antti.vilpponen.net

I haven’t had too much time to blog in the recent days about my career decisions. However, the secret is out and the new company I will be joining is called Oy Gyllene Skor Ab, it’s Swedish and means golden shoes. The company is brand new and was founded in September. We launched our company to answer the demand for a business oriented hands-on digital consulting company focusing mainly on strategy and marketing.

Be sure to check out our website – more news on the developement later.

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 1¬? 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.

Got my computer back online today after a 2-month offline time (although I was online daily with my work computer). The power and the motherboard got busted and it took me actually 2 months to get it fixed. Now that I’m looking at all the stuff I went through daily, RSS feeds, links, all that other crap – no wonder I didn’t have any social life…there’s a lot of that in my browser.

I agree with what Evan has to say about being away for a while. I’m definitely quite fond of completing these tasks now that I have the chance to start off fresh:

• Unsubscribe from as many things as possible.
• Clean up old junk (mental and physical).
• Read more books.

I will do a major restructuring of my 150 or so RSS-feeds, throw all my toolbar bookmarks to del.icio.us and start of fresh (although I think I’ll keep the best of the bunch). Taking a step back and actually seeing the forest again from the trees is quite enlightening at some points.

Oh, and a small piece of advertisement regarding my last point on the list – do join our Jaiku business book club at #bookclub.

I’m back home in Helsinki after my trips to Norway and Spain. I am currently enjoying my last day of holidays so don’t expect me to be online normally just yet. Also, please don’t get angry at late e-mail responses, I’ve got some 500 work e-mails to go through and some 150 personal e-mails clogged in my inboxes.

I’ll be adding some photos online during today, hold on…

Update: Didn’t manage to upload my photos from Spain yet, but have a look at the photos from my trip to Norway over here.

I wrote about the logo I designed for Freeculture.org some years back over here. Take a look at the new CC remix icon over here and in the image above. Looks funnily similar! :)

Those lego-blocks seem to have made it big time! That makes me one happy camper!