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!
Kauppalehti, the biggest financial newspaper in Finland, has included Exove in their Kauppalehti Menestyjät 2011 (direct translation: Kauppalehti Prosperous 2011) listing based on our financial performance during 2010. Exove scored full five stars on their review.
Listing of Kauppalehti Menestyjät 2011 on IT sector. Read the rest of this entry »
We are been working closely together with the city of Helsinki to design and develop an open democracy platform to enhance opportunities for citizen participation in the city administration.
The system has been in use for a few weeks at demokratia.hel.fi (in Finnish only, English summary), and yesterday there was a first open meeting (in Finnish, includes video) that citizens could participate in by being present at the town hall, through the site, or by watching the event through cable-TV. For the meeting, we implemented a real-time chat support in the system, and it was used extensively.
Speaking of the system, it is based on Drupal 7 extended with a number of contrib modules, a city of Helsinki look’n'feel template, and a couple of site specific custom modules.
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.
Tänään Exoven aamiaisseminaarissa tutustuttiin sosiaalisen median palveluiden suunnitteluun ja toteutukseen. Puhujina oli tuttuun tapaan exovelaisten lisäksi myös asiakkaitamme, Mikko Ristimäki esitteli Suomi24:n uuden Minä-palvelun ja Mikko Manerus sekä Elias Pietilä puhuivat Golfgamebook.com:sta. Kalle Varisvirta Exovelta esitteli Drupalin sosiaalisen median alustana ja Janne Kalliola sekä Juha Jauhiainen (Union) puhuivat sosiaalisen median palvelun suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta tyhjältä pöydältä lähdettäessä.
Tarkempi ohjelma löytyy seminaarin sivuilta.
Alla vielä pari kuvaa tilaisuudesta.
Mikko Ristimäki esittelee Suomi24:n Minä-palvelua.
Mikko Manerus ja Elias Pietilä kertovat Golfgamebook.com:sta.
Mikäli haluat ladata seminaarin kalvot PDF-tiedostona, täytä ystävällisesti alla oleva lyhyt kysely. Vastausten lähettämisen jälkeen lomakkeen alapuolelle tulee linkki PDF-tiedostoon.
Pakolliset kentät on merkitty tähdellä.
Seminaarikalvot voi katsoa myös tästä:
Suomi24 Minä profile service has been implemented by Exove with close collaboration with the Suomi24 team.
Mikko Ristimäki of Suomi24 is speaking about the system tomorrow at our social media seminar (only in Finnish).
Minä is the heart of Suomi24, the largest Finnish on-line community with more than 2.3 million of registered users. It is the control panel for updating users status, keeping in touch with friends and being always up-to-date of the interesting information around. Suomi24 also offers Finland’s most popular discussion forum, e-mail services, marketplace, dating services and so on for more than 1.3 million unique users a week.
Exove hold a central role in renewing old profile and network solution. The concept of a community-driven, sharing-based service with high performance requirements was designed by Suomi24. Exove implemented the new service concept onto a existing technology platform consisting of Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL in close collaboration with Suomi24. The HTML/CSS templates of the site were built by Suomi24 and integrated to Drupal by Exove. Perhaps the most notable feature of the system is the tight integration with Apache Solr search engine.
Minä uses about twenty modules, half of which are Drupal contrib. modules and half custom-made modules for specifically Suomi24 needs, implemented by Exove. The most important third-party modules are ApacheSolr, CCK, Content Profile, ImageApi, Friendlist and Heartbeat. Custom modules mostly extend and customise the features provided by third-party modules.
Community section of the service provides users an efficient way to browse interesting user profiles and to find new friends. Search integrates with all social functionality on the site.
In addition to the service implementation Exove migrated the existing Suomi24 Gallery information and centralised user information into almost half a million Minä user profiles.
Pasi Piispa, Product Director at Suomi24, describes the result of the renewal project as follows: “The challenge of the project was to duplicate the functionalities of the old Suomi24 Gallery application on our new Drupal platform and migrate the existing user data to improve the quality of the service. The project was by no means easy or simple, but despite the initial challenges we succeeded in building a foundation for upcoming new features and site wide content integrations, which wouldn’t have been possible on the old platform.”
