Speech at European Cultural Tourism Network

Last week I held a presentation in Turku at European Cultural Tourism Network. I started the presentation by comparing different fresh Nordic visit.com sites: visitfinland.com, visitsweden.com and visitnorway.com from the social media point of view. I went through the sites and described how they utilized social media.

The aspect for utilizing the social media varied from a lot. Visitnorway.com had practically no social media elements and the channels they had in other social media sites were not very active - taken that they had had YouTube channel for the site for one year and published about nine videos over there - with pretty marginal hits. It seems that visitnorway.com lacked social media strategy. Implementing social media to the sites and utilizing existing channels is not a easy task: it demands lots of resources and time and it is often not a task someone can do alongside with his/her ordinary tasks.

Visitfinland had some functions which utilize personalisation of the service according to user's wishes. The recommendation tool based by action/tourism images (alternative was traditional tick boxes) was a nice concept and worked actually pretty well and gave interesting suggestions. Two of the recommendations I got were from lake district and Carelia - which is very nice since I come from Southern Carelia. How did they mangage to do that?! LOL.

But visitfinland lacks more deeper levels of connectivity to the personal profile and utilizing the UCC/UGC aspect - personalised e-mail from the tourist officials is not an answer nowdays, because people are practically using less and less e-mails for they personal communication today. Email accounts are becoming more and more spam accounts for storaging subrcribed newsletters - which no one reads.

Absolute winner for the Nordic comparison was visitsweden.com. They had produced a nice looking, fresh and multimedial community communityofsweden.com which - though - was not integrated part of the country portal, but offered a fresh social site for the fans of Sweden (which I am too). Community had a clever strategy for profile building and it actually works for collecting visitors' memories and material from the Sweden. What could have been done is the more closer connections to the existing social media sites.

Then I moved towards marketing and why the social media matters from the marketing point of view. Statistics and the data is somewhat the same I had in my earlier presentation I held at Creative Economy and Beyond conference, but not in so close details (so if you are interested in that, check out the other prezi presentation in this very same blog).

Impementation of the social media is not a easy task. But in order to go in details to that issue would need another presentation.

Lastly I presented some shots from the live2011.com site - which is Turku 2011 projects digital European Capital of Culture. We are going to build new tools for participation, interaction and community for the cultural sector. Follow this site, it will change gradually towards an interesting cultural portal.



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Turku is the European Capital of Culture 2011 together with Tallinn, Estonia. The Turku 2011 Foundation has been commissioned by the City of Turku to oversee the implementation of the Capital of Culture year.

The Turku 2011 Foundation provides partial funding for the programme content. The Capital of Culture year will comprise a total of 150 projects and numerous individual events. The projects and events will form an interesting and diverse programme that comprehensively involves different cultural fields and encourages interaction between these fields.
The main objectives for the Capital of Culture year are to further develop creative industries and cultural exports, strengthen internationality and increase well-being. All activities are aimed at having long-term impacts.

Guests can follow the process of putting together the 2011 programme online at www.turku2011.fi – Programme and Projects.

The final programme is scheduled to be announced during the summer of 2010.
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The writings and stuff in this blog are personal notes of the Live2011 team at Turku2011 Foundation. We wish to bring up interesting stuff we have popped in to interesting field of digital media, social media and media technology.

Turku2011 Will Grant Extra Award at MindTrek 2009

Turku2011 – European Capital of Culture wants to support MindTrek, the major new media event in the Nordic Countries, by granting one of its Live2011.com Grand Prix Event Awards during the MindTrek conference. 1000 € award will be granted for an entry which fits to some of the categories of Turku 2011’s Live2011.com Grand Prix. The awarded MindTrek entry will automatically continue to the final jury round of the Grand Prix.

Live2011.com Grand Prix is a digital media art and new media challenge with eight categories ranging from social media applications, games, av-content, interactive art to robotics to name a few.

