The crème de la crème
And the finalists
are…
The Blue Arrow is an award for impact. The finalists have all gone through a rigorous evaluation process to make sure they live up to our almost idealistic conception of the role digital services can play in peoples’ lives. They empower, educate, engage, entertain and generally help people and society live up to their full potential. Each and everyone. They’re all winners!
Societal Influence Award
Finalist
eSote Kanta
The National Archive of Health Information (Kanta) combines three major health care services into a comprehensive digital service that includes electronic prescriptions, digital management and analysis of health care data and patients’ access to their health care information.
It will improve health care service productivity, reduce treatment errors, facilitate research, reduce reimbursement management costs and make patients owners of their own health.
Finalist
Yrityskylä learning environment
Yrityskylä is a comprehensive digital learning environment that provides students of primary school upper classes with lessons in society, economy, work life and entrepreneurship. This learning environment combines new, functional pedagogies like gamification and simulation with interaction with the real world outside the school. In addition to digital learning content, the concept includes teacher training on the substance matter and learning methods.
In addition to educational goals, the aim is to foster interaction between companies and schools in order to give students and teachers deeper understanding of work life and economy. Already, more than 140,000 students have participated in the program.
- Name: Yrityskylä
- Material & methods: Experiential learning powered by pedagogy and a sprinkle of web tech
- Published: 2009
Finalist
Lupapiste
Lupapiste addresses the hurdles of getting a construction permit. Getting a permit in Finland has traditionally been perceived as a cumbersome and complicated bureaucratic process that requires dozens of forms and documents and meetings with civil servants.
With the help of this digital service, construction permit and building bureaucracy has become more fluent, as not only permit applicants, but also civil servants and other litigants are better informed about the progress of the construction project. All the relevant documents are available around the clock in a single service. As a result, the finalist service has already been implemented in almost 200 municipalities around Finland.
- Name: Lupapiste - eService for built environment permits
- Material & methods: Clojure & Open Source make great footings
- Published: 2013
Finalist
112 Suomi mobile application
112 Suomi is a mobile application for emergency positioning. In many emergencies the first caller does not know the exact location where emergency assistance is required. Valuable minutes are lost when the caller, often in shock, tries tell the Emergency response Centre, where he or she is, while the phone used has a built in positioning system.
The finalist application locates the emergency caller automatically and transmits the coordinates to the Emergency Response Centre that can use them to direct the emergency teams directly to the caller.
- Name: 112 Suomi
- Material & methods: Qt + Cloud + Service Design + Over 10 years of cooperation crystallized into one button to save lifes
- Published: June 2015
Finalist
Túlka Community
Túlka is is a community application of peer-interpreters who interpret daily conversations of persons without a common language. Peer-interpretation means interpretation by one’s peer smartphone users rather than professional interpreters.
Currently volunteer interpreters provide daily help to about 500 community members in Arabic and Persian languages. The interpretation community for Somali language is also under construction.
The situations the community application has been used range from passengers discussing with bus drivers to parents and teachers discussing school matters to patients and doctors discussing diagnosis and treatment. The purpose of the community is to help particularly immigrant communities to become integrated in Finland and ultimately more widely in Europe.
- Name: Túlka
- Material & methods: Pragmatic code on demand
- Published: 2015
Disruption Award
Finalist
DiacorPlus
Mobile clinic in your pocket. The DiacorPlus is a modern way to care for your health.
It has the potential to address some of the limitations related to physical location in healthcare, which is an important societal challenge to be solved.
- Name: Mobile clinic with human to human experience
- Material & methods: Have a clear vision, shared target and aim high. The rest is just hard work.
- Published: March 2016
Finalist
Juhlapesu
Juhlapesu offers unlimited number of car washes for a monthly payment. The service is operated with a smartphone app and the customer, i.e. car, is recognized by the registration plate.
A subscription-based pricing model combined with unmanned washing stations, made possible by technological innovation, disrupts the traditional business logic.
