2008 October - ArcticStartup

Zipipop Is Going To Defy The Economic Sentiment

by Ville Vesterinen, October 31, 2008 — 2 Comments

Zipipop, a new media start-up that develops web-based services for making everyday life easier, is going to Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco on the 3rd November. Zipipop was selected to present at the conference when it won Mobile 2.0 Europe.

Zipipop CEO Helene Auramo informed ArcticStartup that Zipipop is going to San Francisco to win Mobile 2.0, but that they are also looking forward of seeing many interesting people and are going to spend an extra one and a half weeks over in the US. We believe that the extra week and a half will be spent driving between venture capital firms looking for investors. (Previous story on the topic here)

Why we have reason to believe this is because Zipipop has gone public with its Advisory Board and one of the Board Members who has already unofficially worked for a long time with the company, Peter Vesterbacka, has been making arrangements for the company’s trip to US for weeks now. These arrangements have very likely included setting up those magical meetings with the venture capitalists.

On a related note the company has revealed that they have a new partner, Robert Aarts. Aarts worked previously as Director of Engineering at start-up Trustgenix which was acquired by HP at the end of 2005. Earlier on Robert was a Senior Architect for Nokia Web Services for seven year.

All this looks very much like the company is getting itself tidied up and presentable for the investors. All well, except that as we all know venture financing has dried up almost over night due to gloomy predictions and the general downturn in the global economy. Let’s hope that Zipipop can assure the wary investors that they have what it takes to make Zipipop’s flagship product, Zipiko, the next Twitter or at least a nice quick exit.

Zipiko is a SMS based social intention broadcasting application. I believe that Zipiko has potential since it is build from simple enough elements which potentially make it easy enough to use by anyone in the larger public, unlike many other web 2.0 services which just dazzle you. Having said that, when it comes to predicting success, how I go about it is by trying out something at least a couple of times and if after a while notice myself using it, even every now and then it can be a success at least for a niche. I don’t use Zipiko even after having tried it out a few times, which is a sign that it needs more work. Twisting the service and letting the users decide which variations work and which doesn’t might do just that, since the right elements are there.

Have you tried the service? What did you think?

Gemilo Launches Reign Of Elements

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

Gemilo, a Finnish social media startup, has launched a Facebook application (or a game to be more precise) called Reign of Elements. The game was launched on 24th of October and in 4 days accumulated around 2200 members.

Gemilo activated 10 players of another game and gave them tools to create objects, weaponry, areas, enemies, etc. When the game launched, the crowdsourced designers had created an entire game on the platform that Gemilo provided. Furthermore, there is no common way to play the game as the designers and players themselves update a wiki where information on the game is shared.

The game seems to work pretty nicely and is a nicer form of text based RPG. There are small interesting details that add charm to the game, such as the slowly increasing stamina if you stay put. It will be interesting to see how the game takes off with the new Facebook design as I’m guessing the application usage in general has slowed down somewhat due to less visibility.

TechCrunch is coming to Slush Helsinki

by Ville Vesterinen, October 29, 2008 — 3 Comments

ArcticStartup is partnering with TechCrunch UK and Slush Helsinki in organizing a brunch for start-ups, entrepreneurs, investors and key industry players the day after the Slush event. Slush will take place on Monday 24th November and the brunch on Tuesday 25th.

Slush is an event for startups by startups in Helsinki, Finland. The event will showcase all the major Finnish Internet-era success stories from F-secure to Jaiku, from Habbo Hotel to MySQL, along with all the hottest Finnish startups.

TechCrunch Brunch @ Slush kicks off with discussions about entrepreneurship and startups in general with Mike Butcher, the editor of TechCrunch UK initiating and moderating the discussions, followed by plenty of networking over brunch.

The event is sponsored by Muxlim, a Finnish born Muslim online community with users from over 190 countries across the world. The site is the official Finland nominee to the World Summit Awards 2009, for the “e-Inclusion & Participation” category.

