What Is Europeana And Why You Should Care

Recently I completed a course on the European Media Policy, which deserves a long discussion of its own. However, one thing I learned from there that I really want to share is Europeana.eu – European Commission’s response to Google Books.

Google started working on digitizing books in 2002 and officially launched Google Books a few years later. They received initial support from top libraries (like Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Uni of Michigan, New York Public Library), world’s leading publishers (like Blackwell, Penguin, Pearson, Springer) and even partnered with a number of European countries (including Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Netherlands).

Everything was good and dandy when Google was helping libraries and publishers digitize their archives. Though things changed once Google Books became a global success and Google grew to be a tech giant with soaring profits.

Many European publishers started voicing concerns that their national archives are being exploited by an American company. That’s when the European Commission came to ‘rescue’ and came up with Europeana. What better way to protect European national archives from exploitation than to create an own version of Google Books? What is more, the platform would link to paintings, photos and videos on top of literary publications!

And in true European Commission fashion the content would come from member-states who were given quotas of how many items they need to digitize. The quota was based on the country’s economy size (!), thus countries like France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Netherlands were asked to contribute 1-3M digitized items and smaller economies like Poland or Finland were asked just over 0.5M.

Needless to say, European Commission and Culture Ministries of member-states poured in plenty of money and resources (read: tax-payers money) into this. The looming question is: why? Have YOU ever heard of Europeana? Once you try it: do you actually like it?

I played around with Europeana and I feel like their stuff of 47 did little user testing or marketing. True enough there is a lot of multilingual content but it is often limited in choice with very crappy preview (you have to click to see the next page as opposed to easily scrolling down).

It took me 5 seconds and no pain to find what I was looking for on Google Books. Five minutes and a lot of frustration later and I still can’t find it on Europeana. But hey, at least their links to images of Mona Lisa are legal (even if they don’t appear on the first page when you search for ‘mona lisa’).

Google is far from perfect but if Europe needs to come up with an alternative perhaps the European Commission is not the best place to start.

From Scred To ArcticStartup To Netprofile

It's been an exciting few months for me: I changed jobs from one great company to another, from ArcticStartup to Netprofile. Now that the winds of change have somewhat subsided, it's time to reflect  and thank the companies that I've had pleasure to work with. 


The memory lane starts from the summer 2010 when I joined Kristoffer Lawson and Tuomas Toivonen  at Scred as a Community Manager intern. This experience opened my eyes to the technical aspects of the web and cemented my passion in technology and start-ups. During my time at Scred I for the first time really dived into social media, user experience and community building. It was also the first time I watched (some) Star Wars movies.

Scred’s team went on to create Holvi, which won Mini-Seedcamp in Stockholm, got registered as a payment service provider (essentially becoming a mini-bank!) and is currently providing checking accounts for group activities.

Meanwhile, I went on to join ArcticStartup - the best and the biggest online publication that covers technology and entrepreneurship in Northern Europe. I was lucky enough to work there for a whole year and it’s been an amazing ride: I learned a ton, met dozens of inspiring people and had the chance to share their stories with hundreds of readers. Best part was working with Antti Vilpponen and the rest of the team; in the words of Jon Steward - The Best F#@king News Team Ever.

I love writing and my passion for technology and start-ups grew exponentially due to my experience at Arctic. What I also realized is that many great stories of exciting products or companies are never told or noticed due to poor communication. That’s when I decided to switch sides from reporting stories to telling them and trying to get them noticed.

And what better place to work on this than Netprofile? Here I was also welcomed into a great team of people who are real experts in what they do. It’s astonishing how many start-ups and tech giants they have helped in the past and are still helping today. My hope is to tap into that vast pool of knowledge to improve my own skills and help companies and start-ups spread the word about their products and activities.

In short, last year was a hell of a ride and I expect nothing less from the one ahead. What I learned so far is that communication is a brilliant multi-dimensional tool that can be applied to so many fields. I am yet to explore the world of opportunities it brings forward. But for now, as Aape puts it so eloquantly: LiG.

Here We Go Again

A post from my first blog back in 2006.

I had a blog before. It was a personal blog for my friends. I was keeping it active during my first year in Finland. I was 17 back then and it is excruciatingly painful to go back and read it (and that’s *after* I deleted the most embarrassing posts). I stopped blogging because once Facebook started spreading, blogs seemed passé.

But I was proven wrong in two ways. First, turns out that blogs are still here to stay. Second, even though Facebook reveals a lot of things about a person, it is not the best platform for putting your thoughts into words and sharing them with people I know and work with.

In this blog I will do just that: share my experiences and thoughts in a slightly longer format than a Facebook status or a Tweet. I will mostly share things I come across professionally with a personal twist to make things more interesting. My ambition is not to conquer the Internets but merely to stay connected with people online in a more meaningful way.