Mika Tuupola

Next two days I will be visiting Internet World exhibition in London. Never been there before So I do not know what to expect. Speaker lineup looks ok. I really hope speakers stay away from giving sales speeches for their own companies.

Anyway I had a point too. New Tallinn airport is really cool. As usual there is free WiFi everywhere. This time there was a boilerplate ad. I do not know if it is the brand, but I did not feel offended by this ad. It was Skype Jobs.

Judge for yourself. It just gives you warm and fuzzy feeling.

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Last week Estonian business paper Äripäev made a small research. Their journalist made an online registration to test drive a car. Only three car dealers out of seven replied.

Response from those who failed to answer? “We had some technical problems.”

Before reading further I should mention that Amserv Auto mentioned in this post is our client.

Who answered and who did not?

Out of seven dealers contacted following replied.

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Finalists of Grand One ‘08 were announced few days ago. Comparing to finalists of 2006 code quality is getting better but there is still lot of room for improvement.

Table below lists finalists from Best B2C service, Best B2B service and Best infodesign categories. Flash sites were left out. Two interesting numbers are listed.

• Number of validation errors on frontpage.
• Percentage calculated by dividing number of lines of html code with number of validation errors.

Lines of code for each site was calculated by executing the following on commandline:

>lynx -source http://www.example.com/ | wc

Most validation errors in one page

This years winner has amazing 301 validation errors. Award goes to Valve and Plenware produced kauppalehti.fi. Shared second place goes to TietoEnator, Avarko, QBrick produced ClassicLive. and Elisa Verkkokauppa by Mainostoimisto Ego (hey guys, what happen!?). Both sites have 113 validation errors. Second place goes to TietoEnator, Avarko, QBrick produced ClassicLive with 113 validation errors. YLE’s inhouse production yle.fi receives third place with 100 errors.

Elisa Verkkokauppa was fixed few hours after publishing this. Apparently backend coder had forgot to close <img> tags. It fully validates so I am taking away the second prize. (Yes, I used to work in EGO. Yes, I still work in Taivas Group.)

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Green White Christmas is Toyota Baltics’ this year christmas greeting. Partners who received the email can plant their own tree into virtual forest. Trees will grow everyday until new years eve.

You can test how it works with demo. Note that demo trees are not saved to database.

Site is built with Ruby on Rails and uses several jQuery plugins: pngfix, form, hoverintent, cookie and last but not least UI.

Cannes Lions Festival started today. I am still disappointed by WiFi. Yes, there is WiFi in the festival area. Bad thing it is not free. You can only access provider (SFR) main page. To make things worse pricelist page does not work. Luckily Microsoft provides CyberCafe. You can use WiFi there for free. 20 minutes that is. Atleast something.

We arrived couple of days early to Nice – France. We are on our way to Cannes Lions festival. It is really true Nice is not nice. Nice smells…

First touch to Nice was taxi driver. He cheated of course. Talked a lot. Oui oui. Took a long route to hotel. Before we were able to see the final sum he turned off taxometer and said 29 euro. Hotel webpages seem to cheat too. Pictures look good but truth is something else. Plastic garden furniture. Multipurpose sofa serving as bed. Morning breakfast costs 8 euro. It consists of coffee and two chocolate croissants. Youre better off walking to nearby supermarket and making your own breakfast.

Nice smells. I reckon it is because of the humidity and all the trash in streets. Not only trash but also dog leavings. People have lots of dogs but nobody picks up the dog poo. There is no WiFi in cafeterias. The one I am sitting now has some old pc. No possibility of plugging in your own computer.

Nice reminds me lot of Egypt. Main differences are nobody speaks english and everything is far more expensive. I hope Cannes will be more interesting.

Estonian business tabloid Äripäev writes about new real estate portal Koduleidja. According to äripäev this newcomer is bringing out fresh concept to real estate market: silent buying and selling.

What Äripäev fails to mention the concept is not new at all. Instead it is a copy of Finnish real estate portal Igglo.

Igglo was first launched in February 2006. Company and the concept it has been successfull. It currently operates also in Norway. One of the key features of Igglo has been the silent buying and selling. Portal has information and photos of every single building in Helsinki and other big cities in Finland. If you are interested in buying a flat from a specific house you can ear mark your interest anonymously. Also if you are interested in selling yours you can mark that there is a flat possibly available in this house.

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Many people have business ideas. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad.

Ajujaht is competition where you can give you idea for peer review. You describe your business plan carefully. It is reviewed by professional people. Jury will choose finalists. Each finalist will receive 5000 EEK (320 EUR) cash price.

Again from finalists jury will choose best business ideas. Winners will receive cash prices to make their dreams come true. Price money totals 500.000 EEK (32.000 EUR). Five best teams will also be arranged meeting with investors. This could mean even more funding.

Competition is sponsored by City of Tallinn, City of Tartu, Tallinn Technologypark TEHNOPOL, Enterprise Estonia and SEB Eesti Ühispank.

Make your office happy buy providing people with fresh water!

Bossa Vesi is a minisite for Estonian supplier of coffee, water and juice machines for offices. It contains some simple jQuery goodness. All Javascript code degrades gracefully.

The nice office in front page is actually our own!

Spring brings out the people. People bring out photographers. For four weeks there will be fashion spy’s patrolling streets of Tallinn.

Kevad.ee is Estonia streetstyle photoblog. During four weeks our photographers will make pictures of people in streets of Tallinn. Art directors will then spend several hours browsing this daily photo stream. Result is around ten new images posted online daily. Photoblog will be updated for one month. But this is not the end. All photos published online will be also published in a book. No not an e-book but an real dead-tree book!

Site is part of spring campaign for Kristiine Keskus

UPDATE 20070409: There are also two similar projects online. Femme tänavamood and Just Glitter Lust