There is limited capacity for attendees at TechCrunch Brunch @ Slush, so TechCrunch is asking for a €20 cover charge to minimise no-shows. The brunch will take place at Cafe Ekberg, from 09:30am to 01:00pm. You can register for the TC brunch here, and for the Slush itself here. Hope to see you in the Slush on the 24th as well as at the brunch the day after!

Nordic Venture Forum: M-Brain

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

Here’s the third startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

M-Brain (FI) – M-Brain is a value-added business intelligence firm operating in the media environment.

M-Brain focuses on media monitoring by delivering filtered, summarized and translated content from the Internet, both editorial and social media. They offer specific aggregated reports from more than 60 countries in 25 languages.

The company claims that it’s success factor is its ‘unique symbiotic combination of technology and human capital’. This stems at least partly from an in-house tech development that is funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Also, members of the R&D team continue to work part-time in the academic EU research projects bringing a wide range of knowledge to the table. M-Brain is also involved in many other EU project which are likely to bring in again new research, and many times also added funding from EU’s budget. Along with a few private individual the company has investments from Veraventure.

M-Brain employs 56 in-house trained staff of which 34 work part-time. M-Brain differentiates itself from its competitors by a ‘business model that is based both on human expertise and state-of-the-art search technology’, where most of their competitors emphasize only one of the two.

The company does not say much about the search technology except that the quality ‘results from scalability of human effort, achieved by replacing the mechanical part by technological means, themselves scalable. Query enrichment tools and interactive means of reorganizing the filtered material transform raw data into normalized information. The process and the representation are optimized with regard to human cognition and customer needs, enabling also broader survey of discourses related to an industry domain, resulting in products such as alerts, ananlyses and recognition of emergent relationships and trends‘ . The only bit I could find out the above I can really say I understood was that the company also employs refined data stream offered by Whitevector and Leiki’s semantic filtering tools. That said, the company states that their R&D investments add up to 15% of turnover, which is a very healthy number.

How M-Brain aims to differ from the Google and other aggregators is by rewriting the content instead of only cutting and pasting or taking a bit of the article and pushing it forward in a feed. In the Nordics M-Brain needs to compete with the likes of Meltwater and Cision, but as soon as you enter for example the UK you can find bigger players such as Libraryhouse among others.

M-Brain might have a killer technology and I hope they do, since their editorial does not seem to offer terribly much value based on their blog (in Finnish) where they claim to ‘observe the social media and offer perspective, opinions and experiences from the web’. The quality of the analysis throws a dark shadow of their claimed ‘human expertise’ which accounts for half of their product offering. For pure information aggregation this might not pose such a problem, but for those looking for in depth analysis I’d look long and hard how much bang I get for my buck.

Currently the company is looking for acquisitions from the old media that work in the media monitoring industry. This would allow M-Brain to integrate their technology to these players’ organizations which are stuck in the old way of doing things, and thus pushing the efficiency and margins way up. This would also offer the company a way acquire new customers in a quick and efficient manner.

Stixy – Your Stickyboard Online

by Antti Vilpponen, October 29, 2008 — 2 Comments

Stixy logo Stixy is a Karlhamn, Sweden based startup that has created an online version of the stickyboard. The service at first is a bit hard to grasp as the website reminds of a board in use itself. However, after a few minutes of looking around I came up with at least a few things how this tool could be used – with only one question in mind, is it better and easier than using simple post-it notes?

Nevertheless, the service is really customisable (a ton of different colours and fonts are available) and has lots of different possibilities for for content. They enable uploading of photos and documents. You can also add to-do notes through the widgets at the bottom. The best part of the whole service is perhaps the networking and sharing of the stixyboard with your friends or colleagues.

Stixy works really nicely with both Safari and FF on the Mac. In services such as Stixy, the biggest barrier of use is really adoption (ironic, I know). But by adoption I mean how you can drive this sort of tool through in your organisation or group of friends as the real potential of the service is unleashed in network usage.

Work on Stixy is not that active, if you look at their blog and they only have a few people in the team (guessing by the contact page). Despite all this it’s a neat looking little app, but the real question is could this be something that agile companies could use to subsitute the real white board and post-it notes? Let me know what are your thoughts, especially those companies using these scrum-like methods?

