Archive for August 2008

FromSMS offers free mobile gateway

by Antti Vilpponen, August 29, 2008 — Leave a Comment

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.

Ironstar Helsinki opens MoiPal Brazil

by Antti Vilpponen, August 29, 2008 — Leave a Comment

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).

Jaiku still to move to Google App Engine

by Ville Vesterinen, August 29, 2008 — 3 Comments

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.

RunToShop.fi went live and back

by Ville Vesterinen, August 28, 2008 — 3 Comments

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 gets a double peak

by Ville Vesterinen, August 27, 2008 — Leave a Comment

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.

Softcolor automates image enhancement

by Antti Vilpponen, August 26, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Softcolor, a Joensuu, Finland based startup, has totally missed our radar for some reason. This North Karelian company is in the business of improving images – the automated way. Their website states that their main products are server side software that can be used to automate image enhancing.

The company was founded by Petri Piirainen (CTO) and Juha Purmonen (CEO). They also have a few other people more or less working full time helping them out. They met each other in the Joensuu university and inspired by the M&A deals of Bitboys and Hybrid they too decided to start their company and have a go at it.

Petri Piirainen did not disclose their clients, but states they are in the media and more specifically print sector – ie. publishing houses. There are numerous competitors in the field and thus it’s not an easy task to come up with an innovative solution to image enhancement, according to Petri. However, as many of the giants such as Apple, Agfa, Kodak, Adobe and others concentrate on user initiated image enhancement – there is a clear gap in the automated solutions department and Softcolor has been able to take advantage of this.

Their future includes improving their server side products as this is where the big business is. Softcolor is also currently expanding their sales network in Sweden, Germany, France and UK – so a strong push towards the Central European states is under way.

Softcolor also has a demo service available at improveyourimages.com.

Swedish Rebtel being blocked in Germany

by Antti Vilpponen, August 26, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Rebtel, a Swedish and Luxembourg based startup offering cheap international calls over internet, is pushing itself hard to conquer the VoIP market. Some might say that even a bit too aggresively as their phone numbers were blocked in Germany by O2.

However, as Alexander Drewniak writes in his blog post, this sort of activity is against EU regulations. He is also asking customers of O2 to send an e-mail or contact Jaime Basterra the “boss in Germany” about this and let the company know how the customers feel about this sort of activity. He goes on to make a Churchill type speech regarding the future:

The fact remains, old operators will always cling on to their decreasing margins, lock-in contracts, hidden charges, big offices, expensive TV-commercials, and out-dated methods but they cannot stop the future of calling. When internet now meets telecom, operators are going to have to change or die. Internet stands for transparency, consumer value, openness and change. Values that clash against the business models of all telecom operators.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works out. We’ll be following the activity closely.

MindTrek prizes for start-ups a positive surprise

by Ville Vesterinen, August 25, 2008 — Leave a Comment
We speculated earlier on that this year’s MindTrek’s Startup Launchpad prizes would be pretty good, and nice they are.


The guys at MindTrek have shown that when it comes to getting start-ups on board, Tampere knows what its doing. Here’s what they have on offer quote on quote:

The winner elected by the jury will be nominated as the MindTrek Startup of the Year 2008, and given the right to pick up the prize first from the basket. The three prizes are:

  • Two tickets for an international conference (max á 1300 €), like Le Web 3 Le Web08 in Paris (December 12th – 13th) December 9th – 10th*
  • Supercoaching training by Sharon Ballard
  • Technopolis Ventures incubation program (12 months contract, worth 3 000 €) and an opportunity to participate in the Money Talks Forum

In addition, the winner will get two tickets for the MindTrek 2009 conference and one hour face-time with one jury member to discuss about the concept, business model, financing opportunities, markets, etc.

The company nominated as second will select prize after the winner, and the bronze-medallist will get the remaining prize.

All companies selected to present their pitches in the conference will be given an opportunity to participate in a half-day pitch training session before the conference.
On top of that we at ArcticStartup want to offer the winning startup the possibility to put their logo (125×125px) on ArcticStartup front page for one month. Additionally we will also do an interview with the winner right there at MindTrek.


If the prizes are noteworthy, so it the jury. The jury line up includes Marc Davis from Yahoo!, Sharon C. Ballard, the founding President/CEO of Enable Ventures Inc., Tapio Siik from Nokia Growth Partners, Pekka Pärnänen theHead of Finpro at Silicon Valley and Henri Rantalainen the CEO and Business Development Advisor at Technopolis Ventures Professia.


