Our client Scoopshot has struck a deal with Metro International, the world’s largest newspaper. After positive results on the first markets, Sweden and Denmark, Metro is now expanding the coverage worldwide.
Congratulations to the staff of Scoopshot. Excellent work!
Once again, we had an excellent seminar about designing and developing mobile applications and sites. The seminar featured Marko Luhtala, CEO of NearMe Services, and Kai Friman, COO of Eazybreak. Also Exove and Exove Design people had presentations, Aki-Ville Pöykiö, Juha Jauhiainen, and Kalle Varisvirta discussed about reasons for mobile development, design trends and platforms, respectively.
The programme of the seminar can be found on the seminar page (in Finnish only).
A few images from the seminar:
Juha Jauhiainen talks about design trends in mobile.
Marko Luhtala discusses the current state of mobile services in Finland.
Kai Friman introduced Eazybreak concept and told about their experiences of recently launched mobile apps.
The seminar material is available only in Finnish and can be downloaded by filling the form below.
You may download the seminar slides as a PDF file. Please fill in the short query below, and after submitting you’ll get the link to the PDF under the form.
Obligatory fields are marked with a star.
The slides can be viewed also here:
Aamiaisseminaarimme mobiilisovelluksista ja -sivustoista on täynnä. Ilmoittautumiset menevät jonotuslistalle, jota puretaan mahdollisten peruutusten pohjalta.
Ilmoittautuminen kannattaa edelleen, yleensä muutama jonotuslistalainen on mahtunut itse tilaisuuteen.
Our customer, Eazybreak, received yesterday the Innofinland 2011 award. The award has been established 1994 and is granted annually. The President of Finland Tarja Halonen acts as the patron of the project.
The theme for Innofinland 2011 is “Intelligent systems and services – a better functioning world”, and Eazybreak fits the bill very well. It is a new eco-system to manage all kind of fringe benefit paper vouchers by a digital IT-platform. Eazybreak will bring the payment itself to your mobile. This will reduce the manual work and cost dramatically for all the players in the value chain – employers, employees and service providers.
“We are very proud to win this highly valued Award after one year of commercial activity. To make innovations a commercial success requires brave and open-minded customers, well functioning domestic finance market and skilled partners. This is the right way to ensure that the innovative companies remain in Finnish ownership and can expand globally” says Jari Kivinen, CEO of Eazybreak Ltd.
Congratulations to Jari, Kai, Teija, Minna, and the rest of Eazybreak team!
More in Helsingin Sanomat (Finnish only)
Written by: Bård Farstad – CTO eZ Systems
Web-first strategies have become a viable strategy for many businesses and we see this more frequently adopted. Lately we have even seen a push for going mobile-first, bypassing the traditional web and other channels. Making the mobile channel the main focus is of course not a coincidence and not just a hype. The fact is that more and more of the Internet traffic is going via mobile and most of us are having iPhonish type of “smart” devices that enable both applications and mobile browsing.
Mobile First: most are doing it wrong!
The thing that bothers me, is that so many have not learnt from the web-first approach and doing just as wrong as they did when moving from print to web. Just look at media industry. I see more and more offers that promises to take your content mobile both for Apps and Mobile Web experience that are based on traditional print systems like InDesign. This is wrong in so many ways.
InDesign is not a dynamic content solution, it is made for laying out pretty print pages and send them to print. The solutions are not good at handling multi media, time to publish is expensive and time consuming. And the whole Social aspects are not even remotely available in such tools, it is made for paper.
Full Apps Experience
If you want to really go mobile first you need to enable the full Apps experience with a native interface and offline storage. This means a low latency and snappy experience for the consumer while still maintaining an efficient publishing process that makes economical sense.
In addition it is crucial that you enable your business model for the mobile world, being it a traditional subscriptions for premium content, retail purchases or simply booking a test drive of the latest and greatest car model.
You need to talk the language
In order for you to really enable a Mobile-first strategy your infrastructure needs to talk the language. APIs and interfaces needs to be easily available to enable developers to build Apps connected to your content in an efficient way.