Nordic Venture Forum: Loanland

by Ville Vesterinen, October 28, 2008 — 1 Comment

Here’s the second startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

Loanland (Sweden) – Loanland is a P2P marketplace for loans, offering customers & investors new financial opportunities.

Loanland is the first P2P (social) lending site in Sweden, offering the Swedish market a new alternative to banks and credit institutes where you can decide your own terms & conditions. It is not only an alternative for people looking for a loan (borrowers) but also for anyone looking for investment opportunities ( lenders).

Loanland claims to offer all of the following:

Letting the customer set her own terms
Direct access to the loan market
The best interest rate in the market for borrowers & lenders(!)
An alternative to banks, financial institutions, pawnshops and micro loans
A new type of investment

The company is currently providing unsecured loans to the Swedish market. The Swedish market for unsecured loans to households amount to around 160 billion SEK (around 16 billion EUR or 20 billion USD) at present and with unsecured loans to SMEs the figure is about 500 billion SEK (around 50 billion EUR or 63 billion USD). The market has grown 15% annually during the last few years. Gartner Group has estimated the P2P lending to take 10 percent of the loan market by 2010.

Loanland’s business model is based on a ‘reversed auction’ model, where the borrower creates a loan request defining the loan amount, duration of the loan and the maximum interest rate, and then the potential lenders bid downwards on the interest rate. For this process to happen smoothly, Loanland provides the market place and assists with administrating the market, credit rating, loan agreement, reports, payments and claims. In effect, Loanland makes its money by taking a setup fee and a transaction fee from the conducted loan transactions.

Loanland is using an open source platform that it has developed, automating most of the processes. The technology is based on Java, J2EE, MySQL, Tomcat, Spring and Hibernate. The platform and auction engine allows individual and automatic bidding, electronic signatures, integrated credit scoring and efficient payments.

The company launched in December 2007 and has already over 10 000 members and 5 000 registered borrowers and lenders. They have 6 million SEK (600K EUR or 750K USD) deposited out of which 95 percent is lend out as loans. Quite significant number considering that the startup operates currently only in Sweden.

This is exactly the right time to be a new type of financial service provider in the market when many of the economic underpinnings of the markets are tested and people are looking for alternatives for all the massive lehman brothers of the world. Loanland for its part is combining the financial industry with Web 2.0 and is allowing its customers to provide and impact content.

Many of the facts and figures are from the good people at Nordic Venture Forum.

Nordic Venture Forum: Zero Point Software

by Ville Vesterinen, October 28, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Here’s the first startup of a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

Zero Point Software (Denmark) – Zero Point Software is a developer of intellectual properties in the video game space and their offering was two fold:

They were looking funding for the game they were developing, namely the Intersteallar Marines.
They were also ’selling’ Real Time Voice Porting to the VCs present. Real Time Voice Porting is a technology they had developed specifically for games.

Interstellar Marines is a AAA science fiction First Person Shooter video game aimed at the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms. The game is positioned in a highly competitive but also equally profitable segment. According to the guys behind Zero Point Software PC and console sales passed $30 billion dollars in 2007, of which shooter games accounted for approximately 10 percent.

Real Time Voice Porting for it’s part is a patent pending technology. It makes the gaming experience that much closer to what it would be in real life. For example if you talk to other users in a virtual bathroom while playing the game, you will experience how the reverberation affects the sound of your voice. In a similar fashion, shout your lungs out in a virtual valley and you will hear the echo of your voice.

In addition to the Interstellar Marines game itself and the patent pending technology Zero Point Software wants to rethink the game distribution model: the company aims to sell Interstellar Marines directly to the consumers without the need for a publishing deal. Whereas now a consumer pays about 75euro a game, the company wants to push this all the way down to 30euro a game.

The company also aims to build a social network around the game. It hopes this will reduce the investment risk by creating proof of market, ensure great quality through large scale focus testing and generate early streams of revenue. It aims to do this by letting the users play bits of the game along the way its developed, thus trying to get the gamers hooked and come back for more while at the same time creating a buzzing viral word-of-mouth.

