Orxter, a Finnish online service for students and teachers of classical music, is well on its way to launch in 7th January 2009. The same day the schools will open after Christmas holiday. This is not a coincidence as Orxer is looking to schools as their main go-to-market channel and get the students to user their service.

The service is especially helpful for music students and amateur musicians as it lets one buy real symphony orchester soundtrack, which have the melody removed. One can also get all the notes for free via the service.

The business model is based freemium model where you get the notes free, but you have to pay for the soundtrack, which is 5 euro per song. To make the soundtrack more appealing the founders realized it sounds way better when recorded just like in the movie soundtracks, where the sound is recorded right next to the instruments. You get a lot more bang and wow to the tune this way.

Etsi muita samanlaisia videoita Orxteri

The video clip is from Orxter’s Beginner - series tutorial videos.

The founders have wisely used many existing services by tweaking them to fit their service. They use Ning for the social network platform, where each user can build her own profile around her musical taste and the music  she likes to play. Similarly they also use ustream.tv and kyte.tv to let the users watch and learn from video.



The two founders have a very strong background in music. Jari Ravaska is a professional studio producer and Pekka Suominen is a jazz musician and long time music producer with a technical background.

The founders decided to build the service after being frustrated with the grayness of current methods on how young people are being taught music. The idea behind the service is that music can, and should, be fun. So in effect, the founders want to remove the stiff image that classical music has, so that also the young would find the classical music appealing again. The big vision is to build a global digital music academia in the Internet in couple of years time, which could have only a fixed fee for all the services.

i2m - Ideas to market, a UK based research firm, has released some very interesting figures in terms of startup financing, according to Sun Startup Essential Blogs. They have researched some 800 entrepreneurs and small business owners over a variety of areas.

The key findings of the financial research has shown that about 40% of startups seek under 10,000 GBP to become profitable while 30% seek between 10,000 and 100,000 GBP to become profitable. Only about 15% of startups seek more than 100,000 GBP to become profitable.

In the findings, Permjot Valia, a business angel and member of the British Business Angel Association describes that the engine of Britain’s entrepreneurial industry is friends and family. If you take this thinking to the Nordics, I’d say the results would be tilted towards the 100k€ mark.

This of course raises questions of other sorts - are we really able to bootstrap up here? Do we take the financial status for granted and regard that something as of a given right even in a startup? Provocative questions to ask, but what are your thoughts - which category would you reckon would be the largest in your home country?

Photo by jenn_jenn.

We invited Peter Robinett of Bubble Foundry to come and attend Slush on behalf of TheNextWeb blog, an Amsterdam based weblog that reports on everything that influences the future of the Web, in any way. Peter himself is a developer now living in Amsterdam and very active in the local startup scene. Peter for example organizes Lunch 2.0 and Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam. Here’s Peter’s take on the Finnish startup scene.

I had a great time attending Slush on Monday and Ville asked me to share my thoughts of the Helsinki startup scene. While more directed at ArcticStartup’s Finnish readers, I hope these comments proven interesting to all ArcticStartup readers. My experience with startups is mainly through working with Dutch ones and organizing various events in the Netherlands, though having grown up in Silicon Valley I hope I have a somewhat accurate sense of how things work there too.

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Now what kind of a title for a post is that you may ask. It’s a title that is trying to constructively criticise the traditional press about its methods. We’re talking about Slush Helsinki of course.

The sad truth is that the traditional press was uninterested in covering anything from Slush, be it a short article online or a in a more material format. A quick query with Ampparit, a Finnish news aggregator site, results in 0 results about Slush. The irony of this is that the President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, has written an apology e-mail to Helene Auramo, one of the organisers, apologising that she was unable to attend (Helene wrote about this in Jaiku). The press did not bother to reply to any queries about coverage.

This is extremely sad, when Risto Siilasmaa, one of the most successful Finnish entrepreneurs said in his keynote about growth entrepreneurship the responsibility everyone has in times of crisis. He also nodded towards angel investors, as they need to believe more than anybody in these companies to invest in them - when it makes no economical sense whatsoever. Risto also talked about the responsibility of the media - these companies need visibility - ahem ahem, are we the only ones supporting this cause?

Slush Helsinki was an extremely successful event in many different ways. We managed to get the elite of the Finnish growth entrepreneurial scene under one roof for the first time in Finland and in a way that close to 400 people could listen and learn from these experts. This in itself is something that should interest many people, what do these experts have to say about pushing yourself beyond belief in a venture that only you believe in with endless passion - looking to make it big from the Arctic.

However, being able to organise such an event that created so many happy faces, so many positive thoughts about the future of the growth entrepreneurship and so many new deals during a time of huge, unimaginable financial crisis. I believe these sort of events are extremely important as they lay the foundation of hope for something that is crucial to the economy in terms of not only growth, but competition in the international markets when we, Finland especially, cannot count on the support of the more traditional industries such as forestry or machinery.

Then again, Slush Helsinki was not created with support of external financing nor official support from a member of government. It was created out of passion and belief that growth entrepreneurship does and will happen out of the Arctics. Maybe in a few years we can turn to the traditional press and tell them - we told you so.

Apologies for a long rant without any bigger news value (pun intended), but I believe this is an important issue that should be addressed and not only in Finland. We’ll be releasing lots of video material in the coming days to spread the knowledge from the event.

XIHA is a Finnish startup developing XIHA Life, a multilingual social media platform and an online community targeted at people living outside their home country, and the multilingual people around the world. XIHA invites users of any language, but adjusts the user experience to each user so that they only see automatically the content they understand. Despite the current economic climate, XIHA has raised a significant amount of risk capital from a Chinese VC.

Jani comments it’s hard to find risk capital in Finland to support global growth. According to Jani the Finnish VC’s thought the risk was too big. Out of the international VC’s Jani thought Chinese were the best, as they have both money and vision.

The amount of investment was not disclosed. However, the amount is rather significant, as the founder and CTO Jani Penttinen says with it the company will open offices in the US, Switzerland, and China, and will hire ten more people, developers and business roles, to achieve 24h global operations. Another ten will be hired later depending on the economical climate. There is also more money coming if certain growth targets will be hit. XIHA has strong Chinese roots due to Jani working in the country, and Jani’s spouse Sun Xiaowen being Chinese. “Xiha” means ‘fun’ or ‘happy’ in Mandarin Chinese, and also ‘Hip-Hop’ in Cantonese.

As of now, XIHA is still losing money, but the goal is to get to profitability by the end of the year. So far the main income source has been downloadable games, but XIHA is planning to expand to other digital products as well. Below is a quick interview with Jani Penttinen from Slush Helsinki.