What's going on in Bolder World.

There have been rumors circling middle-earth about our future. Yes, it is true - an alliance has been created between two kingdoms. This autumn Bolder Helsinki and Kisko Labs will join forces under the same roof.

The new joint-office is located in the peaceful seaside of Kamppi and it’s over twice the size of our previous residence in Töölö. We also just found out that Bolder’s “role model” Reaktor Innovations used to reside on the same street. Hopefully we will be able to catch some of the same magic and spirit that has made them one of the best places to work in Europe.

The new deeper collaboration naturally expands the service offering for both companies. Our combined expertise and know-how will be available as a single entity for all current and new customers. Through this collaboration we hope to better answer the needs and requirements of our growing client base.

We wish all the best to everyone and welcome you to come and visit our new office in November!

We are more than happy to announce that we have a new member in Bolder. Kasper Stenbäck is joining the company as a sales manager in August. Kasper is a Master of Science in economics, who has gained wide experience working for NGOs in various tasks for nearly a decade.

The members Petri Vilén and Vladimir Abramov are going to fulfill their civil duty in the military service – starting from July 2009. They will be serving the country from 6 to 12 months and will return to Bolder after that.

From now on, the post of CEO will be held by Pekka Hartikainen. This will not affect any ongoing projects and all the preparatory actions for these transitions have been started this spring.

With this information, Bolder wishes everyone a joyful summer!

Someone bought a 20 000 euro advertising space from the most read Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. This someone is looking for a woman he met in a restaurant a few weeks earlier. The ad has raised a huge conversation in the Finnish medium, because nobody seems to believe that this someone is a person rather than an evil advertising company.

To dissolve some rumors around this buzz, we must state, that Bolder hasn’t been involved in posting this advertisement. We only put a Google ad related to some of the keywords related to this topic. However, the most interesting part in the whole story is the appealing demonstration of the power of digital media. We used a 50-euro coupon code Google has sent us, and after spending some 4 euros we got the first calls from Helsingin Sanomat and the tabloids.

Finding strategic partners is a vital part of our story and thus we require much from our customers to bring our relationship to a new level. As a result, people who are interested in this kind of strong impressions and appealing influences are the people we are happy to meet and to work with.

I sure hope that those who have paid for the advertisement will achieve their goals, whether they are personal or businesslike. In any case, if this is a campaign, the attention was clearly missed on some levels and maybe the advertising company should have come to us to get some advice on how to turn such an option into something useful and perhaps, profitable.

Bolder has raised out of the academic community of the Aalto University. Our concern from the very beginning has been the lack of entrepreneurial spirit among our fellow students. We have tried to spread the word about the (mostly) wonderful world of running ones own business and been quite succesful in getting it through.

The rumors are now over. Bolder is happy to announce that we have a new member. We are very proud to say Pekka Hartikainen is now a part of our creative team. In Bolder, Pekka will bring more depth vision into the digital media and technical understanding. Combined with his visual skills and understanding of business logics, Pekka is a unique and versatile character that doesn’t leave any project cold.

Last summer I participated in the Information Technology Program (ITP), which is a summer program in the Helsinki School of Economics (HSE). As a part of the Content & Media - track I was on, we did a very large web project for Suunto.

Our team consisted of five HSE students, which might be hard to believe when you see the end result. Our task was to unify Suunto’s three product choosers into one, design it and code it from scratch. Luckily we had an amazing team to work with, as the project could have been too much to handle for five regular business students.

According to a recent survey about half of Finnish companies are planning to keep their marketing investments on the current level and about one fifth is thinking about increasing them. Referring to the same survey a recent article in Kauppalehti (a finnish business newspaper) speculated that marketing efforts will be shifted from image and brand towards more directly sales related activities as companies will be paying closer attention to their euros.

I don’t necessarily agree.

Hello world! Welcome to our brand new and shiny site. Some of you may have noticed some changes in our visual image, the way we describe our services and the language that we use. Earlier we used Finnish but we wanted to get a broader scope and communicate our new strategy as a bolder branding company.

The biggest change after the language might be also the fact that we have transformed our blog also to English. The old material will be published in our CEO blog that will continue as a blog discussing Finnish entrepreneurship issues. In this site, we wanted to concentrate more on the changing marketing and branding environment and our path in the wonderful world of a startup.

All in all, I hope you like our new site. Like in all sites, there might be something we haven’t noticed so give us a hint in this blog, by email or stopping by at our Lounge in Helsinki.