The founders also emphasized that the game needs to be easier to access than pirated games, which would mean a user could play first 30 minutes for free and only after that she would have to pay if still interested.

The game trailer looks as good as any, even though it’s a long way from blockbusters such as Halo3. Similarly, I have no doubt that the patent pending technology can be a success. What I doubt though is whether you can bypass the publishing houses as Zero Point Software is planning to and still reach a wide enough audience for the game to take serious market traction. Whatever you think about the big publishing houses, they still play a critical part in the marketing of the games and thus creating the awareness among the bigger gaming public. You’d need to have a hell of a game if you plan to be the next Halo3 (or a bigger hit) just with a viral word-of-mouth. That said, the startup is not just talk and no action -The Interstellar Marines trailer has already passed two million downloads and gotten an average user rating of 9.2 on GameTrailers.com. Nice going!

Many of the facts and figures are from the good people at Nordic Venture Forum.

Kaskado Delivers Mobile Coupons

by Miikka Kukkosuo, October 28, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Kaskado, founded in 2007, takes a Swedish approach to mobile coupons and marketing promotions. Kaskado’s Kaskado Deals mobile service is a mobile Java application which fetches location-based promotions over-the-air and displays them to users (well at the moment you need to pick your city from the list yourself).

The mobile application is rather simple, but looks good. It’s easy to select a city, and downloading the offers doesn’t take much time. The UI is clear and displays all offers nicely. At the moment it was unclear to me, though, what exactly ‘activating’ an offer means, as it didn’t seem to have any other effect than a new green box on the screen.

Kaskado apparently makes money from a monthly fee on each offer, and by taking some percentage fee of the used coupons. If ‘activating’ an offer in the client means Kaskado interprets that as a billable event, it sounds rather problematic implementation. I’m not sure about that, though.

Kaskado has recently signed up the biggest coffee chain in the Scandinavia, Wayne’s coffee. Wayne’s Coffee has introduced Kaskado’s mobile offers to its 30 000 customers in Sweden. The customers can get offers and discounts in most of the chain’s cafes all over Sweden.

Analysis Into The Deloitte 50 List (Finland)

by Antti Vilpponen, October 27, 2008 — 1 Comment

Last Friday I announced the fastest growing company in Finland according to Deloitte and I decided to dig a little more into these companies in terms of finances. So the breakdown is as follows: Company rank on the Deloitte list (2008), company name, growth percentage (from 2003 to 2007), turnover in 2007 (000’s €), turnover in 2003 (000’s €).

1. Futurice, 2885%, 3313, 111.
2. Openbit, 2521%, (not reported), 391.
3. Nomovok Oy, 2367%, 2319, 59.
4. Endero Oy, 1775%, 10029, 312.
5. Directa Oy, 1734%, (not reported), 166.
6. Heeros Systems Oy, 1566%, 1233, (not reported).
7. Vilant Systems Oy, 1238%, 1258, 94.
8. Bluegiga Technologies Oy, 1192%, 4340, 336.
9. Reaktor Innovations Oy, 1102%, 9255, 770.
10. Nebula Oy, 1016%, 9310, 848.

If you look at this list, the companies in general are still very small by international standards. Growing your company over a 5 year period from under a 100k to a few million should be on everyone’s list and with a proper team executing it – very doable. I’m gonna get hammered here again, but I do believe that it’s not that difficult up to a certain point. The real difficulty begins when you think of these companies growing from the 5-to-10 million revenues into 100-200 million revenues. How is that done? Now that’s a bigger and tougher question.

I was unable to find any comparative figures for other Baltic countries nor the Nordics, but the first company from this geographical setting in the Central European list is Webmedia group from Estonia with a growth percentage of 770.

Kuneri Wins at Smartphone Show, Gets to Mobile Summit with Ramblas

by Miikka Kukkosuo, October 27, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Last week Kuneri won the Best SpeedNet Pitch award at Symbian Smartphone Show 2008 in London. The CEO Ugur Kaner pitched Kuneri and their next, biggest product Pikkoo to a jury consisting of representatives from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Navteq, Orange, and Symbian. Pikkoo should be launching in a closed Beta soon, stay tuned for invitations.

