Estonian startup called Fromdistance, has launched a product called FromSMS that enables you to create a totally free mobile gateway with the help of your phone. I’ve worked with SMS brokers and gateways in the past, and I can say that this is probably a very welcome move due to the outrageous service commissions the network operators are collecting.

The FromSMS webserver is connected to your web application through regular HTTP GET/POST and the FromSMS server connects to the mobile phone through few different technologies, the regular phone data connections such as 3G, EDGE, etc. or a WiFi to cut down on costs. Then of course your phone is the last post which sends out and receives the messages to your customers. For more information, have a look at the website.

It’s nice to see innovation like this nourish. I’m sure there are some scalability issues with this, but with a small service - this is a perfect match for smaller startups who want to test their concept online.

The Finnish based mobile community game builder Ironstar Helsinki has opened a new country for their Moipal virtual world - Brazil. Moipal is a mobile based game that is a mix of Tamagotchi and Facebook. You play the game on your own, but there are interactions between the players.

Joakim Achrén, the CEO, told us that on many occasions there are hundreds of Brazilian players on the US site which confirmed him they need a local site in Brazil as well. The community management is handled from Brazil, but the hosting and other technicalities are still handled from Finland, says Joakim. They are also working on many small aspects to make the service more localised, such as Samba parties at the beach etc.

Brazil will be Moipal’s 3rd site (Finland and the US being the first two).

We’ve been speculating about Jaiku moving the Google App Engine and on Wednesday when Jaiku came back up after a period of down time many believed the move had happened. Yet, Jyri clarified that this is not the case yet and the actual move is still ahead.

During the weekend and early this week when Jaiku was down, it was only moved as far as to the Google data center. Nevertheless, as it came back up it was already lighting fast compared to what it had been before and equally important the invitations opened up and are now unlimited.

And there’s more in the cards. For example, the new Jaiku API will support OAuth, which in itself is already fantastic. If the service can also handle an ever increasing user traffic without slowing down significantly or crashing it will be interesting to see whether it can still make itself a serious competitor for Twitter. We certainly hope so.

Edit: If you’d like to have an invite, ask for one in the comments (and do leave your real e-mail in the field provided) - we’re more than happy to spread the good around.

I attended RunToShop party last week at Shaker, Helsinki along with a lot of Finnish entrepreneurs and it was a blast. It was an opening day of the RunToShop.fi service, which was to act as the first step towards opening the service internationally at RunToShop.com

RunToShop is a social recommendation service for stores that rewards its users for recommendations as well as for the actual purchases. Whether it works or not is anybody’s guess at this point when the full fledged service is not rolled out yet.

The service at .fi address came and went. I did create a profile and browsed around the service to familiarize with it and decided to came back later on. Yet, today I found that the guys had but the site back behind a login and a password, probably to fix some buggy code. I didn’t get a proper look with still so few stores and service providers on the site at the time and am eager to take a another look as it goes live again. Hopefully there will be a lot more to browse through.

What is notable in RunToShop however is the way it was build: The guys behind the concept started building the start-up only in April 2008 and according to RunToShop CEO, Taneli Tikka, the service has already over 150 partners: Mostly in Finland and in the UK.

What is also unusual is the very strong advisory board the start-up has gathered which includes close to 30 experienced entrepreneurs and key figures in the industry. Similarly Taneli Tikka who is driving the start-up as its CEO has a long list of start-ups behind him, including Dopplr and IRC-Gallery to name only a few.

I did a video interview with Taneli, but since I only had my iphone with me Kai from Floobs borrowed me his Nokia N95 to record the interview. Unluckily I didn’t have a chance to pick the video clip from Kai last week, and when I gave Kai a call yesterday I got an SMS back saying he was hiking somewhere in the Norwegian Lapland, so it’ll have to wait a little. We’ll post the interview on the blog as soon as I get my hands on it.

Xiha Life, a Finnish based multilingual social network, got mentioned yesterday by both: TechCrunch and Mashable (here and here respectively). Regardless of the quality of traffic that a company’s web page receives when it gets TechCrunched or mentioned by any other major news service this gave Xiha Life a welcome publicity boost in the US market

The main reason of this sudden interest towards Xiha is its public launch in US, which took place yesterday.The second and we believe equally compelling reason is their new Music section, which will challenge other social networks going after the less known artists who are determined to climb to the mainstream from the long tail, thus competing with the likes of MySpace.

Xiha has more than a decent user base for an organically grown social network from the Nordics: 500,000 monthly users worldwide. We wish the best of luck to Jani and rest of the Xiha Life team in conquering the rest of the world’s multilingual population.