Valve is a very creative environment, including designers and developers working in diverse digital fields. We have a great feel to our working environment, including the private “Valve Café” on the ground floor, and an excellent location in the heart of Helsinki.

Get in touch and find out more if you are interested!

Contact Miia Wren
Find us on the map

Pics from Valve office and more

Different people from Valve will be contributing everyday. We are encouraging our friends, colleagues and networks to get involved and help spread the word.

Give us your support – become a Facebook fan, follow us on Twitter or get the RSS feed for your favourite reader. Follow our Christmas Stories and share them around – we appreciate all your help, in the virtual world or if you come along and join in…

This year, much of the conference was focused on mobile development. The Open Screen Project, funded by Adobe more than a year ago is about to bear it’s first fruits. Flash Player 10.1 was announced and is heading to a mobile near you. This means that in the near future, you’ll be able to enjoy the full user experience of the Flash Platform on a mobile device, both embedded on the web as well as in stand-alone applications.

Adobe has put a lot of effort to optimize the Flash Player for the mobile computing platforms. Without these optimizations it would be almost impossible to run Flash applications on your mobile computing platform. For example, the memory footprint of running applications has been reduced by as much as 50%, a crucial optimization for most, if not all, mobile devices. FP 10.1 also includes multi-touch input and accelerometer support.

Most notably, however, is the fact that Flash Player 10.1 will include GPU-acceleration for the full rendering pipeline. Everything from drawing vectors, decoding video and compositioning will run on the GPU. The demos that we saw increased the frame rate of a Flash application running on an Android device from 5 fps to 25 fps while reducing the power-consumption by 90%. Amazing.

Most of the major mobile device manufacturers are now part of the Open Screen Project, with RIM beeing the last to join. Only Apple is missing, but I believe that it won’t take long before they join the fun.

Other notable news from the conference include that Mark Hamill (aka Luke Skywalker) is really old nowadays and that - although beeing bought by Carlsberg - Budwiser Lite is still quiet terrible.

The red dot design award is the leading and largest design competition worldwide with 12.000 entries from 60 countries. The red dot seal of quality is valued around the world and stands for the best in the design business.

Artek.fi is a bold move for the brand’s internet presence. Artek’s high quality product catalogue is at the heart of the new design concept supported by a stunning selection of interior design showcases. The dynamic and contemporary feel of the site appears to have been achieved using Flash-based technologies. However, Valve’s developers implemented the site with pure CSS and HTML coding. This enabling use of technologies resulted in user experience benefits and excellent search engine optimization.

At the red dot gala on 9th December, Artek.fi will compete for the “best of the best” and “grand prix” prizes, with the elite from the communications design community.

Timo was previously at Satama, Hasan & Partners, and most recently at Taivas as Managing Director. On joining Valve, he said “this was an opportunity I could not miss. As the financial climate accelerates the migration of marketing communications to the internet, Valve has the strategic, technical and creative competence to stand out. The way brands are built and engaged is evolving, new types of agencies are appearing, and consumer behaviour is rapidly changing…” Timo sees preserving and developing Valve’s strategic leadership as key in a market where “so many agencies are entering the field and claiming expertise.”

All at Valve are pleased to welcome Timo on board. You can contact him at timo.julkunen@valve.fi +358 40 549 043

It is therefore no surprise that this year’s ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Hypertext 2009, had plenty of presentations on folksonomies. The research presented covered many topics on how to utilize the implicit information contained in tags. Tagging by users is an uncoordinated distributed process, that generates a lot of meaning beyond attaching a keyword to some content. Mining this data allows for all new ways of personalization (such as social search, that takes into account the user’s tag cloud), user experience (e.g. tag recommendation when adding new files) and exploitation of the “wisdom of crowds” (discovering the wisdom hidden in tag rankings and occurrences).

Over the last years, Valve has been working on a variety of projects where tags are integrated as an integral part of information architecture. We are excited to explore the latest trends in tag-based computing and are always looking forward to make use of the latest technological possibilities to serve our clients and their users with the best solutions.

Hypertext 2009, the annual conference of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Web, was held in the end of June at Turin in Italy. Besides folksonomies, the conference covered the evolution of hypertext-based information structures. Participants discussed the role of social contacts as hyperlinks, the use of hypertext for narrative tasks, the tracking of user behavior in hypermedia systems and last but not least Ted Nelson’s alternative to HTML, xanalogical data structures.

Following the opening words by the event’s host Ville Tolvanen, the morning started with Tuukka Temonen sharing his insight why internet videos should not be treated any different than films produced for other media. Antti Seppänen continued with a presentation of the Staraoke concept as an example how to use multiple media around a concept and Antti Öhrling gave a thorough introduction to social media marketing, using the success story of Blyk as an example.

Our presentation stood in direct continuation of Öhrling’s final thought “Let the customer own your brand”, talking about the complexity of user generated content. Tuomo Sihvola and Sebastian Greger aimed at raising awareness for the fact that each of the conceptual dimensions of UGC (immediacy, public dialogue, customer insight, low participation threshold; to name a few) brings along both possibilities and risks. Our on-stage dialogue - which thankfully evolved into extensive discussions with the audience - ended with a list of six rules we identify to be crucial when acting in the field of social media in general, and UGC in particular. We will elaborate further on these topics in a later blog post.

After the lunch break, Marco Mäkinen showed how established and emerging marketing strategies should be combined for success. He was followed by three case studies, Nina Venäläinen presenting Nokia’s social media launch strategy for the N97, Minna Lenander showcasing valio.fi’s online TV and Risto Vuorensola sheding light on the “Satellite bicycle” viral videos YLE launched last autumn. The two final talks were by Per Kristian Tandberg, on targeting as a means of cost-effective digital marketing, and Kim Weckström, about digital customer care.

