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Some guys from back home are coming out with a free full feature film on 15th of October. Here’s a trailer that has been filmed around Punkaharju.

More on the Biisonimafia website.

I just added a small moblog “badge” to the right sidebar. You can follow the photographs I take with my phone in there. Let me know what you think!

It has taken a lot of thinking and hard decisions, but I have decided to leave my current job. I have left my resignation for my position as Sales Director of Apaja Online Entertainment and will be stepping down during October.

My little over 1½ years in Apaja have given me great ways to grow as a person and help push the company forwards. When I joined, there were 16 of us and we were all crowded into one side of our current office. What more, we were active only in a few countries and mainly beginning our internationalisation. Today, there are close to 40 people, Apaja has 7 sites open does direct business in 10 countries. Apaja’s product portfolio has grown from a simple gaming site to fully taking advantage of social networking, online identities, virtual worlds (something still coming) and combining all this with casual gaming and thus taking the service to a totally new level. I leave the company in good spirit and truly wish all the best to all of the great talented people I’ve had the chance to work with. I’m very happy to have taken this ride and seen where it has taken the company, however now it is time to go.

I cannot fully disclose where I am going - not just yet, but something I said earlier over here (what made me choose Apaja over larger companies) still holds true. Vierityspalkki.fi has heard some of the rumours circulating around and I only saw it best to confirm it.

While you’re at it, feel free to point people to this address - there will be more disclosures in the coming days.

Today a woman called from Fortum to sell me electricity at a fixed cost. I was quite busy at 3pm so I asked her if she could send me some more info on this by mail or e-mail so I could have a look at it when I have more time. I’m the kind of person that wants to take the time to make proper calculations even if it is about saving 5 to 10 euros a year (I’m sure this sort of thinking will payoff later on).

She began hesitating after I presented the question to think about this. “Well, you know you only have one day since the system forwards these tomorrow and the campaign ends”, was one reason she stated. Fair enough, but don’t blame it on the system - they’re built by us! She promised to send me an e-mail so I could go over this, even if I only had tonight to think about it. I asked her if I could ring her back about this when I had the time to do so, she replied no as the e-mail is a bulk e-mail that has no personal contact details and instead, she’d ring me back tomorrow to ask how I had decided. I can tell you now (without a lot of thinking) that I won’t change to Fortum’s fixed electricity (no matter how cheap it is to competitors), because the promised e-mail never reached me. If they can’t deliver me an e-mail, how are they going to deliver me electricity?

Question is - what went wrong and what could have been done better?

• First of all, understand the customer behaviour - how many consumers make these sort of decisions on the phone? It’s a different thing trying to get you to change mobile operators or order a magazine than change your electricity supplier.
• How did the seller support my hesitation? She promised to send me an e-mail, that never reached me. She denied me to personally calling her in case I would have more questions. Two show stoppers to actually selling me anything.
• If I wanted to make the decision to switch my electricity provider - how would I go about without having to contact her (or in this case hope that she would contact me) to go through with the order? No way what so ever.
• With a little optimisation, she could have been doing double cold calling if people could follow up on this online - instead of having to ring people back on their decisions.

Numerous obstacles in a simple selling process that prevented me from making my decision, following up on the sale/offer and actually putting through the change in electricity providers (ie. purchase). I’m sure there are better ways to go about this - for example, the internet wasn’t even touched in this. She could have given me a simple code that I could enter on their website to get more info on this (and at the same time feel I am priviliged as the information is not for everyone - giving some value to her interrupting my work day) and thus give me the possibility to go through with the order.

Another good example of a lost sale purely because of bad marketing (and the absence of internet).

I went to Osuuspankki today to close my bank account I had to open for my motorcycle loan a few years back. Since then, a friend working at Nordea managed to get me a better loan with a slimmer margin and I switched back to Nordea, making my OP account obsolete.

I received a letter from Osuuspankki earlier this week stating that I had crossed my balance by 11,40€ due to direct debits from my account due to the web access to my account. (I don’t even want to get started on this, but who in the world creates a commercial product and thus a barrier of entry of a service that should be taken for granted and used as a marketing platform to further create benefit for customers and thus revenue for your company? It is a big business I know, but nevertheless.) I paid the amount I owed to the bank and went to the office to close my account.

The lovely lady at the desk told me I have 5 euros worth of service charges I need to pay before I can close the account. I asked her if I could pay them right there to speed things up. “Certainly, do you have any cash?” Of course I don’t, I’m all about cards and seldom have any cash on me. Furthermore, I couldn’t “pay” the amount with my Nordea card since they aren’t a store that can charge cards so easily. I would have had to go out to the ATM to get some money, walk back in to “pay” the amount due. I even offered to pay the amount by directly transferring 5 euros from my Nordea account with my mobile, but it doesn’t help since the cross-bank transfers take 2 nights to go through (yet another big business to get interest on overnight deposits to the Bank of Finland). Another totally “useless” illogicality that makes customers’ lifes difficult.

She asked me to pay the 5 euros and come back next week.

Ok, now hands up those who see any logic in this? I know it’s good to create obstacles so customers don’t leave you per se, but this is pretty ridiculous. This is what you get when you have stiff processes that you tie your customers to and make their life unnecessarily difficult.

I’m not very fond of the way they treated me, but I’m sure other banks would have made me go through the same procedure. Isn’t there seriously any interest in the management teams of these banks to honestly improve customer experience?

As I was walking to work this morning (I’ve found that I come up with the weirdest and most innovative ideas during these walks), I realised that there is a lack of startup related blogs in Finland. To be honest I can’t think of any. There are a few sites that promote entrepreneurship in Finland in general, but a blog or a media concentrating on startups and entrepreneurs - no such thing around. For example, which Finnish blog covered the seed financing of Dopplr (yes, it’s a Finnish startup) by world known VCs like Martin Varsavsky and Joi Ito?

This pretty much portrays the overall atmosphere of entrepreneurship in Finland - it hardly exists. I’d be willing to throw in some effort to promote this area and general publicity of this issue. Entrepreneurship is vital to the economy and important in creating jobs for people. Also, I’d like to argue (at least in the Finnish case) that this will be a road to success in the coming decades, as our old industry giants are slowly being acquired overseas.

So, my question is - are there other like-minded people out there? I’d be willing to start a blog and through that gather people of similar interest together and possibly even arrange networking events etc. in the future.

This idea is out for grabs, any one willing to jump on the band wagon, take the risk and reap the rewards? :)

Just signed up with Goodreads.com - the last.fm for books. Check out my short profile over here.

Sony has made a strategic move in it’s online music business and has decided to adopt Microsoft’s DRM as a technology for its online content. Sony had been trying push its proprietary ATRAC along with its own music player for PCs. Smart move, although I don’t support DRM that much. I guess Sony was trying to go the Apple way and create their “own” DRM that would create a technology lock on their customers - thus artificially enhance customer loyalty.

Apple has an incredible customer base, which is full of evangelists that promote Apple and support them in their products and decisions. Sony doesn’t have this. It’s quite obvious that even Apple was taking a gamble with their “own DRM”, but succeeded in it because they were the first to market with their iTunes music store (that actually took the customer point of view of shopping for music) as well as the sleek and cool iPods that were once again superior to products already on the market. Sony didn’t have any of this with their online strategy.

So why try to create a walled garden in very competitive market? Beats me. Sometimes these decisions are made so high up, based on figures and calculations by highly paid consultants that money is poured into the most stupidest of ideas.

(via Guardian Unlimited)