Archive for September 2008

Funding and Training for Finnish and European Companies

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 30, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Tekes

Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, offers Finnish companies possibility to take part in the UCLA Global Access Program once again this year. In the program MBA students of UCLA will make an international business plan for the companies as their final thesis, focusing on analysis and action plan for entering specific international markets. The program was ranked last year as the best of its kind in the US, and the bar for both participating companies and students is high. There have been yearly around 10 Finnish companies participating in GAP, including e.g. one of the fastest grown firms Openbit and Cidercone.

EurostarsEurostars is an European funding and support program specifically dedicated to creating competitive SMEs that will be leaders in their own sector. The program tries to ignite international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding for growth companies. The program is initiated by EUREKA, pan-European intergovernmental network founded to enhance competitiveness of European businesses. Eurostars offers 400 million euros of R&D funding to SME companies over a six year period. Tekes funds the Finnish participants with 5M euros per year. The next deadline for electronic submission of applications is November 21st 2008. See instructions from Tekes.

Gaming and interactive media companies can also apply for funding of 10,000-100,000 euros for producing product demos and prototypes in the Media 2007 program. The program is aimed at companies developing on and off-line interactive works. Eligible are interactive works for the computer, internet, mobile phone, games console (including handheld), and digital television, that present a substantial degree interactivity, narrative, and innovation. Companies that submit an application must have completed a previous interactive work, or an animation of at least 24 minutes, and prove that the work has been commercially distributed between January 1st 2006 and the date of submission of their application. The next deadline for applying is November 17th.

Blyk Appoints Eric Samson As Belgium CEO

by Antti Vilpponen, September 30, 2008 — Leave a Comment

BlykNormally there isn’t nothing big in companies appointing CEOs or recruiting people. However, this time I believe there is something ineherently different happening in terms of Blyk that will tell the whole industry how different it is compared to a few years ago. Blyk is a Finnish based startup that offers a free mobile contract to 16-to-24 -year-olds in exchange for advertisements.

Eric Samson is the former Managing Director of Carat Belgium. Now as far as I know, Carat doesn’t engage itself in mobile operator business at all. When Blyk is bringing a heavy weight advertising and marketing specialist onboard it tells about the business the company is in as well as how dedicated they are to promoting the way the company is seen.

This brings about an interesting point to many startups – how many are still focusing on technology through company recruicts, when (possibly) the focus should be on answering the market needs such as in the case of Blyk? No doubt the technological understanding is important, but isn’t the customer insight even more important?

Poohtech Enables Newsstand Bill Payment in Latvia

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 30, 2008 — Leave a Comment

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]

PoohtechEstonian company Poohtech has launched a service called Cmart (.swf link) in Latvia that enables paying utility bills in 99 local Narvesen kiosks. Poohtech is an Estonian startup focusing on electronic ticketing and payment solutions. Toivo Annus, the former lead engineer of Skype, has reportedly invested in the firm. Poohtech has earlier provided electronic ticketing for in public transportation in Tallinn, Estonia.

The Cmart service enables Latvians to pay their bills at local newsstand chain Narvesen. The barcodes of bills from different service providers (including telecom, security, energy , etc.), are scanned in and paid on the spot.

The value statement Cmart makes is letting people to pay their bills on the go makes their life much easier. Toivo Tänavsuu comments at least in Estonia most of the people pay their bills online (similarly in Finland), and probably in Latvia also, but on the other hand the service could be very valuable for elderly people.

Poohtech is aiming for international markets with Cmart, and mention they would like to hear from potential partners.

MySites Going After Familiarity

by Ville Vesterinen, September 29, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Here’s a video where Ramine Darabiha, the CEO of MySites, is interviewed by Mashable, whose summer tour MySites sponsored. MySites is a Finnish startup that provides a web desktop that lets you store up to 10 GB of photos, music, videos, and other files that you can easily share

I was critical of MySites on my earlier post and MySites has been very active working on the site since. In the video below Ramine points out that MySites is not going after the most savviest of tech geeks, but aims for students and gamers only somewhat familiar with technology who many times use for example Microsoft’s products. This in mind MySites has for example made the desktop icons double clickable just as you would open a file on your desktop.