But as they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch and even start-ups have to invest real money sometimes as much as it hurts. There is no real registration fee for the Launchpad competition, but if a start-up is selected it will have to register for the conference to get to pitch and be eligible for the prizes. The registration fee is 75 euro (+VAT) for the Thursday when the actual pitching competiton will take place, and if you want join the whole two days you have to pay 110 euro (+VAT) for a two day ticket, ie Wednesday and Thursday.

To ease the pain a bit, we are co-organizing with Culminatum, Sombiz, Floobs and MindTrek a free bus ride for all the startups to Tampere and back. Regardless of whether you’re pitching or not, you’re most welcome to join the ride. write me at ville [at] arcticstartup [dot] com if you wanna come and I’ll reserve a seat for your team.

You can read more about the competition and fill in the registration for here. Good luck!

*Edit: A correction to The MindTrek website: The first prize that includes two tickets for an international conference (max á 1300 €), should read “like Le Web08 in Paris (December 9th – 10th)”, not ‘LeWeb3 that was held in Paris last year on December 12th and 13th.

Star Wreck Studios gathering attention abroad

by Ville Vesterinen, August 25, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Star Wreck Studios, an open source movie making platform or rather a community of passionate movie loving individuals that produced the Star Wreck, a movie with eight million downloads from all around the world, has been featured in the VentureBeat.

The article is quite thorough in explaining what Star Wreck Studios is doing and it sounds very promising indeed, even though already the first comment to the actual article questioned the long term prospects of the open source movie making model. I am sure all open source models have their own problems and hurdles to over come but just like with the software business I believe the model can be made to work better than most of the industry heavy weights can predict. After all, it is hard to argue with eight million downloads achieved with a mere $20,000.

Regardless of the Star Wreck Studios’ operating model’s credentials it is absolutely fantastic to see another Finnish startup featured in a media such as the VentureBeat. Now, I suspect that Star Wreck Studios’ board member and a personal friend of mine Peter Vesterbacka had something to do with the fact that VentureBeat’s reporter Tanja Aitamurto took note and eventually wrote the piece. I’d hope more people that have similar connections to the Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley or even to the Silicon Roundabout in London would recognize the opportunities and contact the promising Nordic start-ups and start evangelize them on their trips over seas or over the canal. If such a culture would born it would benefit everybody, not least the evangelists themselves.

Going back to the article, here’s a few tidbits that I found particularly interesting:

Star Wreck Studios isn’t just about collaborative movie making, it’s also about collaborative movie viewing. [...] For example, if you’re watching a horror flick, as a part of the plot, your phone rings, and when you answer, the person on the other end of the line is the main character of the movie.

[...]

[Peter Vesterbacka] says that the goal for the project is to wreck the Hollywood model of film making.

[...]

“StarWreck easily generated more than 10 times return. The numbers are small, but the cost, $20,000, was minimal as well”, Vesterbacka says. “And when your movie costs only 20K to make, you don’t need to have an audience of millions or tens of millions to reach your goals. But if you spent a hundred million on the production, the expectations for the size of the audience grows, too.”

[...]

Star Wreck Studios is bootstrapped so far, and the company is hoping to get a first round of funding in a year and some angel led funding in the next few months.

We here at ArcticStartup are fans already and looking forward to Star Wreck Studios’ future productions. Let us know if you know any other promising open source projects going on in the Nordics. We’d love to hear what else is cooking on the open source front.

Jaiku now hosted by Google

by Antti Vilpponen, August 25, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Many websites have reported that Jaiku is now being hosted on Google servers. I had to test it for myself and see what a traceroute would return – look for yourself.

Jaiku has been down all weekend with a notice: “Folks, we’re offline for the weekend for server maintenance. Now’s a good time to talk to someone you love.” Recently we also wrote about the web 2.0 crash that occured to Finnish startups using Nebula’s services and back then Jaiku was one of those services.

Mashable is guessing that the final move to Google App Engine is on the way, but to be honest – there’s no proof. We’ve written about the move a few times, but it hasn’t happened yet. Another interesting question to ask is that how many people have left Jaiku for twitter as this is the second long outage that has occured in a very short time period?

Megapolis planning to go international

by Ville Vesterinen, August 20, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Megapolis, a Finnish born festival for global urbanites, is planning to go international. The theme of the third Megapolis is Happy Cities and according to Roope Mokka from Demos Helsinki says the event is going to be bigger and better than it was last year and that international expansion might be in the cards:

Theres plans, but theyre still v. much plans.

