As Swedish private equity company Scope has invested a whopping €7m in a Finnish company Footbalance System Ltd.
The investment will enable the company to further accelerate growth and sales of its custom insole concept (see videos below). The solution is sold through Road Runner Sports in the US and Intersport International Corporation in Europe. Here’s a more in-depth take on the investment from Technopolis.
Footbalance’s solution is a 100% customized insole, which it creates through its computer-aided foot analysis and in-store production units. Footbalance’s concept is also a means for sports stores to increase their service level by helping the estimated 75% of all consumers who suffer from incorrect foot positions, such as overpronation and supination. Footbalance insoles support ideal foot and ankle alignment while preventing and correcting malpositions.
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Eqvitec Technology Fund III has invested a hefty 26 million Swedish Kronors (about 2.55 million euro) into Voddler, a Swedish startup looking to disrupt the way we watch movies at home. Hadar Cars, a partner of Eqvitec will join the Voddler board with the investment. This is great news for the whole ecosystem as consumer internet had been a little less active in terms of investments in the recent quarters. Also, another sign of this investment for the ecosystem is its size, if there is potential – investors are willing to invest and with Voddler’s 26 million Kronor investment it has been proven.
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We’ve done our share of guessing what Sofanatics, a new Finnish stealth startup, is up to with their concept and it seems that finally there’s some light being shed to their work. It comes from an interesting source, one of the blogs hosted by Finnish Broadcasting Company. The blog post is titled “Videochat combines home couches during the Olympics”.
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Foodie.fm is that obvious thing that I always knew I needed but could not think of. There’s about a million different ToDo list apps and cooking apps that help you do partly what Foodie.fm does, but not really.
Foodie.fm enables smart grocery shopping by allowing the user to browse different recipes and then add that meal to their shopping cart. It lets me see different meals and then breaks them down into the needed ingredients in just the right amounts and once I tab ‘Add to cart’ it ads it to my shopping list on my phone. Now, here’s the beauty. Foodie’s back end is connected to all the stores in a given chain (They just announced a partnership with S-Ryhmä in Finland) and the server technology learns from what I like to buy and starts to …wait for it… make recommendations to me when such ingredients or products are on sale in my local store (iPhone lets the service know where I live and recommends me to choose a store as my local shop). You can get the iPhone App here.
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Plugg, one of the better conferences in Europe, is held 11 March in Belgacom Surf House at Brussels. It’s a one-day conference with a clear focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and raising global awareness for those European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field that stand out in the crop.
There’s certainly not too much celebration of entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and we are excited to see Plugg bringing together some of the best thinkers and startups on the continent. Our good friend and established writer at TechCrunch, Robin Wauters is at it again and is going to showcase the best that Europe has to offer. Plugg is a must for anyone who’s anybody in the European startup scene.
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Already last year there was a lot of talk in Finnish media circles about how Schibsted, who own, for example, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet, is coming and taking a big share of Finnish media’s most profitable products: classifieds and market places. Now the land grab has started and its called Tori.
Tori has set up the shop quickly and started strong. It’s modeled on the Swedish service Blocket. Monthly uniques for the month of January broke 300,000. That is an impressive number given the service had zero publicity and was only gearing up for the launch. The team, headed by the CEO Jussi Lystimäki, drove traffic to the site using Adwords and smart guerilla advertising tactics.
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Gemalto, provider of end-to-end security solutions, has acquired a Finnish startup Valimo Wireless. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Some of Valimo’s investors included Altine Group, Risto Siilasmaa and SpringBank TechVentures.
Valimo has developed a two-channel, two-factor authentication based on Public Key Infrastructure, combining an over the air platform with a software client in the SIM to generate a legally binding electronic signature. What this jargon from the press release means is that Valimo enables mobile phone users to securely authenticate themselves, digitally sign documents and confirm legally binding transactions simply by entering a self-chosen passphrase or a PIN code. Voilà!
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Estonian mobile service company Mobi and mobile mapping firm Nutiteq have announced that Mobi has acquired a 33% stake in Nutiteq. The investment will be used to strengthen Nutiteq’s product development and international marketing. Nutiteq’s provides customized white label open mobile mapping applications for developers, service and content providers.
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