- Name: Juhlapesu - Always a clean car
- Material & methods: A blend of lush software & hardware on solid UX
- Published: 2011
Finalist
Golli
Golli is a service that digitises a company’s order-delivery chain, regardless of how big or small the company is. It’s a low threshold service for managing the flow of goods in logistics and retail and makes it easier for small producers to get their products in stores.
This service has the potential to lower barriers of entry into a major market for small and family-owned businesses. May provide some benefits of digitalization to small companies that can’t invest in it otherwise.
- Name: GS1 Golli
- Material & methods: State of the art cloud ecosystem based on the actual & validated user needs.
- Published: 2015
Finalist
ResQ
Restaurants, cafés, bakeries and caterers can use ResQ to announce any unsold food (prepared for e.g. lunch) to be “resQd”, i.e. bought at a discounted price and consumed.
ResQ turns waste food into a sellable asset by providing a new sales channel. A positive societal impact, win-win for all parties.
- Name: ResQ Club
- Material & methods: Node.js puts food on our MySQL tables. Front-end is straight from W(3)C. Oh, and our apps are native. All the while, we aim to be as agile as humanly possible.
- Published: January 2016
Finalist
Industryhack
Industryhack brings big companies and professional software developers together to create new products. Organised as competitions, the developers and company staff work together over a weekend at the company’s premises or an offsite location.
Though not a digital service per se, it disrupts the way in which digital services are created in traditional R&D-heavy industries. A good track-record.
- Name: Industryhack
- Material & methods: Bring big companies and hackers together, then shake.
- Published: Starting from 2015
Customer Experience Award
Finalist
Yle Uutiset Uutisvahti
Yle Uutiset Uutisvahti is a personal news service. Not everyone wants to check news sites for relevant news - the news has to find the users.
This app feels like the future. Regardless of it how it operates, it provides the user with a welcoming onboarding experience, with an adequate explanation of how to live with it. The UX is as good as it is simple and gets to the point. The value prop is not particularly unique, but it fulfills expectations.
- Name: Yle Uutisvahti
- Material & methods: Personalised news on native clients
- Published: 2014
Finalist
Tallink Silja mobile reservation
Leading baltic shipping company Tallink has made major investments in digital services and created a very efficient and easy-to-use mobile reservation system.
Sometimes all it takes to create an excellent user experience is keeping it simple and small. The Tallink Silja mobile booking service seems to know what the user wants to do before the user does and, with a few cleverly selected microinteractions, it creates an elegant and well designed service.
- Name: Mobile booking service
- Material & methods: Effortless booking on mobile web app
- Published: 2015
Finalist
Veikkaus.fi
Veikkaus is the Finnish national lottery provider, offering high-quality gaming entertainment reliably and responsibly. Every week it creates over EUR 10 million in lottery revenue for the Finnish society.
The Veikkaus site has smoothly working interactions and a uniform look’n’feel for its dozens of games. Many details are well thought out, like showing ongoing games and bets with their options on the front page of a registered user. Even the site itself is gamified, with Veikkaus Points that encourage the user to explore more.
- Name: Veikkaus.fi / Customer Experience
- Material & methods: Mission: Iloa elämään - Maailman paras rahapeliyhtiö
- Published: 2013
Finalist
Zervant
Zervant provides simple and useful invoicing software for small businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs. It’s designed to make running your own business as easy as possible.
Zervant provides a simple, elegant and very powerful solution to a persistent and business-critical problem: how does a small business owner create invoices and track billing? Financial software often feels either trivial or overly complex. Zervant manages to combine inituitivity with power.
- Name: Zervant
- Material & methods: Java on AWS, JavaScript, node.js
- Published: 2011
Finalist
Nordic Sky Entertainment
The Nordic Sky entertainment system plays an important role in Finnair’s digital services. It provides comfort and peace-of-mind, entertaining passengers and allowing them to manage their time on board effectively.
NSE system presents the user with a consistent, modern and spacious user experience. As an example of work carried out in a uniquely challenging domain, the system succeeds in satisfying all basic use cases with delight. The system functions without a glitch. For future development, more unexpected delight and playfulness would be desired.