It is basically open for huge variety of works to participate in the field of IT, arts, media and electronics. The total amount of award money is 140,000€ in eight different categories. the first deadline for Finnish students is 15th of November, 2009. More information can be found at http://www.live2011.com.

Live2011.com team will be in MindTrek from 1st to 2nd October. Please, stop us and find out more from the Grand Prix or get information on the Live2011.com development activities.

Star Wars: Uncut

Me and a bunch of my friends just finished our (first) submission to the Star Wars: Uncut project.

If you're into remakes and mashup stuff and possibly also a Star Wars nerd like me, you might enjoy this. The website of the project displays the Star Wars: A new hope -movie divided in 15sec clips, which can be then reserved to be remade by you and your gang.

When all the clips are ready, the project mastermind Casey Pugh will stitch the whole thing together into a complete movie with a soundtrack.

So if you have time and inspiration (or maybe if you lack inspiration), try this. It's a nice mini project you can do in a few days or hours with some pals and couple of beers.

Also check out the original HERE

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 374 from Valtteri Mäki on Vimeo.

StarWarsUncut.com/#/finished/374

Lecture Series on Game Development in Turku

Major Finnish professionals within game development are giving open lectures in University of Turku's and Turku University College's joint game design and development course Game Tech & Arts Lab. Lecture series is open for public and it is held on Fridays 13:15 - 15:00 at ICT-House (Joukahaisenkatu 3-5) in Hall Beta (B1032). Lectures will be held in Finnish.

Coming programme (in Finnish):

2.10. Mikko Karvonen (Universomo): Universomo Dogma – mobiilipelejä rajoituksia rakastaen
9.10. Teemu Haila (IGDA/Neogames): Peliprojektin toteutus opiskelijaporukalla sekä pelikerho Scoren tarina
16.10. Joonas Peltola (Sulake Corporation): Ketterästi globaaliksi – eli miten MMO-palvelua kehitetään
30.10. Jukka Wallasvaara (Microsoft): Opiskelijoiden ja oppilaitosten mahdollisuudet pelinkehityksessä sekä XNA
6.11. Markus Saari: Turkulainen näkökulma pelialaan
13.11. Tony Manninen (Ludocraft): Peliprosessit ja -tuotanto
20.11. Antti Hattara (Digital Chocolate): Mobiilipelien tuotehallinta ja -markkinointi
27.11. Sonja Kangas (IGDA): IGDA sekä itsenäisiä kehittäjiä aktivoivat initiatiivit
4.12. Matti Kari (Sulake Corporation): Sosiaalinen media – sukupolvien välinen kuilu

More information from: http://www.iki.fi/smed/pelinkehitys

Japan Media Arts Festival submission deadline 25.9.09

This comes in the last minute, but you can still make it!

You can submit your work online , deadline friday 25.9.2009, here:
http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/english/festival/2009/entry/submission.php

Thursday, 16 July 2009 to Friday, 25 September 2009 (arrival due not later than the closing date)

Interactive Art, Installation, Visual Image, Still Image (including digital photograph), Web Work, etc.

Game, Play Equipment, Visual Image (VFX, CM, MV, etc.), Character, Web Work, etc.

Long Animation (Movie, TV, Original Video Animation), Short Animation, etc.

Story Manga, Frame Manga, Web Manga, Independent Manga, etc.

We are inviting submissions of work using new media technologies such as computer, video, and the Internet. Regarding animation and manga, not only digital works but also works using existing methods are welcomed. The competition is open to both professionals as well as amateurs, commercial and non-commercial works without distinction.

One Grand Prize, four Excellence Prizes and one Encouragement Prize are awarded in recognition of works of outstanding artistry and creativity in each division. Based on the recommendations of the jury, one Special Achievement Prize is presented to the artist who has made significant contributions to the field of media arts.

[Grand Prize] Certificate (Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister's Prize), Trophy, Extra Prize of 600,000 yen
[Excellence Prize] Certificate (Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister's Prize), Trophy, Extra Prize of 300,000 yen
[Encouragement Prize] Certificate (Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister's Prize), Trophy, Extra Prize of 150,000 yen

We want flash-demos too!

