September 29, 2011

My media service idea - refined

As an pre-assigment for MediaBizLab we had to generate some media service ideas. Now after first lecture we were ordered to refine our ideas. I decided to continue with my advanced web grocery store idea. I call it now grocery shopping 2.0. Main motivator for me is that everyone has to eat (except zombies), I hate shopping and therefore I'm big fan of web shopping. So here's my refined idea as SlideShare slides.

Manual of Me

In first MediaBizLab lecture we had to analyze ourselves based on Foursight analysis technique. My result was that I'm driver. Means I'm high ideator & high developer. So here are some points you should know when working with me.
  • I usually have lots of ideas and if I get excited about some idea I might feel little bit aggressive to other people because I put so much energy to implementing it quickly. Just remind me that maybe we should think little bit deeper and I'll calm down. And I really value all opinions :)
  • If you're more clarifier or developer I really need you because you slow me down and focus better on right problems and select what ideas we should really push forward.
  • Clarifiers! If you need some implementing horsepower maybe I'm the right guy for your group.
I promise to remember my strengths and weaknesses to make most out of group work. And yes all the skills are really needed to make breakthrough innovations. Point taken.

September 20, 2011

Experimenting with Adobe Muse

As a part of MediaBizLab studies I'm participating to Tools of Digital Media -course where we have to do some exercises with Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Final Cut Pro. Our first exercise was to build website where we can host all our other exercises. We were supposed to use Dreamweaver for that. I'm not a coder (although I've done some webpages by hand in the beginning of 2000) and maybe because of that Dreamweaver has always felt awfully complex piece of software for me.

I read from Adobe Muse and realized it's freely available for beta testing. So I grabbed my copy and started to experiment. I have to say I feel very positive about the software. I understand it's restricted at the moment for simple websites without content management systems and maybe the code it creates is little bit long and not so clear but it seems to be valid and working. There's definitely still need for real web developers with coding skill but for some small businesses, personal home pages, prototyping etc. Adobe Muse is awesome!


You can find the page (only in Finnish) I did as an course exercise with Adobe Muse here.

September 16, 2011

Pre-assignment for MediaBizLab

So like I posted earlier this academic year I'll be doing MediaBizLab minor studies program. It's about to begin next friday (23th of September) and we had to generate some media service ideas as an pre-assignment. So here's mine.

1) Advanced Web Grocery Store (with open API)

With some limitations it's been possible to order food from web and get it brought home. I'm super bad/lazy cook and even if I found recipe I like, I find it painful to find all the ingredients from market. I would any day pay for the service where I could choose food I'd like to cook this evening and with one click get all the ingredients brought to my home few hours later. I think Kesko or S-ketju should build database (I guess they already have some kind for inner use) for all the foods etc. they have in their each individual market and create open API that 3rd party developers can access and build services on top of that. Of course they should build their own web grocery store also but API would let many recipe sites, courier companies etc. build different services on top of that. Everyone benefits. I'm sure there's market for this. Everyone has to eat :)

2) Final Cut Pro X Freebies

Apple Final Cut Pro X is an video editing program that was launched this June. It should narrow the gap between professionals and amateurs because it's easy to use interface. Final Cut Pro X has never before seen possibilities for different kind of effect templates, graphic templates, storyline templates etc.. And people are creating lots of these templates at the moment because it's so easy and fun. Nowadays more and more companies & individuals are creating video for different kind of purposes and any help they can get from professional created templates is valued. At the moment free templates people have made are all over the internet and it's very hard to find the good ones. So I'd like to create ad-driven website called fcpxfreebies.com where I gather best of the best templates with clear descriptions, pictures and videos. Actually I've already registered fcpxfreebies.com domain but it might be I'll never have enough time to put it up. Previous version of Final Cut Pro has over two million users (probably more to come with Final Cut Pro X) so there should be some kind of market for this.

3) "I want to be in silence" -service

People want and need silence to be healthy physically and mentally. It might be difficult in todays technological landscape where you're interrupted constantly. I'd like to make service that integrates with phone, email, Facebook, Twitter etc. and informs people that I won't be available for next X hours/days and puts some nice quote there telling people how good it's for your health not to be always available. Someone said "killing your account in Facebook" is todays "I don't have television". I think not being available/being in silence can easily become trend. I think it's already for down shifters. Maybe the service itself is not bringing money but all the other things you can link to this thing (books, seminars, courses…) can easily be monetized.