But that wasn’t enough, Kuneri was also selected to represent Finland at Mobile Summit 2008 in Stockholm this week by Mobility @ Otaniemi and got the opportunity to pitch at the VC Panel event. Digital event marketing and media agency Ramblas Digital got the other speaker slot for the main stage.

Congrats both Kuneri and Ramblas!

A Few Quick Facts For The Weekend From Finland

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

The week’s been way too busy and apologies for the lack of writing from me. However, I’ve been following the scene and been meeting people over lunch from the startup scene. I’ve heard a few interesting facts this week that I’d like to share with the readers here.

NewsToScreen has been growing fast despite my earlier bashing. NewsToScreen is an aggregator of different feeds and activities that can be used to transmit information to large crowds. They now have 80 000 members and transmit 5-10% of Finnish online video and approximately 66% of Finnish commercial video. I also talked to their founder and CEO Marko Parkkinen about the usage of the product and he confirmed that they have slightly shifted the focus and are taking different approaches in capitalising it.
RunToShop, the social shopping recommendation service, now has over 400 partners. We previously wrote about 150 partners in their network so the growth has been nice. Despite still having a long way to go to successfully integrate the service with these partners I’m glad to see companies also focusing on the commercialisation of their innovation.
The Deloitte Fast 50/500 Finland list for 2008 is out. A familiar company is topping the list with a growth percentage of close to 3000% – Futurice. Futurice is a web and mobile production powerhouse located in Helsinki, Finland. Second on the list is OpenBit, a mobile payment provider we have covered previously as well.

I’ll do some more digging into the Deloitte’s list as there are a lot of interesting companies that need to be uncovered in terms of interviews.

Adactus Enables Cross-Platform Multimedia Streaming

by Miikka Kukkosuo, October 24, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Adactus is a Norwegian startup providing cross-platform content delivery systems. Adactus aims to enable broadcast television and other content providers to increase their market reach to mobile to get new customers and revenue.

Adactus enables broadcasters to offer controlled and optimized live video and video-on-demand services with best possible quality to a variety of different mobile terminals, also simultaneously on both web and mobile. The optimization of content can be done based on the delivery network environment, and end-user handset capabilities and preference, while the content provider can control and monitor the content consumption with DRM and other tools. Adactus’ products support live or on-demand streaming of, download of, and subscriptions to video content. The company’s technology also allows for personalized or location-based commercials in different forms like tickers, images, and movies.

Adactus has taken part in the standardization of MPEG-21 multimedia framework, which forms the core of the company’s products. The technology makes it possible to adapt content to specific environments and handsets, based on for example screen resolution, color depth, video- and audio codecs available. The adaptation can also be done based on network capabilities and user preferences.

The publicly-traded Norwegian company Vizrt has a minority stake in Adactus.

Muxlim building Muslim virtual world

by Ville Vesterinen, October 23, 2008 — 4 Comments

According to TechCrunch UK (blog post here) Muxlim, the Finnish born Muslim social network, is launching a virtual world especially Muslims in mind. This will be much like the other virtual worlds we are familiar with such as The Second Life apart from the Muslim specific features.

TechCrunch UK reports:

The idea is that something tailored to the Muslim world would be allowed through the IP-blocks of countries like United Arab Emirates which currently stops access to virtual worlds and online games considered unsuitable or offensive to Muslim culture. The virtual world is said to launch in 4-6 weeks

[...]

The revenue model will be VIP accounts, virtual gifts, virtual furniture/clothes, themes/styles, profile applications, advertising, branded communities and physical merchandise like t-shirts.

Muxlim has been very active lately. In addition to the new virtual world, they are planning to open an office in the UK and a big UK launch event at the end of January 2009 to go along with that.

If you look at the TechCrunch UK comments it clearly shows that religion is much more sensitive topic in the UK than it is over here in the Nordics and Baltics. Very few, if any, of the comments actually deal with the product itself, but rather with the fact that the virtual world is for Muslims. Mike Butcher, the Editor of TechCruch UK, decided to shut down the comments since the blog post created so many racist comments. I have not seen such negative approach here in the Nordics or Baltics even though Muxlim has been in the headlines quite a bit. It seems that UK has much more to learn from us than just financial regulation.

