I did a video interview of Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen from Floobs some time in February. I never had time to edit and go through the video, but I finally managed to do so in the Easter holidays. During the editing of the video, I noticed that the add-on microphone was slightly faulty and it only recorded the left channel - therefore the sound quality is quite bad, apologies for that. Nevertheless, I decided its better to release the video late than never - so here it is:

I met Christoffer Landtman the CEO of CompanyCube in our Open Coffee with Arctic Startup event. CompanyCube has a very interesting position in terms of their business. They have managed to penetrate the somewhat unsexy commodities market of traders with their product. More specifically, they offer steel traders a viable solution to handle their processes.

The service is provided over the internet, accessible from anywhere - even the mobile phone they claim. The service includes trading management, customer relations management and business intelligence. Trading activities are managed as seperate projects and each project therefore includes certain routines such as stakeholder management, scheduling and so on. CRM is the regular integration of customer data to match more closely to the trading activities. Business intelligence has been built in to give a quick dashboard type of display to running your business and help make decisions faster.

CompanyCube is positioning themselves in huge market, measured to be 318 billion USD in 2005 worldwide. Due to large acquisitions and mergers the IT solutions are a mess and largely fragmented, according Christoffer Landtman. They have started off well in Finland as SteelTeam, the largest trading house of steel has began to use their product to streamline their business.

Eero Aarnio, one of the most famous Finnish designers, has taken his work online to Playforia, the 3D virtual world created by Apaja. He created the timeless Ball Chair in 1963, which has been hugely popular around the world. Apaja, the company behind the casual gaming site, has built Playforia as part of their service portfolio to gather audience from the huge population living in online worlds. According to Asmo Halinen, one of the founders of the company, over 30% of the users in Playforia and Aapeli are over 30 year olds.

Apaja is venturing into the same direction as Sulake, who has done a lot of co-operation with 3rd party content suppliers in their Habbo Hotels. It’s definitely a feasible way of bringing in valuable content and creating that link between the virtual and real world that users normally crave for in some sense.

Disclosure: the author is a former employee of Apaja.

Laurea is arranging a series of seminars for entrepreneurs in Finnish. The first was actually held today, but the next one will be on 25th of March in Leppävaara. The speakers in the series of seminars are Joonas Turkama of CoreFinland and Mikko Silventola of Calcus Kustannus, Mohamed El Fatatry of Muxlim.com, Esko Alanko of Micromedia, Taneli Tikka of Wisdom Like Silence, Heidi Ekholm-Talas of BSG Marketing and finally but not least Eero Lehti from the The Federation of Finnish Enterprises.

Interesting line-up with interesting people! You can read more about the series of talks from here. As a short reminder, we (Arctic Startup and Open Coffee) will be hosting another event in April on entrepreneurship. The schedule and theme will be announced later.

I did a small e-mail interview with Helene Auramo, HSE student, MA student in TAIK and CEO of Zipipop. Zipipop was founded July 23rd 2007, but Helene and Richard von Kaufmann had started planning the company some 9 months earlier. The young company has 5 Facebook applications as their products.

Helene, you’re the CEO of Zipipop – what does Zipipop do?

We make social media applications that help make life easier, for example getting your friends together for drink. Our current focus is on Facebook, however, we are about to start developing for other social networks too. And we’re always thinking about mobile possibilities.

At the moment most of our income comes from making custom applications for various clients. However, these are mostly based on our own Zipipop platforms. One example is the Laika application “What kind of dog are you?” inside Facebook. Laika Design is a cool Finnish company that produces bags and accessories with a dog theme.

Can you tell us how you went about starting the Zipipop – did you plan to do Facebook applications from day one or was that a result of some other decision?

I have a background in Helsinki School of Economics, but also in University of Art and Design Helsinki, in media lab. I met other two Zipipop partners; Richard von Kaufmann and Tuomas Laitinen in media lab. And the idea of Zipipop came in one UIAH’s course together with Richard.

One Friday last summer we had our normal afternoon tea break, when we started to talk about Facebook and its applications. We had an idea that we should test the platform and create an application there. And one week later, we had the first version of Friends Pad online. We also thought that the Facebook platform might be suitable for spreading our other web-based software.

You started the company while studying – how well does studying and running a company mix together?

I just had one week holiday from Zipi office because I had to study. But otherwise I haven’t been that much away from the office. However, I hope to graduate on June 2008 from HSE. At the moment I’m working days and trying to study on evenings and weekends. My thesis is also related to Zipipop.

Being in school at the same time has been good in the sense that we have received a lot of help from other students and teachers. And some courses have really given me good ideas related to running a business.

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Thanks to Helene for the interview! Although there is a lot of capability to grow the business in a difficult industry, I’m glad to see people taking initiative already earlier on in their studies.