Arctic Startup

At 25 times revenues Sulake is valued 9th in Alley Insider valuation for digital startups. The valuation is purely based on revenues and show the potential of companies in totally different perspective in favor of companies that have valued revenue creation, for example Facebook is valued at 9 billion USD instead of the 15 billion valuation which Microsoft validated when it invested in Facebook. More on the SAI25 at AlleyInsider.

This list tells something of the tides that are on the way, as tells this blog post. Companies are valuating themselves to check where their valuations linger. Sulake does relatively well when compared to the valuations of other US companies which have been hyped a lot in the recent months without a proper business model.

Is this a new sign as a result of the significant drop in investments that has been noticed in the US? Remains to be seen.

Nextweb, the conference organised in Amsterdam, will be blogging about Finnish startups this week. Ernst-Jan Pfauth met with a bunch of Finnish startups in Web 2.0 in San Francisco and has started the series with Xiha.

Nextweb has some 2400 subscribers through RSS so these companies are bound to get some traffic in the coming days.

Ville Vesterinen wrote about the need to re-evaluate Finland’s immigration policy to create some real carrots to get foreign workers to come to Finland. He referred to Joi Ito’s post about IT eventually equalizing GDP per capita in the future. The workforce issue has been touched lately in the gaming industry news as well, as Neogames published their report on the Finnish game industry’s educational needs.

I think SMEs can do a lot themselves as well to get foreigners excited about working here. First of all, there is a whole bunch of good foreign students out there, many of whom are eager to work and show their skills if only given the chance. Of course hiring students is also pretty cost efficient. Second, if you happen to build a reputation good enough to lure some professional from abroad to Finland, the chances are she will draw in also other fellow countrywomen over time. I’ve seen that happen, in a somewhat large scale even. That’s really valuable when the available professionals in Finland are as limited as today. Often they also bring their spouses along who may be skilled in some other area, so other organizations may benefit as well.

In my opinion it’s also very good to strive to get foreigners along in the startups early on. It’s quite tricky a task to try to build a truly global product or service if you only have people from a single continent, let alone from one country. In some cases you can surely offset this by having beta users, but sometimes you just want the insight in-house, along with the respective networks you can tap into. Also, the sooner you (really need to) start using English as the true company language, the easier it gets to get other nationalities along, and the lighter it makes the document translation burden later on.

Official policies are little use if the companies themselves don’t take on the opportunity. So, do yourselves and Finland a favor and hire foreigners! That’s my 2 cents.

There will be a special startup developers get together event in Helsinki on May 22. The purpose of the event is to exchange knowledge about technologies and conventions touching startup developers, and also to demonstrate students “how cool it is to run and work in a startup”.

There’s quite a good bunch of startup speakers participating, including Lare Lekman, CTO of Star Wreck Studios, Jani Luostarinen, System Administrator at Floobs, Joakim Achren, founder and CEO of Ironstar Helsinki (MoiPal service), and Taro Morimoto, CTO of Zipipop. After the afternoon event there will be an evening party as well, place to be declared later.

The event will take place on Thursday, May 22, starting at 1pm at HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science in Helsinki. Check out the detailed agenda and enrollment on Yahoo upcoming or Facebook.

If you can’t make it, you can see the live stream from Floobs. Sponsors are also sought after, so if you’re interested, contact Kai Lemmetty @Floobs.

Oindex is a new iniative by Matti Hirvonen to create a competitor for the commercial TNS Metrix in Finland. TNS Metrix is the defacto analytics service in Finland used to keep track of visitors, pageviews and sessions. The data from TNS Metrix can be seen at Gallupweb for the services listed in the measurement.

Oindex is currently being developed and thus is unavailable to beta testers. You can leave your e-mail on the site to keep yourself notified of new releases.

The idea of Oindex was first covered in Optimointi.com, a Finnish blog on web analytics. Oindex will be free to the users, unlike TNS Metrix, and the data is collected from a credible third party source - Google Analytics. Websites joining the service will be able to select what data they want to be made available to the public.

We wrote about CompanyCube back in March, when they were doing business as normal. I checked my e-mail this morning to find a press release from Christoffer Landtman, the CEO of CompanyCube, to announce that they have been acquired by SteelTeam, a steel trading company. CompanyCube will become a subsidiary of SteelTeam in June.

With the acquisition CompanyCube has halted marketing and selling of their CRM and trading solutions. They continue to develop their steel trading solutions, but look for strategic partners to address other industry segments such as plastics, oil industry, wood, paper and the financial industry.

Christoffer and Jussi Alamäki, the current management team will move towards new challenges.

Congratulations from the whole Arctic Startup team to Christoffer and Jussi, a magnificent job!

Marko Ahtisaari has directed our attention to the Blyk blog, where they have announced yesterday that they have reached 100 000 customers for their service in the UK.

I remember talking to Marko in Paris at LeWeb3 last year and he said their target for this year is to reach 100k customers by the end of the year. Seems like they did a lot faster, some proof of the concept working even better than believed.

Yesterday at a lecture in the Helsinki University Teemu Kurppa, one of the Jaiku founders, told people that currently Jaiku is being developed on the 20% free time Googlers have for their own projects. We reported that Jaiku will be one of the first applications to be running on Google App Engine and this port will be done on “normal” working hours.

Vierityspalkki wrote about this first in Finland and soon the press coverage followed. It’s nice to see that blogs too generate discussion.

Therefore it’s clear that buying Jaiku for Google at this moment was more about recruiting the team rather than develop the product. We’ve also seen this in Jaiku’s development (or lack there of) in the recent months.

Here’s a video of Teemu Kurppa, being interviewed - he’s advice is skip the summer job, code all summer. :)

Kristoffer Lawson from Scred has told us that they are organising a Night of Code this Friday (25th) down at the Cable Factory. They are inviting all coders and designers to come down and share ideas what they are working on at the moment.

The event will start at 3pm and end around midnight. There will be no marketing pitches, no advertising or anything such - pure coding and sharing of ideas. If you’re interested, sign up to the event in Facebook or Upcoming. More info on Scred’s blog.

The largest commercial television channel MTV3 has acquired Kuvaboxi, a photo sharing service developed by Futurice - according to M&M.

The photo sharing service evolved from a mobile photo sharing product called Mobshare developed in 2005. With Mobshare, you could upload your photos to an online service to share with your closed friends, avoiding your photos getting indexed by search engines and being available to the public. Mobshare could be used with a photo blogging service called Futublog, which has now been shutdown.

Kuvaboxi joined the MTV3 portal in March 2006 and since then has become one of the most popular photo sharing sites in Finland (not counting IRC-gallery and similar type of services). Currently Kuvaboxi has over 170 000 registered users and over 5,3 million photos. Following Kuvaboxi’s ride has been close at heart as I wrote my Master’s thesis back in 2005 to Futurice on how they should market and approach mass markets with their service.