- I was born in Kemij�rvi, Finland in 1952 (boy, am I old =P)
- I got married in 1973 with Silpa. We are still together after 35 years, can you believe that?
- I studied graphic design at Helsinki University of Industrial Arts (UIAH) from 1973 to 1978. I never graduated, since I needed to go to work to support my family. My son samuel was born in 1975 and my daughter Henriikka was born in 1977.
- In 1977 I got my first job as a graphic designer at a religious publishing house Ristin Voitto in Vantaa, Finland. I designed and illustrated childrens magazine, book covers, album covers etc.
- In 1980 we founded a design co-operative Ars Nova with some partners. In 1983 one of the partners moved to Australia and our co-operative disintegrated. I continued the business by myself. I did illustration and designed brochures and magazines and advertisements, designed some logos too.
- In 1987 I acquired my first Mac and joined the vanguard of the desktop publishing revolution. My Mac II
computer with 2 MB memory and 40 MB hard disk and with Viking 8 bit color monitor with amazing 256 colours was one of the first in Finland. And my Freehand 1.0 license was first in Finland. Isn�t that something =)
- In 1988 I was hired BSB Finnad in Helsinki, then the biggest advertising agency in Finland, to train art directors and their assistants to use computers and desktop publishing software in their work. Most Art Directors back then thought that computers are a threat to them and that use of new technology kills creativity and hoped that computers will somehow go away and disappear. Their attitude changed totally when Finland drifted into an economic recession and ad agencies started laying of people. People sticking to outdated production methods were first to go.
- In 1990 there was an event in H�meenlinna, Finland, where I for he first time heard abour Ted Nelson and project Xanadu. I already knew the concept of hypertext since I had in 1988 created an interactive presentation for the Municipality of Hausj�rvi using an Mac software called Hypercard. The presentation was created using 1-bit graphics because I had a Mac Plus to run that presentation. And It was so advanced and new by then.
- In 1991 I was hired to graphic design agency Alform, Helsinki as a junior designer.
- From 1993 to 1995 I worked in Viestinn�ntekij�t Oy (communication makers in english) as an Art Director and was responsible of running a studio of 5 designers. We produced marketing material for MEK, the Finnish Tourist Board and communications and marketing services to various customers, mainly in travel business.
- In 1995 I participated ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, in Helsinki. There I was introduced to World Wide Web for the first time.
- In 1996 I designed my first website, www.nettiradio.fi. It was run by a Finnish knowledge society visionary, Veli-Antti Savolainen.
- In 1996 we also started our own business Pan Design with my wife, Silpa. Our idea was to provide cross media design services. I thought and still think that there should be no deviation from corporate design rules or product brand in various media. The main reason to deviations was, in my opinion, that customers needed different partners to create design to different media. There might be demand for a design house that can provide design services to all media and thus guarantees the consistency of the company�s message. And we did lots of cool productions, too. Graphic design, magazine design, illustrations, web sites and services, multimedia graphics for events, animations, corporate design, etc...
- In 1999 we rented shared office facilities with Njet Communications and Beta Audiovisual. With Njet Communications we produced several major data-based web services to large Finnish enterprises. The guys in Njet Communications were and still are top of the world web developers and programmers. I worked as a project manager and concept developer and we really did great services.
While working on projects we also had discussion about the rationality of production methods of web services.
- One of the members of Njet Communication, Jani Lehtim�ki, started to create his own Java development programming language Anvil that was planned to make development of Java applications faster and easier. And he did it. Go to www.njet.org to see yourself.
Heikki luhtala, now a HammerKit guru, joined Njet later and brought his ideas of component based web application development with him. Heikki and Jani started to develop a application builder tool with Anvil. It was called composer. The purpose of the Anvil Composer was to enable a web designer to create and modify real applications. I was asked to create some interface graphics for that tool.
Then we started think about making some business with Anvil. Njet would develop Anvil and partners would create applications with it. We started creating business plans. We decided to create an web shop application that would be easy to update and customize. What would be the name of that application? ShopHammer of cource! You use the hammer to mould things on anvil. Great.
We had high hopes and started to prepare for customer presentations. There was some interest in Anvil and Composer from major companies like Sonera and Satama Interactive in Finland. But it soon turned out that Composer was not mature enough. We could not create the web shop that would meet our requirements. The tool was to complicated and difficult to use.
