Why the year has to change right after Christmas?

Today we signed the company papers. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Monday we will do the rest of the paperwork. A lot of things learned, a lot of things yet to learn, in the middle of all the shopping and family meetings.

The hazzle is now, because the number 2008 is changing to 2009 in many bureaucratic machines. It is the darkest and most stressful time of the year and everyone is having the cold. Why do we need to have the year changing thing this month?

I disagree with it. People probably die because of all the stress. We must implement stress monitoring in our service, to collect information to have some other, any other month as the year changing host.

BTW, Merry Christmas!

Logo, another logo and more logos

My job as designer began by getting to know the project. After that, it was time to work on interface and logo design. After doodling my logo ideas on paper and choosing the best ones for further development I sent the guys, Wesa and Markus, my first logo ideas. And then, I sent more ideas. And more and more again. A funny thing is that now we think that maybe the very first idea is the best one. Well, you'll see later on which version we have actually decided to keep :)

Tasting the cold

I am slowly getting over the cold, or propably two colds in a row. Instead of the usual suffering, I did a bit of user experience research. I tried to analyze the symptoms, find the small details our users may encounter.

I had temperature twice, but they felt different. First time I was tired, second time my head hurt. I also found two types of coughs and sore throats. Do the cold viruses have different symptoms or is it just me? What about a group of people, do the different colds create unique symptom statistics? Interesting findings yet to make!

Wheter the small details in symptoms make any difference or not, tasting the cold is something to try out. In fact, cold-tasting should be regarded high culture like wine-tasting, with unique vocabulary!

Designing the brand and how the whole thing will work

We have spent the last days brainstorming our name ('illme' has got some critical feedback and to be honest, we came up with the original name in bit of a haste).  We have decided our new final name now and will reveal it when the graphics are ready.

We have been also having some productive sessions designing the brand, the user interface and the whole concept. It's been all been fun and interesting and I think we have found some pretty unique solutions to some pretty unique problems.  We also got a new member in our team: graphics genius Hanne Zenjuga will work on our visual and interface design. She might share some of her thoughts on the blog too. 

We are also negotiating with some first sponsors and have had the possibility to discuss all kinds of interesting collaboration schemes. We'll tell more details when we get the deals done.

Caught the cold :(

Another story about us hit the blogosphere, featuring comments about how badly our name was chosen. We have been trying to find the "final name" as it would help us in about everything we do. It is suprisingly difficult to come up with anything decent. How do you name the web 2.0 start-ups?

We have been circling around "health" and "ill", positive and negative aspects around the common cold. Now that I caught it, I realised there's nothing healthy about being ill.

Our service will include the possibility to "give face to the disease". I tried this today. After about 20 photos, I finally managed to take one that looks like the casual single shot.

A fledgling almost ready to conquer the world

Different pieces of our project are coming together gradually. We are currently designing and working on our first demo, which will be tested in the end of January. If you are interested in participating in the preliminary testing, please sign up for the blog or contact us. 

Our project seems to be creating some interest already. Following the attention we got in Slush Helsinki, a few blogs have written articles about us, e.g. Venturebeat. Slush got some media attention too (Digitoday).

So far so good. We'll keep you informed how our project is getting on.

This is how it starts

A wise person [who was it?] in Slush Helsinki said: "Instead of a business plan, create a blog."

Our team is curious about testing radical transparency. Project ill-me is on early stages of development, but we don't believe in keeping secrets. We don't even have a final name for our product, but that should not keep us from blogging.

My name is Wesa Aapro, I'm a doer, not a blogger. I don't see my thoughts verbally. I just intuitively do design or code or whatever. But this blog will be more than one post for me. I have to communicate at least the overview of our product design to the other team members, so I have to verbalize some thoughts anyway.

---

What is this Project ill-me? We'll soon post a video of me and Markus presenting the project for the first time, in Slush Helsinki.