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.