So instead of going for the ultimate user experience as we know it MySites is going for the familiarity and build the user experience around that. An interesting and brave strategy to not aim for improving the experience, but rather to make it resemble what people have used to using. Even though I still do think MySites has ways to go with the service you can’t blame them for not trying.

KaraokeParty.com Offers 24/7 Karaoke Fun, Gets Funding

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 29, 2008 — 1 Comment

KaraokeParty.com logoKaraokeParty.com is a music service that let users sing karaoke, practice singing, and challenge friends on the web. The service is provided by Karaokeparty Online Gaming, a Swedish startup founded in 2007.

All the user needs is a microphone and a computer connected with Internet connection to start singing. The service is open and free for everybody. There are two playing options, one with leading vocals for practicing and one with backing vocals only. You can also register to the service to store your scores to your profile and top lists, interact with the karaoke community, and to request new songs. The unique scoring technology makes it possible to compete with friends, both at home and all over the world over the Internet.

KaraokeParty.com screen shotThe service features most popular pop songs. At the moment there seems to be a bit over 100 songs, with more being added. All the songs are performed by cover artists, and Karaokeparty has the rights to the songs granted by Swedish Performing Rights Society and Nordisk Copyright Bureau (STIM/NCB). I’m not sure how this arrangement covers the global markets, though, but apparently the company is having users all around the world and has added many localized language versions already.

Karaokeparty Online Gaming AB has just announced finishing a funding round last week, securing SEK 3 Million (EUR 0.3M or USD 0.45M) investment from a group of Swedish angel investors.

According to the CEO Mattias Öberg the company is extremely pleased with the development so far, and has reached user numbers beating even their most optimistic forecasts. With the new funding, KaraokeParty will “intensify its expansion plans and increase its catalogue of songs which should make the service even more popular” as stated by Mattias Öberg. The new investors are Kent Gustafson, Håkan Janson, and Rolf Johansson, who were co-owners of Swedish Gekås, one of the biggest low price shopping centres in Europe. They have also worked as angel investors in other different projects.

As of now there doesn’t seem to be any revenue model implemented for KaraokeParty.com, but it’s quite easy to think of quite a many different interesting options.

MindTrek Finalists Have Been Chosen

by Ville Vesterinen, September 26, 2008 — 4 Comments

MindTrek Startup Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The following companies made the cut (in alphabetical order):

Floobs
HammerKit
MahShelf
One Did It
RunToShop
Star Wreck Studios
TripSay
Zipipop

There will be eight finalist in total in the pitch competition and each startup will have 6 minute pitch to present to the high profile jury. Read more about the Startup Launchpad here.

Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!

The free bus ride for startups to the MindTrek and back from Helsinki on 8.-9.10.2008 will depart 8.10. Wednesday morning at 7.15am in fron of Kiasma  (the bus has MindTrek sign on it).

The bus will head back to Helsinki on 9.10. Thursday at 4pm departing in front of Hotel Rosendahlin at Tampere. If you want to come along contact Hanne Lehtola at hanne.lehtola [at] culminatum.fi

Antti Akonniemi from Kisko Labs is also running an Ignite while we are driving up there. Antti wrote a short intro on what’s on offer for the ride up:

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? And what if your stage was an actual bus full of startup entrepreneurs? Fun of karaoke and excitement of Powerpoint combined. Sounds too much like the movie Speed? Introducing Ignite:Mobile. Join ArcticStartup’s bus trip to MindTrek and experience the first ever Ignite:Mobile.

There should still be plenty of room in the bus, so drop Hanne a mail and come along.

MAS Expands Country Coverage

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 26, 2008 — Leave a Comment

MAS - Mobile Advertising Solution

The Finnish startup Mobile Advertising Solution (MAS) has expanded their ad-funded games service to four new European countries: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. MAS launched their pilot portal 123play.com in the UK in May this year.

