Yet another article about gold farming in the game industry.
An estimated 400,000 Asians hack dragons and monsters for a living. More »

The other day for an afternoon coffee, I went to a bookshop and bought a big bunch of magazines - fashion, travels, news, design, games and photography. It seems that most of the stories and articles inside can be found somewhere in their websites. Similar information are given even more in depth in different blogs and forums. But they are nicely printed, full of big images, and the ads are fun to flip through. Apparently I just spent some 50 euros without much thinking.

Many have claimed that print advertisement is ineffective (or even dead). Or then, more and more people stop watching TV these days. People are all getting so accustomed to following news and trends in blogs, forums, widgets and social networks. That everything has become dominantly digital.

In the meantime, book sales in Finland have increased in the past years. More »

Finnish association for advertisers (Mainostajien Liitto) released their latest advertising barometer (sorry, in Finnish). During it’s 30 year history, these are the worst figures so far. Basically what it says is:
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In middle of this economical downturn it is hard find positive things from constant flow of ever more negative news. At the same time there is great need to find positive signs things getting better, worst being experienced already? While these are news we may have still to wait why not try to see other side of coin.

Less money, more results

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I was catching up with some friends on a few drinks. They are marketing managers of some very big and well known brands. I was telling what I have been doing at work. They were telling how much headaches they have been getting working with their agencies on some recent campaigns. So the discussion led us to the question why we don’t work together: they need marketing agencies and I am working in one.

Their answer is “yes but no way, we will not commission you.” More »

Flex & Air as technologies enable whole new kind of applications and make things possible that before were very difficult to realize. And what better way to understand what is possible, than trough examples? Superb desktop application which works for coders and business people alike: Tour de Flex.

This is what they say:

Tour de Flex includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and other details. Topics include the Flex Core Components, Flex Data Access, AIR Desktop Capabilities, Cloud APIs, Data Visualization, Mapping, and a growing collection of custom components, effects, skins, etc.

How cool is that?

I want to introduce one interesting example how can be implemented Anaglyph technology using flex & papervision3d.
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Challenge and opportunity of continuous development

With some perspective of doing various kind of development projects I am more and more convinced that in many cases the challenge and opportunities of continuous development still remains to be fully discovered. Project being big or small, product or service - the same challenges seem to exist. More »

To many MMO players, today is a special day. Millions of World of Warcraft (WOW) players have been anticipating the release of the latest expansion.
My local video game stored has promotion all over their windows about the midnight release sales tonight. I am a confused video game addict. Instead WOW, I am a faithful follower of Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). I am dying to touch and taste the second commercial release of the saga, Mines of Moria, next week :-)  More »

Most of the marketing I encounter these days is in the internet. And these days, its not just banners on sites or spam emails on my inbox. Its everywhere I look. Its in every service I use. That’s the price of the free.
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This article is oriented most towards the Project management people but with slight modification you can apply it for all kind of daily activates.

Multitasking is a proven Productivity killer. No doubt about this. But we are living in a multitasking world no matter if we are talking about our personal live or our job and have to survive somehow. Trying to get rid of it will not help, it is simply not possible. What we can do is an OPTIMIZATION.

There are number of ways to do this and each and everyone have to find what fits him best. More »

I was training earlier this week in Lahti, where my audience was mainly pr- and communications people. We had many good discussions and unfortunately I managed to run out of time. I was supposed to cover more about my views on the future so I promised to share some of that stuff via this blog.

And please bear in mind, that I write from my own perspective, which is a perspective of a digital media & internet worker, enthusiastic, addict and science fiction buff. So do take my views with a grain of salt. Since I seem to have too much to say, I’ve divided this into few parts.
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Here is an overview on the new CS4 Photoshop functionalities to help you figure out if its worth the upgrade.
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Flex Builder is working just fine when used with small to middle sized projects. But once used with large scale project it just starts to go down: slow builds, irregular or messed up building, slow refresh rate & etc.
Include that flex builder IDE just do not have implementation of good automation routines like:
increment project’s version & timestamp -> compile release -> prepare release -> upload to development server More »

Why it is so hard? How to know what will be next hit product or service that will turn the market around? Why is it so hard to predict future to capture the next wave of success with the just right product at the just right time? Innovations are tough.

Or is it too hard after all?
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A few days ago I've finally decided to spend some time with Microsoft's new ASP.NET MVC framework. Like all MVC implementations, the ASP.NET MVC framework provides a structured model that enforces a clear separation of concerns within applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code.  It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and can optionally provide more control over the HTML that is emitted from them. Here is a nice article on the history of MVC pattern. More »

I often get asked how is it possible to do creative projects without meeting face-to-face. At East we often work between the two offices already at the initial concept creation phase and projects are never based on IRL meetings (in real life). While not without challenges, this is possible to do.

I have listed here the most important requirements in my experience for making the end result a success instead of an average or total failure: More »

You may think that Linux must have received great boost after Microsoft shoot itself in the foot with Vista fiasco, however real data show different story. People are relay migrating out of the Microsoft OS-es but very few of them end as Linux users. Apple seems to be the winner here. More »