Overall project and technical implementation was supervised by Mikko Ristimäki, Director of Development and Technology at Suomi24. Mikko highlights the Exove role in the project as follows: “Exove provided flexible and cost efficient way to move Suomi24 community features into our core Drupal platform. The team was experienced and provided good insights and best practises on how to build and manage large scale Drupal platforms.”
Please check http://mina.suomi24.fi/yhteisö and see the service yourself.
Exove järjestää aamiaisseminaarin sosiaalisen median verkkopalvelujen suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta keskiviikkona 15.12.2010. Seminaarissa käsitellään sosiaalisen median verkkopalvelujen suunnittelua ja toteutusta käytännönläheisesti eri alustoihin pohjautuen. Kummankin ratkaisun esittelyn yhteydessä kuullaan myös asiakkaan edustajan esittämä case äskettäin toteutetusta projektista. Puhujina exovelaisten lisäksi Juha Jauhiainen Union Brandilta, Mikko Ristimäki Suomi 24:ltä, sekä Kalle Väinölä ja Mikko Manerus Free Drop Innovationsilta.
Tule kuulemaan ja keskustelemaan sosiaalisen median verkkopalveluiden suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta.
Seminaarin tarkempi ohjelma ja ilmoittautumislomake löytyvät seminaarin esittelysivulta. Seminaari järjestetään perinteiseen tapaan Exoven toimitiloissa HTC Pintassa, Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki. Seminaariin täytyy ilmoittautua ja se on maksuton.
Exoven aiempien seminaarien ohjelmat, kuvat ja esitysmateriaali löytyvät myös blogistamme: sivustoseminaari, 19.5.2010, web-sovellusseminaari, 12.2.2009 ja julkaisujärjestelmäseminaari, 16.6.2009.
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.
We have been lately working with several web applications and social media systems. Every system has a unique business model and value proposition to the customers and the visitors, and thus the functionality we have been implementing vary a lot between the applications. However, when digging one level deeper, similarities start to surface.
There are a lot of typical features in web applications, such as registration, signing in and out, viewing your details, and so on. On the admin side, one needs to be able to list, add, modify, and remove items — whatever they might be — and to manage users, see log files, etc. If we drill one more level down, there is a need for a common set of library functionalities, such as image manipulation, friend and group management, session handling, and protection against SQL injections and XSS / XSRF attacks.
If you are coding all components mentioned above, you are either in framework business or doing something wrong. There is no need to invent the wheel again. Instead, you should be focusing your energy on selecting the correct wheel for your needs.
There is a plethora of different web application frameworks in the market. Some of the publishing systems, such as Drupal or Joomla! provide their own application frameworks within the CMS. The selection is not easy, because approaches to the challenges of web application development are different, and sometimes even not directly comparable.
When we selected our core set of tools (Drupal, WordPress, eZ Publish, and CodeIgniter), we looked at the following items:
None of our systems are perfect. WordPress has issues with separation of content and presentation, and the performance is not optimal. However, it is an excellent tool for small and medium scale web sites. CodeIgniter is fast, but you need to implement a lot of functionality around it. There is a good number of third party components, though, and active development going on. Within Drupal, there is typically at least one module that solves similar problems you are working on — sometimes the approach is not valid, or the module is half-baked.
After selection of the systems, we have been steadily gaining knowledge of good modules and extensions that can improve the projects at hand by cutting development time and thus prices. Further, we have been implementing a commonly used functionalities, as mentioned in the beginning, into libraries and components that can be used in any project requiring such functionality. We do not believe in coding for possible future needs, so the components grow based on the needs of the project — and the next projects get more features from the same components. One just needs to keep the solutions generic enough so that they can b reused.
We have been able to use the components so that some projects have been able to implement a large set of functionality, such as group management, with only a few hundred lines of own code.
Järjestämme 2.12. aamiaisseminaarin web-palveluista. Tilaisuudessa puhutaan teknologiasta ja liiketoiminnasta, puhujina sekä exovelaisia että web-palveluliiketoimintaa pyörittäneet Pia Koivu Kvalionista (Hyvälääkäri.fi) ja Petteri Koponen Lifeline Venturesista (Jaiku.com)
Päivitys 24.11.: vielä muutama paikka jäljellä.