The portal includes games from a number of mobile publishers. MAS is focusing on quality games, to attract also blue-chip brands. In the UK, the company has included ads from e.g. Britvic, eBay, The Sun and NME. So far MAS hasn’t indicated any brands from the new countries that would be advertising in the games

[Via PocketGamer Biz]

Previous coverage on MAS.

[Disclosure: the author's employer has a business relationship with MAS]

Meet Four Swedish Startups In London Today

by Ville Vesterinen, September 26, 2008 — 2 Comments

Anders Fredriksson of Tablefinder fame has organized a trip to London with some Swedish startups that are today presenting at minibar, London.

The Swedish startups are looking to share expertise, learn from London startups, and meet great contacts. The startups in London are:






Videoplaza.com – An ad server for video – they help companies monetize online video.
Jaycut.com – Online video editing – named best entertainment website in Sweden 2007
Bambuser.com – Live broadcasting from mobile phones and webcams – recently received venture backing by a Norwegian firm. (The best bit is that you can get a link send to your Jaiku and Twitter account when you are broadcasting so your friend can go see what you’re up to)
Moyu.me – Instant picture messenger – early startup that just launched their service.

I personally instantly fell in love with Bambuser and Jaycut. I already tried Bambuser and it appear to work nicely, although there is a quite a time lag between the time you record it and when the link appear on your Jaiku or Twitter feed to notify your friend.

If you’d like to meet them Anders told me that he’d be happy to meet up. Contact Anders via Twitter (here) with invitations or meet them at the Minibar London at 6pm if you’re already planning on going.

Second BarCampHelsinki This Saturday

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

BarCamp HelsinkiBarCampHelsinki2 is being organised this Saturday (10AM onwards). This is the
second BarCamp in Helsinki. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to
share and learn in an open environment. The original BarCamp concept is a spinoff from Tim O’Reilly’s FooCamp, an annual invitation only event to network, discuss and demo cool new stuff. More on BarCamp in Wikipedia.

Ath the moment there are five sessions (so far):
- Where is microblogging going
- How to develop FB apps?
- Can you make money from FB apps?
- Why (user) experience is all that matters
- Beer – Why do you have to taste so good

There are already 20 participants on the list, and you can still make it if you sign up. More info on BarCampHelsinki Jaiku channel and the wiki. The event is organised in the Fjord premises at Keskuskatu 6G, Helsinki.

If you have any questions about the event, you can contact Antti Akonniemi, the organiser of the event.

Nutiteq Releases Open Source Mobile Mapping SDK

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 25, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Nutiteq logoNutiteq is an Estonian startup founded in 2006. The company has released an open source J2ME mobile mapping library product called MGMaps SDK, which might be the first open source one (add in comments if you know others). The software enables fast development of advanced mobile mapping applications, and also allows adding mobile mapping to other mobile applications.

Nutiteq’s objective with the library is to make the custom mobile mapping development as easy, affordable, and flexible as Google Maps API on the web. The company claims that anybody with basic J2ME knowledge can make custom mobile mapping applications with their tools in less than 30 minutes. The library is also customizable and extendable. J2ME and Blackberry platforms are supported currently, and support for other mobile platforms is promised to come later.

The main target of the company are mobile application developers, but Nutiteq offers also end-to-end client-server custom solutions. By default Nutiteq’s library uses OpenStreetMap global map data, but it also supports other commercial and custom sources. Nutiteq uses dual licensing for its products, offering the library both under GPL and commercial license. The firm lists a few references already, including Estonian mobile operator EMT, Connect2Car, and Navizon.

Nutiteq is currently looking to expand it’s reach and international partner portfolio. I heard through the grapevine the company might also be doing something with Finnish Whatamap.com, though it’s yet unclear how the companies’ interests align.

