thing it is not free. You can only access provider (SFR) main page. To make things worse pricelist page does not work. Luckily Microsoft provides CyberCafe. You can use WiFi there for free. 20 minutes that is. Atleast something.
We arrived couple of days early to Nice – France. We are on our way to Cannes Lions festival. It is really true Nice is not nice. Nice smells…
First touch to Nice was taxi driver. He cheated of course. Talked a lot. Oui oui. Took a long route to hotel. Before we were able to see the final sum he turned off taxometer and said 29 euro. Hotel webpages seem to cheat too. Pictures look good but truth is something else. Plastic garden furniture. Multipurpose sofa serving as bed. Morning breakfast costs 8 euro. It consists of coffee and two chocolate croissants. Youre better off walking to nearby supermarket and making your own breakfast.
Nice smells. I reckon it is because of the humidity and all the trash in streets. Not only trash but also dog leavings. People have lots of dogs but nobody picks up the dog poo. There is no WiFi in cafeterias. The one I am sitting now has some old pc. No possibility of plugging in your own computer.
Nice reminds me lot of Egypt. Main differences are nobody speaks english and everything is far more expensive. I hope Cannes will be more interesting.
Estonian business tabloid Äripäev writes about new real estate portal Koduleidja. According to äripäev this newcomer is bringing out fresh concept to real estate market: silent buying and selling.
What Äripäev fails to mention the concept is not new at all. Instead it is a copy of Finnish real estate portal Igglo.
Igglo was first launched in February 2006. Company and the concept it has been successfull. It currently operates also in Norway. One of the key features of Igglo has been the silent buying and selling. Portal has information and photos of every single building in Helsinki and other big cities in Finland. If you are interested in buying a flat from a specific house you can ear mark your interest anonymously. Also if you are interested in selling yours you can mark that there is a flat possibly available in this house.
Many people have business ideas. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad.
Ajujaht is competition where you can give you idea for peer review. You describe your business plan carefully. It is reviewed by professional people. Jury will choose finalists. Each finalist will receive 5000 EEK (320 EUR) cash price.
Again from finalists jury will choose best business ideas. Winners will receive cash prices to make their dreams come true. Price money totals 500.000 EEK (32.000 EUR). Five best teams will also be arranged meeting with investors. This could mean even more funding.
Competition is sponsored by City of Tallinn, City of Tartu, Tallinn Technologypark TEHNOPOL, Enterprise Estonia and SEB Eesti Ühispank.
Make your office happy buy providing people with fresh water!
Bossa Vesi is a minisite for Estonian supplier of coffee, water and juice machines for offices. It contains some simple jQuery goodness. All Javascript code degrades gracefully.
The nice office in front page is actually our own!
Spring brings out the people. People bring out photographers. For four weeks there will be fashion spy’s patrolling streets of Tallinn.
Kevad.ee is Estonia streetstyle photoblog. During four weeks our photographers will make pictures of people in streets of Tallinn. Art directors will then spend several hours browsing this daily photo stream. Result is around ten new images posted online daily. Photoblog will be updated for one month. But this is not the end. All photos published online will be also published in a book. No not an e-book but an real dead-tree book!
Site is part of spring campaign for Kristiine Keskus
UPDATE 20070409:
There are also two similar projects online. Femme tänavamood and Just Glitter Lust
We just finished latest joint project with finnish EGO. Result is Valentine’s Day card campaign for the main newspaper in Finland. Users choose between six prefined picture frames. Upload best picture of themselves (photoshopped or not). Write a nice poem to their loved one. After the masterpiece is finished they can send the card immedietly or at chosen time.
Typical way of working in advertising world is not most pleasant. Insane deadlines. Clients doing last minute changes. With these things in mind, you can not spend too much time coding basic things. With jQuery we were able to concentrate on needed features:
Campaign site also uses date picker plugin by Kelvin Luck
!/~tuupola/oldimages/23.gif (Igglo BETA)! Igglo has a fresh aproach to real estate business. In addition it puts together vast amount of information collected from various sources but in a comprehensible way.
Igglo is a project whose start I got to follow quite closely. Personally only thing I did I was to help find people to do it. We were lucky to hire one of the best PHP coders available. Even though it is late from the original schedule and released as beta the guys did amazing work.
If you are interested in buying an aparment you can mark a building a street or neighbourhood you would be interested in. To help you find the building you want Igglo has photographed every building in Helsinki. More towns will follow. Other people and potential sellers can see if people are interested in their house.
In case you consider selling your apartment but don’t want to make a final decision yet, you can tag your bulding apartment for sale anonymously. Soon you will see if there is any people interested in your house.
One of the most interesting part is the combination of different databases and the fact that Igglo actually photographed every house. They also have satellite pictures and aeroplane pictures. All which can be pinpointed to specific builgings.
I got a bit sentimental looking at pictures of all my old addresses in Helsinki: Anianpellontie 4, Opinkuja 6, Liisankatu 16, Vuorimiehenkatu 4 and Ruusulankatu 18.
!/~tuupola/oldimages/22.gif (Henry Ford)! First joint Internet project between our Tallinn and Helsinki offices went just live.
Henry badge is a guarantee that the used car is sold by an official Ford dealer and it was throughoutly checked by Ford engineer. Ford Henry website itself is a visual way to browse used cars which have the Henry badge.
The car data is fetched from Netwheels database – a company which hosts most of carsale dealer data in Finland. The logic itself is built around DB_DataContainer, PHPSavant, Cache_Lite and PEAR::DB. And yes, it validates.
Sixty minutes ago the old brand of Kolumbus brand was revived as
new cheap mobile connection.
It has been nice two weeks work. Now it is time to sit back and
tail -f access_log for a while.
Ok, this has been already noted by almost every single interesting blog. But hey I was busy all morning. Anyway a great rant from Joel Spolsky about getting your resume read. My favourite part must be the one about punctuation:
OK, this one really bugs me. Learn where spaces go in relation to other punctuation. Attention, the entire population of India: whenever you have a comma, there is always exactly one space and it’s always after the comma and never before it. Thank you.
The above should also apply for posting to Sun Managers.
Two Laws of Explanation is something everyone working with clients should read. The first law applies especially to project managers:
When you’re explaining something to somebody an they don’t get it that’s not their problem, it’s your problem.
The second law is good for anyone who has to work with a project manager:
When someone’s explaining something to you and youre not getting it, it’s not your problem it’s their problem.
Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs has discovered a way to run multiple version of Internet Explorer in windows without using additional software such as vmware. Basically you just extract minimum needed files from IE standalone installer. Installers for older versions of IE are available from Evolt. You put all the files into one directory and create a blank textfile named IEXPLORE.exe.local into the same directory. This textfile causes IEXPLORE.EXE to load all the DLL files from this directory and not to use systemwide ones. Effectively you can run many versions of IE at the same time.
We were just notified that out of 2,945 organisations that entered the 2003 E-Commerce Awards website of Left Foot® Company has been shortlisted for judging in the E-Business Startup category in the West Midlands. Judging will take place between August 26th and September 5th. Award ceremonies are scheduled between the 9th and 19th September.
It is always nice to be recognized internationally. Last time it was FoMoKu Mobile Coupons being finalist in Cannes Lions 2002. Guess it is time to update my cv again.