Pardon the marketing but most systems today are not able to do this as they are purely Web CMS, most often meaning that they store XHTML in the content repository – which is not very much channel neutral as we know.
Mobile Web is not the Web
Handling content for Web is different than Mobile and handling Paper is again very different. For that reason your system needs to be able to differentiate the channels and translate the channel neutral content into channel specific enriched content. And this is only possible if you are truly managing your content in a neutral way. Just make sure you keep that in mind when you build your infrastructure, there are good systems out there and needless to say that I am happy to assist.
eZ Marketing: Solving the multi-challenge
As you know, I am with eZ Systems and our focus has been solving the multi-challenge which of course includes enabling a Mobile-first strategies. But don’t take just my word for it, listen to customers and partners to learn what they have to say.
Eazybreak, the mobile lunch voucher company, has released an iPhone app to redeem lunch vouchers in a snap. The application, as well as the Eazybreak system, has been designed and developed by us.
The application shows your favourite restaurants, and you can also check the nearby restaurants based on your location. Redeeming a voucher takes only a couple taps and then you are ready to order your food. You just show your application to the cashier and then you’ve paid.
We had an excellent seminar on Wednesday about designing and implementing iPad and mobile applications. The seminar featured Jarno Koponen from Futureful, Bertrand Maugain from eZ Systems, Norway, and Petri Rahja from Scoopshot. Besides our partners and customers, also our own people, namely Aki-Ville Pöykiö and Juha Jauhiainen from Exove Design had presentations.
The programme of the seminar can be found on the earlier blog post.
A couple of pictures from the event:
Jarno Koponen demoes Futureful application.
Bertrand Maugain discusses about implementing content-driven applications to save time and cost.
Petri Rahja shows Scoopshot plans about their future pro application.
You may download the seminar slides as a PDF file. Please fill in the short query below, and after submitting you’ll get the link to the PDF under the form.
Obligatory fields are marked with a star.
The slides can be viewed also here:
Update May 30: The seminar is full. All new registrations go to waiting list. In case of cancellations, we invite people from the list to participate in the event.
Exove will host a free breakfast seminar on designing and implementing content-driven iPad applications on Wednesday June 8. The seminar takes place in Ruoholahti, HTC Pinta building at Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki.
Enroll (in Finnish) – Seminaariesittely suomeksi – Ilmoittaudu
Mobile and tablet apps are at the forefront of new innovation – the hottest concepts, the brightest people, and the savviest of customers are now converging in the mobile app space.
Apps provide a lot of potential for the industry: devices are ultra-personal, always on and always available; most notably people are easily inclined to spend money on and within mobile apps. App platforms support both high class user interfaces and easy integration to back-end systems.
However, there are some important considerations: for instance, the cost and the time-to-market required can pose challenges when developing mobile applications. Furthermore, an application needs to be developed on several mobile platforms separately.
Fortunately, there are solutions to reduce the time and the cost involved. The content-driven application development model discussed in this seminar allows some of the development to take place on the web, thus reducing cost and time spent dramatically in certain cases.
During the breakfast seminar Exove and Exove Design share their knowledge of application design and implementation. Exove’s partner, eZ Systems, shows how to use their eZ Publish CMS to radically reduce costs whilst Futureful and P2S Media Group showcase their iPad applications and related business cases.
We welcome you to enjoy the presentations and to discuss about content-driven application design and implementation.
Please note that the seminar will be held in Finnish. The seminar material will be available in English.