Edit: Here’s also Wired’s take on the Muxlim virtual world.

Nokia’s Change Of Heart

by Ville Vesterinen, October 22, 2008 — 5 Comments

Just recently Nokia, the Finnish born mobile phone manufacturer, put up a competition to find the most innovative mobile apps. We believe this might be part of a bigger initiative to reach out to startups in the wake of what App Store has done for Apple.

The word on the street is that Nokia is really(!) trying to reinvent themselves. This does not only mean shifting the focus partly from hardware to software such as Ovi service which just launched recently, but also possibly finding new partners in the platform area in order to create an ecosystem similar to what Apple is doing with App Store.

Not only has Nokia been sniffing around in Android developer conferences, but when I recently spoke to a Nokia employee working high up in the organization he was carefully asking around how a platform change away from Symbian would affect the startup scene over here in Finland. This might just be speculation or part of a careful scenario planning exercise from Nokia’s part, but then again it might be much more that.

Now, Nokia has put up a mobile app competition (here) which is clearly part of their answer to Apple’s App Store. The contest is open for everyone: independent developers, startups, and so on. There are three different categories for submission:

Eco challenge (looking for apps that help make sustainable choices)
Emerging market challenge (apps to empower people in developing countries)
Technology showcase challenge (looking for killer apps which feature cutting edge mobile technologies)

Winners of each contest will receive $25K cash prize, will be able to distribute their apps through Nokia channels, with possibility to meet VCs, showcase their apps in Mobile World Congress 09 in Barcelona.

The big question is that do these pieces add up to something much more than what we’re currently seeing. Will Nokia take up Android to challenge Apple’s App Store? What do you think?

Nordic Venture Forum Winners

by Ville Vesterinen, October 21, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Nordic Venture Forum 2008 is over and the winners have been announced. Just when I wrote (here) about how skeptical I was about Concilio Networks, they land among the top three companies out of the 50 firms that participated in the Nordic Venture Forum.

Nothing delights me as much as company proving me wrong when I’ve been critical of them. Here’s the top 3:

Concilio Networks (Finland) – Mobilizes and monetizes VoIP and internet community services
NsGene (Denmark) – Developes novel cell and gene based products for the treatment of neurological diseases.
Inmold Biosystems (Denmark) – Develops sterile polymere products with biomolecules immobilised into the plastic surfaces.

ArcticStartup congratulates the winners!

While talking to Concilio Networks’s CEO, Kristian Järnefelt, in Copenhagen he showed me exactly how the company allows users of normal existing handsets to import their internet contacts from social networks. The user experience is much smoother than I’d expected -I could start chatting with a friend with two clicks: First I chose my contacts and then I just jumped into the relevant contact name as I do with any Nokia phone and I was ready to start chatting. Whenever I have my phone on it shows as ‘active’ in all the networks I choose to use, for example Google Chat or Skype. As soon as one of my contacts decides to start chatting with me I receive a SMS for every comment. Easy and simple.

I actually pulled out my Nokia N95 and fired up Fring to show Kristian that such a solution already exists, but just as Kristian told me, it takes ‘forever’ to wait the Fring to load and connect via WiFi or 3G. That said, I still believe it’s an up hill battle to sell this solution to the telcos. This Kristian also admits.

All in all, I have to give this round to Concilio Networks. Kristian showed me how easy and effortless their product is to use. Not only that, It makes the world of difference where there are no 3G or WiFi networks in place, which would make it an ideal for South American market or even for Africa. Kristian told me that this might be the case, but that Concilio Networks has found out that to win the telcos’ trust they need to find the proof of concept closer to home.

I still believe that iPhone might give them a run for their money, but even if that happens in some markets there are still nearly 3 billion other mobile phones to work with. ArcticStartup 0 – Concilio Networks 1.

I’ll be writing more extensively on all the companies that I saw presenting in the conference in the coming days. Keep on the lookout for some interesting startups!

Archive for October 2008