- Name: Nordic Sky Entertainment
- Material & methods: Airbus A350 + Stellar Design & Code
- Published: 7.10.2015
Best Performing Team Award
Finalist
Veikkaus.fi e-commerce / Digital sales
“At Veikkaus.fi we do long-term software product development. Veikkaus is developing itself and its culture, with the support of external consultants, to become a stronger digital service provider.”
The team has learned a lot about getting great results: strong cornerstone practices that drive performance, work towards a shared goal in multi-vendor enviroment, etc.
- Name: Veikkaus.fi / Best performing team
- Material & methods: Coffee, bacon and friends!
- Published: 2013
Finalist
DiacorPlus Team/Diacor & HiQ
“At Diacor, we work as one coherent team in order to build better healthcare and well-being for Finland. Everyone from the front desk to the IT department shares the same goal.”
The team provides a new service in a very traditional sector and has achieved excellent results in a short time. It has made a large-scale impact in the organization.
- Name: Mobile clinic with human to human experience
- Material & methods: Have a clear vision, shared target and aim high. The rest is just hard work.
- Published: March 2016
Finalist
Feeniks/DNA & Smilehouse
The team consists of people from different units at DNA and Smilehouse. The Finnish core team consists of DNA online business and DNA IT, as well as Smilehouse’s Finnish team, working on daily basis at DNA House to reach common goals.
Displays a long-term mentality and achieved excellent results in a short time, in both customer and team satisfaction. Achieved big changes in culture. The team vibe shines through.
- Name: Feeniks
- Material & methods: Bi-weekly reborn to be a better team creating great customer experience
- Published: 18.11.2014
Finalist
Elisa growth hacking team, Reaktor
Elisa Growth team is a new joint development team of Elisa and Reaktor. They are more than just a self-organizing agile software development team. They are a self-directing, lean startup, business driven money making machine. They refer to themselves as “post-agile”.
A team that crosses traditional boundaries. Constant look past the team’s own responsibilities by challenging, coaching and supporting on a larger scale.
- Name: Elisa Kasvutiimi Reaktor
- Material & methods: Post-agile driven experiments with a spray of champagne
- Published: April 2015
Finalist
Deveo
“Deveo is a 100% remote company located in five different countries. Our work culture is driven by the five core values: keep things simple, be open, connect to customer, stay curious, take initiative.”
The approach is very different, as the whole team is remote and thus provides a different angle to the other finalists, presenting an opportunity for all of us to learn.
- Name: Deveo
- Material & methods: 100% results on 100% remote with 0% bulls***
- Published: 31.1.2014
Epic purchasing Award
Finalist
K-Ruoka app
In purchasing, the goal of Kesko was to find an agile vendor to build new and high-quality mobile services for our customers, but one that could operate within the parameters of our purchase model, too. Thanks to open communication and a shared goal of finding the best ways to collaborate from the very beginning, we were able to change the way digital services are developed at Kesko.
Kesko went through revolutionary agile transformation and launched a successful mobile application despite a long history rigid procurement processes. The market-fit of the new product was constantly validated. Collaboration between business, procurement and supplier was based on trust and transparency. The purchasing of the service development was successfully designed and steered to avoid any supplier lock-in.
- Name: K-ruoka
- Material & methods: User centric design & agile development team
- Published: 5.10.2015
Finalist
Veikkaus.fi
Veikkaus is the Finnish national lottery provider, offering high-quality gaming entertainment reliably and responsibly. Every week it creates over EUR 10 million in lottery revenue for the Finnish society. Within its mode of purchasing, Veikkaus has favoured multiple vendors with open mode of communication of its partnering needs.
Any supplier lock-in was avoided by effective multi-vendor management model. Multi-vendor management model based on collaboration, trust and transparency turned out effective in producing quality with relatively low costs. Veikkaus was successful in both attracting the best suppliers with interesting and challenging business environment and retention and nurturing them with healthy development environment.
- Name: Veikkaus.fi / Epic purchasing
- Material & methods: Open communication and transparency make friendship with benefits!
