Archive for February 2009

Mobile Video Streaming Service Bambuser Slowly Gaining Ground

by Ville Vesterinen, February 27, 2009 — 2 Comments

bambuserA mobile video streaming service Bambuser has made new inroads in Sweden. The service is much (if not exactly) like the US based Qik. Bambuser just announced that they released a widely improved version of our application for Symbian S60 and UIQ.

The problem with live mobile video is two fold: First is latency, which kills any meaningful interaction when it passes a certain very low limit. Second, inverserly correlated with the fist one, is the video quality one is streaming. Naturally, a bad quality kills not only the ablity to interact, but quite successfully also the ability to watch the video at all. These two together are the main culprits to why live mobile video streaming has delivered such a terrible user experience.

But now, in order to keep you as close to real-time as possible Bambuser will drop a few frames here and there which often still allows you to get a good video, but will also store any dropped frame or audio that can’t get through while you’re live and give you the option to complete your video with this data immediately after your live broadcast. This allows Bambuser to keep latency at a minimum while also providing the viewer with a perfect video when watching on demand. Read more about the release here. In addition to the released version for Symbian S60 and UIQ, we have also heard that the company is coming out with a iPhone version soon.

This in itself is newsworthy, but there’s more.

Swedish TV4 used Bambuser as a part of their Live talk show “Kvällsöppet” on Swedish national TV. Bambuser was used to provide a live feed from the home of blogger Marcus Birro who couldn’t be there in person but took part in the discussion from a distance.

Now, this might sound like a small thing but when put it in a historical context it can be yet again that little snowball that eventually will turn into an avalanche of mainstream. I am not sure whether the big mainstream will ever see a service just like a Bambuser or Qik, but the concept just took another step: To misquote Neil Armstrong, where this was perhaps a small step for TV4, it could be a giant leap for streaming mobile video even though nobody can tell before we can look at it from the comfort of hindsight. The exact format, device, usage culture and context and much of others things around it will change and evolve, but in one form or another, I believe, there is something interesting about to happen with traditional media practically all but dying. Streaming mobile video might be just a piece to whatever is about the emerge, but I believe it has its role to play.

Tweehouse Scores 350 000 Euro From Tekes

by Ville Vesterinen, February 26, 2009 — 1 Comment

tweehouseTweehouse, a 6 months old Finnish MMO gaming startup that was spun from Valve, has received 3500 000 euro from who else than Tekes, Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.

Tweehouse got the grant to assist in the ongoing development of TrunkTech, an end-to-end technology platform designed to develope games in co-operation with a U.S. based games publisher. With the grant Tweehouse team will be able to grow its current size of nine developers and designers in Finland and additional marketers and producers in Los Angeles, CA. They just got their first game out, Eco-Rangers. A good start, even though according to the team it’s only a mere poke at the market compared to what’s in the plans: The Eco-Rangers was mainly a marketing campaign for Taco Bell in the US, whereas TrunkTech will be published as SaaS (’Software as a Service’) later in 2009 and used as the core engine in buiding of many more massively multi-player applications or even in virtual worlds.

The startup has a rather unusual business model. I quote myself here from the previous post on the company:

Tweehouse will target purely US market in the beginning. For this Snap TV is an ideal partner [for Tweehouse] 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.

…

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.

As Paavo Perttula of Tweehouse notes, Finnish success in gaming is partly due to the long tradition stemming from the very active demo scene of the 80’s. Along with the demo scene, the Finnish goverment has had an active role contributing to the success as well. In 2007, the Finnish technology fund (Tekes) gave in excess of 6M euros in government grants to gaming initiatives, whereas the combined figure for the whole of the EU was 21M euros. This time it was Tweehouse’s turn to give the international expansion a try, and based on the progress so far they are on schedule. Congratulations to the team and good luck!

Sun Microsystems Open Storage – Save On Storage Costs

by Sponsor, February 25, 2009 — Leave a Comment

The recently launched Sun Open Storage systems combine open-source software with industry-standard hardware, enabling you to reduce your reliance on high-priced systems and achieve significant savings on storage costs. Sun is holding a breakfast seminar in Espoo to tell more about this ground breaking and unique approach to storing data.

The informative breafast takes place on
Wednesday March 4th 2009 at 8.30-12.00
at Stella Business Park, Stella Terra, Auditorio Corona
(address Lars Sonckin kaari 16, 02600 Espoo)

AGENDA
8.30-9.00 Registration and breakfast
9.00-9.45 Significant changes in the cost structure of storage through utilization of open architecture
Timo Danilotschkin, Director, Storage,Sun Microsystems Nordics
9.45-10.00 Break
10.00-11.00 Open storage technologies and solutions
Pasi Haatanen, Product Manager, Sun Microsystems Finland
11.00-11.30 Demo and discussion
Pasi Haatanen, Product Manager, Sun Microsystems Finland

NOTE: Presentations will be held in Finnish!