You can see the whole discussion thread here at Jaiku.

Once we get a samekind of buzz and self confidence going country wide and everybody buys the mindset that we can make it anywhere and everywhere, we’re doing just fine even without the ill incentiviced governmental early-stage investing and other market distorting subsidies from the public sector agencies.

Sampo Karjalainen and the Sulake story

by Antti Vilpponen, August 19, 2008 — 3 Comments

On Wednesday 27th of August, Sampo Karjalainen – a co-founder of Sulake – will tell the story of the company from the founding moments to this day in an event organised by Tommi Rissanen of Digibusiness – Digital content cluster.

Last year they had Jyri Engeström talk about the path that Jaiku took and it was a huge success, so they decided to redo it this year with another successful Finnish entrepreneur. I sure hope this continues every year and the industry keeps those successful speakers coming.

The event takaes place on the stairs of EGO at Unioninkatu 13, Helsinki at 2pm.

The event is free, but due to limited space – please RSVP to Tommi Rissanen if you’re coming.

Finnish gaming companies come in large numbers

by Ville Vesterinen, August 19, 2008 — 5 Comments

Asmo Halinen, Co-founder of Apaja, has compiled a listing of Finnish gaming companies into a rather comprehensive list. You can find the list here, and the original blog post about the project here (in Finnish).

Asmo started the list way back in 2005, but has updated it along the way, the latest update being from 16 July 2008. The list has 38 gaming companies altogether, a number which in itself amazes me. I’d be very interested about the ratio of ‘other startups’ vs. gaming startups in Finland, if anyone wants to compile such a ratio. And if that is not challenging enough I’d love to see the ratios from all the Nordic countries. I have yet to figure out why Finland has relatively such high numbers of gaming firms. Any ideas on this would be warmly welcomed.

Let us and Asmo know (via comments) if he’s missing anybody from his list.

Add your event to ArcticStartup through Upcoming

by Antti Vilpponen, August 19, 2008 — 5 Comments

We’ve added a tiny bit of information to the right hand side regarding upcoming events that are of interest to entrepreneurs and startups in the Nordics. You too can add your own event and get it posted in the stream, just sign up to Upcoming (works with Yahoo accounts), join the group ArcticStartup and add your events also to that group once you post them to the service. This way we’ll see it and if approriate, approve it to let others know of it as well.

Please remember to write something about the event to the description part and also link to existing information elsewhere as not many people might be familiar with the event.

Please let us know what you think!

HappyWakeUp analyzes your sleep

by Ville Vesterinen, August 18, 2008 — 10 Comments

A friend of mine at Nokia tipped me off to this wonderful wake up software. HappyWakeUp, a smart alarm clock for your mobile phone, promises to wake you up feeling refreshed every morning. Not a small thing to promise in any measure.

I am particularly keen on getting my good night’s sleep and am already using pzizz for my napping and Phillips Wake-Up Light for my mornings. Pzizz works like magic, but I’ve found the Phillips Wake-Up Light useful only for reading at the evenings. Thus my excitement when I heard about the HappyWakeUp.

HappyWakeUp goes beyond the mere gently sound or light and instead offers us statistical analysis of our sleep pattern for the price of:  One week – 2€. Two months – 8.95€. Full license – 49.95€. This is how it works:

HappyWakeUp detects the optimal moment to wake up by monitoring the quality of your sleep using the microphone of the mobile phone. Actually it listens to your movements during the night time. Therefore the phone has to be near to you, preferably on your bed. Detection of the arousals is based on statistical analysis of the microphone signals.

To read more about how the service works go here.

The company does not say where they are based, but since there is the Finnish language option available and the English copy writing has quite a few typos I’m guessing they are from Finland.

It’s a compelling story and I’m eager to try it out. Before trying tho, I need to get a Nokia phone which is a bit of a let down. No happy wake-ups for iphone owners. According to the company behind the service, Smart Valley Software Ltd., the service works only with Symbian 60 3rd edition platform and can be installed in Nokia mobile phones.

I was personally about to get a Nokia phone to go along with my iphone anyway, just to have the video recording capabilities with me at all times. But I can see this nifty service bypassing potentially significant tech savvy market if they are not hard at work with the HappyWakeUp iphone app. A nice opportunity for an iphone app developer perhaps.