Live 2011 Open- and Digital Turku 2011 -categories have no restrictions for the medium of production. As long as it is a digital, audiovisual work of art, we're happy.

Therefore we would also like to see flash, actionscript or java demos ready to roll in the browser window without conversion.

It's probably needless to say that actionscript 3 and java are powerful coding languages to produce super cool effect mayhem and even eye-candy realtime 3d, but also something simplish and still awesome!

I stumbled upon this somewhat mindless piece of flash animation/demo.

http://512kb.net/flash5.htm

I'll just post this here as inspiration and as an example of stuff that we gladly accept as an entry.

(crazy japan kawaii warning)

IBC - What Left an Impact II: TriCaster, a Compact Streaming Box

One of the tasks in IBC was to look for solutions for Live streaming. Digital Capital of Culture, Live2011.com, will bring events of the European Capital of Culture to the internet by utilizing streaming technology. There are several solutions around but few which can handle the critical issues of the mobility, easyness to set up on the event and high quality output. From the different solutions especially the one left an impact. Tricaster by a company called NewTek. Their solutions is used from major sporting events (like NHL and NBA) and big TV companies (Fox, MTV) to small organisations as many universities around the world.

A box which you can bring to the site with backbag and which also is relatively economical compared to other solution is a combination which might pass well to the many of the live productions we envision in our minds.

IBC - What Left an Impact I : Visualisation and Projection

Jarmo from Live2011 took a trip to IBC conference in Amsterdam over the last weekend (11.-15.9) in order to find out technologies within visualisation, projection, AV production (whole workflow from shooting, streaming, editing, storaging etc.). On next few days I will reflect back over the five hectic days in this large conferance starting from visualisation technology.

One of my tasks was in the conference was to find out solutions for projections/screening in public spaces spanning from small public transportation screens to large visualisation. From the latter category the most impressive one was Pandora's Box technology delivered by Coolux. Coolux technology has been used widely in cultural productions and the speciality of it is projection to the different structures and shapes.

Legendary modern circus company Cirque de Soleil uses the technology in its shows. Here's an example what the technology is good for. Enjoy:

:o) Jarmo

Can Social Media Raise Participation in Culture?

Yesterday I was attending to Creative Economy and Beyond conference in Helsinki, Finland. I held there a presentation about social media, it's rolling strategies in a organisation and said couple of words about Live2011.com platform. Of course I was a bit biased to answer to that question (You're right, the answer is "yes").

Presentation was made by the wonderfull presentation tool, killer of Powerpoint and Keynote, Prezi. An Hungarian based company has developed this fantastic nextgen presentation tool with which you can create easily stunning, mind blowing presentations.

Enjoy!:) Jarmo

PS. Of course you miss the talk around the presentation - the smash up images of the author (as a Love Guru and Hannibal Lecter) illustrate one of the central ideas of the social media: smash up. It was widely discussed on the presentation. Since you missed that part: Smashing up the content is one of the coolest Hi5 honour any content producer can get within social media platforms and organisations presenting content (if that's cool) will get smash up honorations eventually (and that's a cool thing!) :) You need Flash 9 in order to see the presentation.

Hello World! Live2011 Starts Blogging

Live 2011.com team starts blogging from today. Here you can follow what Turku2011 Foundation's team does, thinks and develops for the digital arena for the European Culture Capital Year at 2011 in Turku.

Gradually on the spring 2010 you can start to follow the developments of the Digital Capital of Culture, Live2011.com, through this URL. Live2011.com will be a new kind of Content Management System/Social media community build around the cultural events/festivals/happenings. Since our patron is no one else than Linus Thorvalds himself, we will build our services with Open Source technology and cultural events and fans everywhere are welcome to use our platform.

Digital Capital of Culture will be also developing new interactive mobile services and you will be getting much taste of the events also through existing social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and so on.