Posts Tagged ‘team’

We are happy to welcome Björn Fant to the Videoplaza team as of today. Björn will help us to keep our clients’ smiles as wide as possible. That includes various missions like making our help sections easily accessible and testing our products thoroughly. He will also be paying attention to our site and help us to make the most out of this blog.

Björn has a technical background as a web developer in the dotcom era but shifted gradually towards project management and business development in startups. Recently he’s been letting his passion out at Musicbrigade (not as ambitious as it used to be) and most recently Jalbum (still going strong).

He also happens to be a close personal friend to me which is why I know that he’s unbelievably talented in spotting flawed usability (really funny anecdotes there) and improving general team performance (oh yes, he’s a ‘doer’).

Make sure to follow Björn on Twitter or his blog (Swedish).

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And by the way, haven’t gotten around to write proper blog posts about us being nominated to this year’s SIME Award and our appearance in this nice piece by SvD about promising Swedish startups (Swedish).

I don’t know how it happened, but in less than three months we’ve more than doubled our team. Being only the three founders in June, our team now sums up to seven people! The latest recruits are two multi talented guys ready to help us change the world.

These guys are fresh media tech engineers out of Stockholm’s top tech university KTH. Together they just completed their thesis project, kTube. They’ve built a complete video service for KTH to be used in the education, including CMS, video player, etc.

Joakim Sarnelid we actually recruited way back in June, but he couldn’t start until now. Joakim is a really skilled Java developer that will help us further improve the speed and reliability of our development with his skills in automated testing.

Of course, as all people in a startup needs to be, he’s multi talented and does a lot more than Java. After evaluating his coding skills we decided to bring him in and feel him out. And we certainly weren’t disappointed. Joakim is one of those individuals that everyone just likes. Kind, caring, perceptive, yet really funny.

Why does this sound like an episode of Nilecity? (Link in Swedish)

Apart from his coding skills Joakim juggles fire sticks, hikes or bikes mountains and joins 90 kilometer ski races (Vasaloppet). He’s also well traveled and surely knows why to avoid happy pizzas.

With only about a week left until Joakim was supposed to start, we learned that his friend and thesis colleague Jonas Frid was also scouting for openings.

Since we had already evaluated (and been impressed by) the source code output of the two we felt that we should really meet Jonas as well.

And sure, Jonas made us laugh too, so he was welcome to join. (With both of them, we just had to persuade them to turn down all the other attractive offerings they were getting.)

As with Joakim, Jonas is skilled with Java, but besides that he’s into usability and interface design. Lately he has based a lot of personal decisions on the dice but when it comes to coding he takes no chances. At least that’s what he tells us.

As multi talent is one of the key factors of becoming an employee here we weren’t disappointed when Jonas (during his first interview) mentioned as a side note that he’s authored a book in his spare time. His skills with German, French, Spanish and Chinese certainly wasn’t a setback either.

Oh yeah, and it sure is a pity that you couldn’t be there when Jonas (after having lost the dice) approached a somewhat reluctant young girl with his sweet talk. Impressing. Or not.