- Published: 2013
Finalist
Turku.fi
City of Turku began an open RFI phase intending to get the right candidates to respond. With public tenders there are not so many possibilities to affect the companies responding, but the RFI was drafted in such a way as to attract companies with strong agile working methods. RFI gave out the impression of a project which is not carved in stone but rather leaving room for chosen experts to suggest their take on the project.
Supplier screening and selection was a great success despite the challenges and restrictions in public sector purchasing legistlation. Multi-vendor management model was able to produce the best in all the vendors i.e. well managed pool of vendors turned out more than the sum of the actors. Collaboration, trust and transparency in the roles and responsibilities acted as the key success factors in the outstanding results.
- Name: Turku.fi
- Material & methods: Agile multi-vendor collaboration based on transparency and peer reviewing
- Published: 1.7.2015
Propellerhead Award
Finalist
Industryhack organizers
This group has shown evidence of impact in many fields of new innovation scene.
Industryhack team has organised 11 great events, each merging 12-15 hackathon teams with an industry company that wants to win in Industrial Internet.
Absolutely impressive and diverse set of activities in various fields. Uniting and powerful act. Nationwide success: these people have been able to get attention form big organizations and keeping the events coming time after time despite very hard work required. Very good impact.
- Name: Industryhack team (Juho, Mikael, Petri & Ville)
- Material & methods: Combine people from Slush, AppCampus, Startup Sauna and Autolla Nepaliin with a fixation for industrial internet
- Published: Since 2015
Finalist
Iiro Uusitalo
This person has the right attitude to respond for the needs of others.
Iiro is a person who grasps the possibility when he sees something that can be improved by his own effort. He won’t just talk but he makes things happen. By combining his sincere desire to help people, his technical expertise and innovative mindset, his ingenious experiments often leads into more wider win-win -results than no one imagined.
This person is making impact in many fields. if this person sees a problem, he intends to solve it. He has a superb servicing attitude. And he tries to make impact to external audience (kids and helping also ladies to enter to ICT-sector).
- Name: Iiro Uusitalo - Irssi ConnectBot & Qlma
- Material & methods: Open source - ftw!
- Published: 2012 & 2016
Finalist
Petka Antonov
This person has made impact in the field of JavaScript.
Petka’s Promise library (for easing work with asynchronous JavaScript) Bluebird is the fastest and one of the most widely used Promise library in Node.js. This is important, because Promises are becoming a JavaScript standard, and in the phase of transition, polyfills are needed.
A very important library for one key technology area, world-class success in its field. Based on external footprint and in terms of community followers, there is clear evidence of him being top talent and international community leader in his field.
- Name: Petka Antonov - bluebird
- Material & methods: JavaScript
- Published: 2013
Robust Code Award
Finalist
Etsimo Visual Discovery engine
Etsimo combines an intelligent search engine with an interactive visual interface. It brings together the power of machine learning with the visual search capabilities and intent of humans. Users find information faster, no matter how vast the collection of documents is.
This technology presents a novel approach to a big problem - with a potentially big impact. Its approach and choice of technologies make it eminently adaptable for many different document sets.
- Name: Etsimo Visual Discovery Engine
- Material & methods: Machine Learning in the Cloud
- Published: August 2015
Finalist
Objection.js
Objection.js is an ORM for Node.js which supports new JavaScript standards and most SQL databases. Objection.js makes SQL operations easy, still permitting the full power of SQL.
Unlike many other open source libraries, Objection.js is exceptionally well documented code with a comprehensive test suite. Its choice of modern ECMAScript technologies makes it at the same time backwards compatible and forward looking. While the library is still young, it has a potential to become Node.js developers’ swiss army knife for databases.
- Name: Objection.js
- Material & methods: Javascript, SQL & open source
- Published: 2014
Finalist
Sanoma Customership
Sanoma Customership is an unified login and subscription handling mechanism across Sanoma services. It ties a set of backend systems into a unified API and also provides a set of UI widgets for a unified user experiences.
The service is an example of software that needs to adapt to a great variety of needs without sacrificing maintainability. It has achieved this through an exceptionally well tested code base and use of contemporary technologies.
- Name: Sanoma Customership
- Material & methods: JavaScript & Java on AWS
- Published: 2015