Casual Games Market Hot – 2-4M USD Invested Per Week

by Antti Vilpponen, September 24, 2008 — Leave a Comment

everyplay.fiJussi Laakkonen of Everyplay has compiled a very extensive list of investments to casual gaming startups in the US and Europe.

Laakkonen has compiled the list from public resources such as VentureBeat, TechCrunch, GigaOm, etc. He admits that there are possibly a lot of investments missing as they based on PR, which naturally works best in the US.

From the Nordics and Baltics, in the list are investments to Apaja Online Entertainment and Sulake, so I’m guessing there are many more smaller seed investments made to smaller Nordic and Baltic companies which aren’t present in the list.

What’s your take – is the casual gaming market the hottest corner of the internet industry at the moment?

Apaja Founder Looking For New Challenges

by Ville Vesterinen, September 24, 2008 — 3 Comments

Asmo Halinen, one of the original three Apaja founders, has just announced through Jaiku that he is looking for new challenges. In other words, he has (or will resign soon) from Apaja’s services.

Apaja Online Entertainment is focused on creating community gaming websites under the name of Playray. The Finnish service is called Aapeli and is one of the most popular entertainment sites in Finland.

Apaja has recently gone through quite a bit of transition in its managerial positions. Inka Mero was the CEO for some time, before she left for maternity leave. Tiina Zilliacus took over after Inka as Apaja continued to expand its services abroad to Turkey and Hungary, to name a few countries. A year ago, 1.75 million euros were invested into Apaja by Martin Trigon Venture Partners.

We’ll see if we can get a word from Asmo on the reasons behind the decision and what those new challenges might be for this online game & community services heavyweight.

Valve Setting Up A New Social Gaming Company Tweehouse

by Ville Vesterinen, September 24, 2008 — 1 Comment

We wrote earlier that the Finnish Internet Agency Valve was up to something in the social gaming arena. Now we have found out that they are setting up a new firm that produces end-to-end social gaming solutions for large brands. The new company is called Tweehouse (Pronounced as a little kid would pronounce ‘tree house’). The games, described as more game like with a storyline than for example Habbo, are aimed at the younger end of the gaming market.

Tweehouse will be set up in partnership with Snap TV, a Santa Monica-based game company that “produces and develops interactive games for media-savvy kids”. Valve will own 50 percent of the venture while Snap TV owns the other half. There are no third party investors involved at this point.

Tweehouse will target purely US market in the beginning. For this Snap TV is an ideal partner to handle the Sales and PR and leave the game development and pipeline management to the Helsinki office. Snap TV prides itself for having a dedicated sales force that calls on all classes of retail and ships products to over 20,000 storefronts across the United States and Canada, thus enabling quick access to market when the product is ready. This is where many other services coming from Europe have fallen short when trying to enter the US market with only a PR agency or a two man office talking to the market.

Tweehouse was born when Valve and Snap TV realized they could actually build a product out of what was initially only a single project. This is a great way for any digital agency to test the market and see what works. I hope we will see more of this type of ’spin-offs’ coming from the Nordic and Baltic countries.

The business model will build on the end-to-end solution. The service covers everything from design, development and marketing all the way to running the platform and moderation of the games themselves. In essence Tweehouse is aiming to build and sell solid gaming platforms to their customers. In addition to a fixed price element, the company also aims to always build an upside to the products they sell. This could mean for example a revenue share model that will be a percentage of each game sold.

Tweehouse has so far only one full time employee, but their first project will soon see around 10 people working on it coming partly through Valve and partly as new hires. Paavo Perttula is currently running the company as its Chairman of the Board. Tweehouse should have their first game out after a year, but they are looking into getting another client project in as soon as late spring 2009.

Interview with Valentin Ivanov, Founder of Bizi

by Guest Blogger, September 23, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Note: This is a guest blog post by Märt Ridala from Estonia.