What to do? With my partners we realized that it is not going to workWe did not believe the level of usability that was required for commercial success would be reached soon. It seemed it was not possible to get the developers to make changes to meet our requirements.
I am not a man that gives up easily. I believed the idea. It is logical, it is inevitable that the creating of web applications goes this way. It was evident that small and medium sized companies had all the same needs for web based tools that the large enterprises have. They sure would not be able to pay for the manual programming of services. It had to be automated somehow. Processes have to be streamlined. These stools must be provided as an on-demand service.
- Njet Communications, a company of six people, had two schools of programmers. The Java camp and the PHP camp. Anvil and Composer were the creation of Java camp.
My company, Pan Design, however, had done all commercial projects with PHP camp, Janne Halmkrona (a rock star), Hannu Palom�ki and Jani V�h�s�yrinki. Hannu and Janne had also created their own cms system called Publishine. I designed the interface for that software.
The web services we had created with Njet�s PHP camp contained many good ideas and had proved to me that programming any kind of web based tools was possible.
After all the idea is quite simple. If you analyze the web services you soon realize that they are built from same basic elements in various combinations. Create a method of combining those elements in various ways and customizing them. Oh, and this must not require any programming skills, otherwise I can�t use it.
Only... programming that kind of an an-easy-to use component based application assembly platform is not so simple.
- We decided to take what we already had, several cool databased applications, coded with PHP and transform them into customizable applications with updating tools.
I called to Jani V�h�s�yrinki, then in Malaysia, if this could be done. �Sure�, was Janis reply. I love this attitude.
Few months after that call, in 2002, the first HammerKit application to a corporate customer was delivered, with cms, access management, order management, design editor, brand manger. campaign tools and action module library. It was truly a component based application builder, back in 2002.
- Opprtunities started to look great for HammerKit and Basewell Oy was founded in 2003 by partners to further develop HammerKit and make it a commercial success.
However the efforts to raise funding for development and marketing failed. That turned out the be fatal to Pan Design that had funded the initial development. Business went down and Pan Design was
declared bankrupt.
- But we strongly believed in the idea and decided to go on regardless of the difficulties. In 2003 Heikki Luhtala joined the Hammerkit team after Njet Communications ended business and went into stealth mode. Some of he guys went to work with Nokia to develop applications for mobile phones. Currently Jaripekka Salminen and Jani Lehtim�ki, Njet�s Java camps core guys, are currently creating Widsets for Nokia.
- We continued the development of HammerKit in Basewell, but we soon realised that the team of 4 developers with no external funding are not able to make it. We put our hope in finding either enough good customers or an investor. But we soon learned that VCs did not understand what we were doing. Business was not good. We ruined our credit history, but we insisted on going on. We were not willing to let go of the work we had done. Fortunately our team�s spirit is strong. It endured. We pushed on.
Anyhow we managed to find customers to whom we succesfully produced dynamic business solutions. Some 300 has been delivered to this day, most of them running still. We did some hard selling work around Finland with a partner Ky�sti Kekkonen, Cap-Net Finland. Ky�sti is a strong believer in HammerKit idea.
- During the spring 2006 we noticed a clear shift in the markets. Suddenly our message started to get response. Especially among finnish telcos. People started to understand us.
But Basewell had run out of cash. We saw opportunities finally emerging and the markets starting to ripen for our product. We had to find funding.
- We decided to start the creation of a business plan to raise funding for new business with Cap-Net Finland. In 2006 one of our customers, ActiveInspire Ltd and member of our advisory board Kari Katajam�ki accepted my request to join in the generation of a new company to give a fresh start to HammerKit.
HammerKit was founded in December 2006 by HammerKit team (Jani V�h�s�yrinki, Heikki Luhtala, Robin Lindroos and me), Kari Invest (Kari Katajam�ki), Active Inspire Ltd and Tmi KK-Marketing (Ky�sti Kekkonen). HammerKit Oy bought all the assets and business operations from Basewell and started the business.
- In October Mark Sorsa-Leslie joined HammerKit as a managing director. We are now seeing a growth and see doors of opportunities opening just like we visioned back in 2002.
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