Nordkapp Weeknote, Week 3/2010

“Weeknotes are updates about what your business has been doing over the past seven days or so. They’re about reflecting on your work, your achievements, and what’s on deck.”

In order to fulfill our promise of transparency, we here at Nordkapp are participating in the idea of Weeknotes. This thing was most likely started by Schulze & Webb (now BERG), who we hold in great esteem anyway.

We believe that this will also give us a deeper understanding of what is going on with the company and where it’s going. Storing history in a journal manner is not bad either. Maybe some thoughts presented here will be of interest to some other people too, especially some small nuggets that won’t make a blog post of their own (relatively small amount of them do, you know).

What form will our weeknotes take will surely evolve and change over time, but here goes our first try. I’ll be posting job titles in this post for this once, so that we get them out of the way. Perhaps in the future the persons aren’t even individually picked out. Without further ado, first ever Weeknotes:

Weeknotes

This week Aki, our Senior Technologist, has been redesigning a huge document management system. Apparently there has been quite a lot to do. Meanwhile he’s also been pimping several music related web services done here at Nordkapp.

Sami, our Creative Director explored goth/Art deco aesthetics for our winter party logo, which was immediately used on the party website created by Aki, Sauli & Matti. Should be live for the lucky ones already, too.  Alongside all that fun he’s been leading two large projects as IxD lead on one and visual on another. Somehow in between he also managed to dive into banking processes through workshop facilitation and work a bit on our our business development as well.

Sauli, our Flash man & Technologist, has been getting the hang of Bildy, a new Finnish website creation tool, for building a client’s website on top of that. It looks promising and the feature list is all the time being expanded by Aisti. Sauli also coded a site called TFO but more about that later.

Matti, also our CEO, told us in a board meeting that business is booming and things are great. Few big decisions include starting these weeknotes and an internal Nordkapp culture workshop lead by Sami next week. In his work Matti has been benchmarking and reinventing online news. He’s also been preparing and workshopping a new cloud computing web service, and doing lots of general administration, including preparations for switching our crappy accounting firm to another one, and even blogging about a Growth Coaching -project we participated in 2009.

Petri, our Principal Designer, has been doing concept design for a communication start-up and finalizing designs on personal health service, and internet TV. In addition he’s been finalizing various corporate communication materials. On his spare time he’s been hugely enjoying snowy scenery equipped with a brand new fixed lense for his Canon 50D body.

In fact me (Teppo, Principal, Interaction Design) and Petri spent much of the week co-designing that internet TV thing. Rest of the week I spent designing another service via a working mockup prototype with Sami. Since we joined that later project mid way, we felt a prototype was the easiest way to get everybody (the coders from several companies, UX people and the design team) to understand the big picture. Closed Alpha looms near.

Panu, our Advisor & UX Strategist, has been leading an important strategic project for our client. He and Matti interviewed a bunch of people with freelancer Ville T. to get some external input and ideas to this project. Panu has also been leading that banking process project and stapling lots of things to foam cores.

We are hiring

In other news, we finally and officially started to look for a quality designer to join our ranks. It’s a rare chance, so have a look at the blog post if you’re interested. There are some promising applicants already, but it’s not too late until the deadline 30.1.2010.

Discussion

General discussion in the company seems to turn more and more towards the impending Apple Tablet that’s hopefully revealed next week. We totally need a quality tablet platform from somebody to enable the industry to move on. Company credits cards are loaded and ready. The tablet is an intriguing design problem as well and has sparked discussion in the lines of the great Gizmodo article about issues related to UI’s of this sort. We are very eager to get this kind of a device for use in our prototyping efforts. It’s mostly likely going to revolutionize several businesses, which is something we always want to be a part of.