Bizi

I interviewed Valentin Ivanov, the founder of Bizi, which is a new startup launched in Estonia last week. The service Bizi offers could be called “Estonian Twitter” with some minor modifications – possibility to add video and pictures. Valentin is an Estonian entrepreneur with international experience, having spent the last decade working in IT developing online applications for the mobile, gambling and entertainment industries in positions ranging from developer, technical manager to Chief Executive Officer. Valentin is also Founder and CEO at Yaika.com, which enables anyone to start their own live TV or radio channel for free. Let’s hear it from Valentin.

1. What is BIZI in a nutshell?

BIZI is a life-moments exchange network. Through BIZI, we aim to unite family members, friends and just other people together via letting them share their short news, feelings and emotions as short messages, small photos or 15 seconds long video records. All this can be done very easily over web, mobile and (very soon) over SMS as well! All this can be done free of charge and will stay free.

There are lots of ideas how to use BIZI for both personal and organizational purposes; either commercially, or non-commercially. Those, who will keep an eye on our press, blogs and other forums will find a lot about it very soon.

2. Why should a person use BIZI instead of Twitter?

The most important reason to use BIZI instead of any other foreign service is the opportunity to speak in your own language to others, who want to do exactly the same.

BIZI offers a bit more than just a Short Text Messages Exchange service – our features are a bit different and definitely more innovative than Twitter, Facebook.com or Orkut.com have. Thus, providing a list of features for real micro-blogging, BIZI lets users to enhance their text posts with 15 seconds long video-audio or just a voice record right from their webcam and microphone. Or, users can add a photo or any other illustration instead!

While developing, we were trying to cover all the needs and requests of our friends, colleagues and also those people, who live in our country and use Twitter, Friendsfeed.com and other similar services over the Internet. BIZI has been made in Estonia and for Estonia.

3. Is BIZI meant for Estonian market? Do you have plans regarding other markets?

As for now, BIZI has been made for Estonian market only. Regarding extending BIZI to other markets, may be one day…

4. What is your general opinion about making local copies of global social-networking services? Is it reasonable to make them? Why people prefer the local copies?

To be very honest, creating BIZI is quite an old idea, which was growing inside me for quite a few years. But as I expect nobody will believe me, I will try to answer your question as-is: my general opinion of bringing something extremely good to local countries in local language and tuned up to be mentally local as well is definitely excellent. How much reasonable is to create such projects is normally a business question to the one trying to that. My reason is a longing for something exciting, something that I can use personally in a home way, and the opportunity to share it with my friends and relatives – people I love and people I want to be part of my life. With all our projects – both BIZI, Yaika.com and the others we are heavily working on – we want to bring a grain of positive emotion to people, to make them happier, more friendly and open.

Now, answering why people prefer local copies, I would first like to ask you back – why do we always prefer everything to be “in my language”: a recipe in the medicine shop to be easily understandable, a movie to be either fully adopted or enhanced with subtitles? Why do we normally prefer everything to be “in my way”? Just because we always prefer to feel ourselves much more secure and comfortable, when we are fully after the situation.

5. How does BIZI plan to make money?

We expect BIZI to get profit form selling advertizing and receiving
sponsorships. Once in the future.

ArcticStartup Searching for Contributors

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 23, 2008 — Leave a Comment

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourbartender/1260338705

As part of our expanded focus, we are now looking for Contributors to act as our eyes and ears in all of the Baltic and Nordic countries, as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg, helping us to spot and report on interesting startups and events. In return for tips we offer link love and visibility on all continents. We will connect your name with each post we write about that is based on your tipping. Naturally, you will also get your profile on our Team page.

If you are enthusiastic, have exceptional industry insight, and can write, we may also be interested in publishing your analysis as a guest blogger. If you are interested in this opportunity we would like to see some sample post from you.

To join our passionate network, drop a mail at miikka [at] arcticstartup [com] and tell us what kind of cooperation you would like to do. Once a year we will also invite all the Contributors to Helsinki to dine and wine together with us and many of the startups we’ve together written about.

Finally, I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce our two new Estonian Contributors, Toivo Tänavsuu and Märt Ridala, check out their profiles on the Team page. Welcome aboard Toivo and Märt, and thanks in advance!