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Hola hola,

I can’t believe how fast weeks fly you’re deep in projects. It seems it’s time for another two-week weeknote and a lot has happened again.

Apps4Finland

Few of us visited the Apps4Finland open data & data visualization competition gala at Vanha. We didn’t participate, but one entry had been inspired quite a lot by our work. You can try to find which one from The list of winners of Apps4Finland 2011 competition. All the best to them and to all of the winners! :)

The level of entries was pretty good in the top end. Some of our favorites were:

• ParkkiNappi by Neligrate Oy — which removed coins from the car parking equation by using a mobile app.
• Helsinki Public Transport Visualized was a clear world class winner in the visualization category.
• Miten menee, kunta? — or how are the Finnish municipalities doing? — was a clear enough Google Maps presentation about the major issues in the Finnish country side.
• Tilannekuva.fi was an interesting in-your-face unsolicited redesign work for anational crisis information web service — a one that was decided to build in 2005 after the Asian Tsunami, yet is still not implemented in 2011(!).
• soRvi — a toolkit for simplifying JSON, XML and PC-axis data input to the R programming language. This should make further processing easier.

Sadly all entries are described only in Finnish.

The gala had many moments of people patting each other in the back for doing good work in advancing open data in Finland. And it seems that celebration was in order as the competition had drawn in more participants than any other national open data competition so far. That’s a good result in as small country as Finland. In the words of Petri Kola: “This has been the breakthrough year for open data in Finland”.

We really want to find some time to do some open data visualizations at some point too, but in the meantime we’ll do them for our clients.

Lots of mobile stuff shipped and in-progress

We’ve been really busy in the mobile space again.

For example, a recent multi-platform mobile application designed by Kate, Sauli, Fabian, Aki was released some time ago and was the most downloaded free app in the Apple AppStore for some time. It seemed to have filled a large user need within that crowd.

A long tablet project that Fabian and Teppo have been doing was also finally launched in one app store. Coming out also on another platform soon. Designing for two different platforms at the same time is challenging, very interesting and educational, but requires quite a lot more work than one could perhaps think. It’s interesting to see how tablet UI concepts from one platform are copied & improved in another platform, before they are again copied & improved and ported back to the original platform. And your design lives somewhere in between of these.

We’re also heavily involved in Windows Phone design again. Jukka and Sami are doing a quite cool project which is just a start for a new product line expansion for this client. This has solid base in research and strategical thinking.

Fabian and Teppo are doing another WP7 thing, which needs to be done according to the strictest rules possible this time. This also makes the project quite challenging, as Microsoft’s own specifications for the platform still have some inconsistencies, although the situation has improved a lot from 7.0 to 7.5 Mango.

Anyhow, if you are in need of some mobile design, contact us, we are on a roll currently!

Competitions

It seems that Urbanflow has found its way into a Postscapes — Internet of Things Design Fiction video competition. At the moment some story telling chair is leading the voting, though. Check it out, the competition has some interesting videos in it, although you might have seen many of them already.

Elsewhere, Sami participated to Peloton Innovation Camp, which is a series of events aiming to find practical solutions for the climate change and the energy crisis. It’s organized by the think tank Demos Helsinki and Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, and supported by many organizations.

In the Helsinki event Sami was in a team that won the shared second price for their project Voimala, a mobile energy app (b2c) and a virtual power plant(b2b). The winner was an innovative ad-hoc car sharing pool Weego, aimed at ulitilizing dormant vehicles by larger group of people. This was “kind of airbnb but for cars”. Good job, hopefully it will be created for real.

That’s it for now, see you next time.