Enroll (in Finnish) – Ohjelma suomeksi – Ilmoittaudu
| 8.30 – 9.00 | Breakfast |
| 9.00 – 9.10 |
Opening Words |
| 9.10 – 9.25 |
Application concept design Aki-Ville Pöykiö, Design Director, Partner, Exove Design Ltd Exove Design helps their customers to make the most out of their business on the web. The starting point is the customer’s business, brand, and strategy. The way our customers are presented on the web should maximize their potential. We call it business driven design. |
| 9.25 – 9.40 |
Differences and similarities of web and application design Juha Jauhiainen, Art Director, Partner, Exove Design Ltd |
| 9.40 – 10.00 |
Case: Futureful Futureful is developing an exciting new way for you to discover personally relevant content. We are currently in stealth-mode and will be launching our iPad app this summer. Marko Andersson & Jarno Koponen, Co-founders, Futureful Ltd This presentation will be held in English. Futureful’s predictive discovery engine analyzes relevant information flows to open up the potential future around you. |
| 10.00 – 10.10 | Break |
| 10.10 – 10.30 |
Content-driven vs. code-driven Bertrand Maugain, Director, International Business Development, eZ Systems Ltd This presentation will be held in English. Founded in 1999, eZ Systems is the creator of eZ Publish, the award winning Open Source Web Content Management Platform used by more than 200,000 websites in more than 160 countries. As a company eZ Systems’ focus is on enabling customers to see ROI from our products, by giving them the ability to quickly adapt and adjust their digital offerings whilst helping future proofing their businesses in this ever changing digital landscape. |
| 10.30 – 10.50 |
Case: Scoopshot Pro Scoopshot Pro will extend the service for professional photographers. iPad is an ideal platform for Scoopshot Pro and in the presentation we will elaborate why. Petri Rahja, COO, P2S Media Group P2S Media Group develops and markets Scoopshot service. |
| 10.50 – 11.00 | Discussion |
We are extremely happy to announce that we have been working for several months on a very exciting project that brings real-time scoring and social media features to golf. Now the system is live, the iPhone app can be found at the App Store, and golf season is just starting.
Below you’ll find the formal announcement:
Exove has played a central role in Golfgamebook.com concept and visual design, and technical implementation onto Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL technology platform.
The site concept and layout was designed by Union together with Exove and Free Drop Innovations. The emphasis was on bringing the social features of golf, typically discussed mainly in the clubhouses or privately, to larger audience in the Internet. These features were supported by a number of typical social media features fit to the golf environment – such as online friends, discussions, and sharing golf game results.
The service was built on ExoveIgniter, a framework based on CodeIgniter offering a versatile set of social media features. The system was built in a modular fashion that allows easy extensibility and fast upgrades. Based on the concept and visual designs, Exove implemented the required HTML code and integrated it into the system as Smarty templates.
The most important features of the system are live connections to scorecard appliances, including also an iPhone client developed by Qvik, full features social media services, integrations to key external services, and fluid user experience with strong branding.
The implementation project delivered a turnkey solution for the client in a multi-vendor environment.
The co-founders of Free Drop Innovations Kalle Väinölä and Mikko Manerus describe the result of the development project as follows: “GameBook is unique within golf’s marketplace as the only product that provides real-time electronic scoring for individuals as well as golf clubs. The scope and timetable of required server side development and web-services were extremely challenging, so we knew we have to pick the right partner in order to reach our ambitious goals. Exove did not only succeed in execution, but they also acted as a true partner throughout the project.”
Mikko Rantanen, CEO of Free Drop Innovations, continues: “We set the standard for our web presence and on-line community very high as we knew that in international golf marketplace only the best products and services prevail. The end result speaks for itself and further distances GameBook from its competition. We are in particular extremely proud of our web-based community, the GameBook Clubhouse. It provides players opportunity to connect with one another through a sophisticated and innovative community platform.”
If you are a golfer, please check www.golfgamebook.com and register. The best game just got better.
Olen (Janne Kalliola siis) käynyt puhumassa parissa seminaarissa alkukevään aikana. Tieturin Luuri 2009 -tilaisuudessa puhuin web 2.0 -toimintamallien ilmestymisestä mobiililaitteisiin ja tämän ilmiön takana olevista suuremmista murroskohdista.
Sytyke ry:n kevätseminaarissa “Web-Oriented Architecture” kävin tänään puhumassa web-palvelujen API:en suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta.