In the closing panel discussion, Heikki Rotko, Kari Kivelä, Roope Lehtinen and Reetta Meriläinen discussed with the audience about ongoing changes in the media and how the established media can keep up with the user-driven trend away from the traditional forms of media.

This has been a great day, with a well-selected balance between insight derived from hands-on experience and very concrete case examples. Having enjoyed the numerous discussions with both seminar participants and the other speakers, we are happy to have been the partner in this event and took home a load of new thoughts to digest and take further.

Valve congratulates the Federation of the Brewing and Soft Drinks Industry!

For this invention we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Also, big thanks to Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Alva Edison, Nikolai Tesla, Konrad Zuse, Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs for pioneering stuff that made the Internet possible.

The winners are announced on 19th of March in the Grand One Gala in restaurant Apollo, Helsinki.

Tweehouse’s first project was also made public as Eco-Rangers online, a ‘green’ MMO game targeted to media savvy kids in North America. Eco-Rangers online will be released later this year.

Tweehouse also opened a blog last week to cover wide range of topics from technology to game design to business. There’s a very good overview of TrunkTech, a proprietary platform developed and owned by Tweehouse as well. In brief, TrunkTech is a cutting-edge technology platform solution and a service concept that can be used to build massively multi-player applications - or more specifically – virtual worlds. Projects implemented on TrunkTech come with relatively low intial cost and zero investment on infrastructure. TrunkTech will be published as SaaS (’Software as a Service’) later this year.

For more technical insights on the Tweehouse platform and MMOG platform development in general, head over to my blog, where I’ve started to write a small series to share my thoughts and learnings from the experiences I gain by working on the TrunkTech platform.

Designing in process.

Implementation, team Jungle Heat.

Team Arabian Nights building interior to the tent.

Die Western Lounge under construction.

Presenting the prominent beer dispenser of Die Western Lounge.

Taking a peek to the Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau (note the periscope on the left next to the sea lion!)

Arabian Nigts full heat.

iBooth in active use straight away.

Coffin Shop has also been awarded in Eurobest and Epica as well as in Vuoden Huiput.

The winners represent less than 2 percent of total entries and were chosen by Cresta’s International Grand Jury. The Cresta Awards were launched in 1993 and the competition has grown to be one of the most valued ones in the field of advertising.

In addition, Valve and Hasan & Partners are shortlisted in the Golden Drum -competetion for Coffin Shop.

At the Helsinki Design Week Open Studio evening, everybody is welcome to take a peek inside offices, studios, workshops and other creative spaces.

Valve’s office is open, and we warmly invite everyone to visit, meet our people, and take a look at some of our latest work. We’ll be offering some small tasty tidbits and drinks.

Open Studios on Wednesday 1st of October from 5pm to 8 pm right here at Pieni Roobertinkatu 7.

Welcome!

Drunk you’re fool was also shortlisted at the Moscow International Advertising Festival.

I’ve always found it odd that Apple didnt’ include a decent Feed reader app on the iPhone to begin with, so I decided to create my own. I really enjoyed getting to know Objective-C and using all of Apple’s development tools

comments Tuomas.

AppStore is Apple’s web store for iPhone applications. The store holds approx 1700 applications at the moment and already the store has sold applications worth of 30 million US dollars (20,4 million euros).

The Web Feeds app is available on the iTunes AppStore under the “News” category for 2,99 euros. Try it out!

He talks about his new position with enthusiasm:

It’s great to start at Valve which is not only known for it’s strong ideas but also as an agency that is an active and eager developer of the digital community.

Hyytiäinen has influenced the best digital agencies in Finland: To the Point, Grey Interactive, Ego and now Valve.

Valve warmly welcomes P-J!

A total of 285 finalists were chosen to the final which represents six percent of the total number of entries.

View the finalists here.

The 16th annual award ceremony will be presented online on Monday, October 24th.

]]> http://blogs.valve.fi/index.php/2008/08/04/valve-to-2008-cresta-awards-final-with-three-entries/feed/ http://blogs.valve.fi/index.php/2008/07/04/valve-celebrated-in-webby-awards/ http://blogs.valve.fi/index.php/2008/07/04/valve-celebrated-in-webby-awards/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:02:17 +0000 kaisa http://blogs.valve.fi/?p=62 Karen Forsström, Toni Laturi and Jussi Niemi from Valve and Paula Morri from UPM celebrated in the Webby Awards gala in New York. The team received the Webby Award for UMP Forest Life in the Corporate Communications category. Known as the “Web Oscar”, the Webby Award is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. With nearly 10,000 entries from more than 60 countries worldwide, the 12th Annual Webby Awards was the biggest in its history.

The atmosphere in the Webby Awards gala was glamorous in the heart of Wallstreet, but at the same time very relaxed

describes Karen Forsström, Valve’s Project Manager and continues:

The best of the best celebrated together with the feeling of mutual respect for each other’s achievements. Most of the works presented were a testament to usability and functionality and others we´re just simply enjoyable. It´s exhilarating to see the salute of originality and be a part of it. As our AD Jussi Niemi noted: “We´ve got to come back here next year!” To be selected among the best is an incredible achievement worthy of praise – and worth bragging about ; )

Valve was the first ever Finnish company over 12 year history of Webby Awards to win a Webby Award. UPM Forest Life has been recognized and awarded also in other respected competitions such as Epica, Cannes Lions, LIA and Grand One.

The gala is famous for it’s 5-word acceptance speeches that stole the show also this year. See the speeches here.