You can register for the event here.

According the the company, the recent launch has sparked some previously unseen excitement in Sun’s partners and customers. Here’s what Sun’s CEO Jonathan Swartz said about it:

[.]..high-performance Open Storage appliances, are quite possibly the
hottest products Sun has ever produced. In fact, in three to five years
Sun may be better known for storage than it is for servers.

The comments on our blogs have also been very exciting:

Bryan, I not only work for a competitor you are going after but I also
worked in Solaris in a previous life. Somehow I guess I bleed purple!
Lets just say that the SEs here are running scared as in head-to-head
deal after deal, you guys are coming in at half our discounted price!
The only ‘defense’ against this project and the 7000 series machines is
to try to point potential customers to Sun’s stock price, its prospects,
FUD about Sun being bought over, no reference customers, etc. In other
words, Fishworks seems to be impossible to defend on merit…

Sun will hold events similar to the one taking place in Espoo on March 4th in the Baltic states as well: March 10th in Vilnius, March 11th in Riga and March 12th inTallinn. For more information on the events or in case of any questions please contact Jonna.Tuovinen [at] sun.com More information on Sun’s Open Storage systems is available at here.

Also, don’t forget Sun’s Startup Essentials program! Please find out more about the program here.  It’s totally free – and for a limited time only each new member will get an invitation to join Spotify – also our SSE program member. Rock on!

Disclaimer: Sun Microsystems is ArcticStartup’s Sponsor for February.

Monty Strikes Again And Invests In MoiPal

by Antti Vilpponen, February 25, 2009 — 5 Comments

MoiPalMonty Widenius, one of the founders of MySQL whom later made a successful $1B exit, has invested through Open Ocean Capital to MoiPal – Ironstar Helsinki’s social gaming world. We previously told Monty investing into Against Intuition.

“I am excited to invest in the MoiPal world and help it grow even faster in the future”, says Monty. “I have always been interested in virtual worlds and seen how the communities around them continue to grow. The thing that really stands out to me with MoiPal, is the way it combines the social networking aspects similar to Facebook, with the caring of your online character, like you do with Tamagotchis or in games like Sims. I am looking forward to adding educational aspects into the game, so that players learn useful things while they play. When you combine this with open interfaces and engage developers out there to expand our world in their own directions, I think we can achieve something really Great!”

“We are thrilled to have Monty on board”, says Joakim Achrén, founder of Ironstar Helsinki. “The investment will give us a stable ground for growing MoiPal to the top league.” With such strong words from the founder – it can be argued that the investment is in the seven-figures, even though it is not disclosed.

MoiPal has gathered some 120 000 members during its first year of operations. The company has some interesting innovation in the pipeline as well, they are adding open API’s for developers to leverage on the sprites in the game as well an Open Social Application approach so anyone can participate in extending the virtual world.

It seems that during the last 12 months we’ve reported on a lot more investments from well known investors than during the boom times. Congrats to the MoiPal team for scoring an excellent investment and a resource that Monty definitely is.

Twitbear Defies Twitter With Commenting

by Antti Vilpponen, February 24, 2009 — 3 Comments

Twitbear LogoThree Finnish Jaiku fans have created a service called Twitbear that describes itself as “enabling conversations around tweets”. Antti Akonniemi, CEO of Kisko Labs, Kai Lemmetty, co-founder of Floobs and Helene Auramo, CEO of Zipipop came up with the service after Jaiku had started crashing fairly often after Google announced it would pull the plug from it las January.

The service itself is based around threaded communication and is currently in closed beta. At the moment, it pulls tweets from Twitter and adds the comments to the service itself – enabling the threaded communication that many other services have tried to pull off, inluding Tweetree. In essence it is a microblogging platform that pulls part of its data from Twitter. According to the creators of Twitbear – services like Friendfeed are too manyfold and difficult to use, something that many former Jaiku fans can agree with, I’m sure.

Only a handful of users have received invitations to the service and each registered user is given 5 invitations to share. It’s nice to still see innovation around threaded conversations, something that remains to be tackled with a proper service. Jaiku had a good try at it, but with Google buying the service – development came to a halt. I’ve personally noticed many Finns beginning to use Brightkite, a service similar to Jaiku. It remains to be seen which will be the service that will take off outside Twitterdom – or do we need one?

Adobe and Nokia Fund New Cross-Platform Flash Concepts

by Miikka Kukkosuo, February 23, 2009 — 1 Comment

Open Screen Project logoAt GSMA Mobile World Congress last week, Adobe and Nokia announced Open Screen Project fund aimed for helping developers create new applications and services for mobile, desktop and consumer electronics devices using Adobe’s Flash Platform. The initial size of the fund is $10 million.

All developers can now submit concepts for new applications. The focus areas are not that limited; you can enter with apps on entertainment, business, social networking, productivity, gaming, travel, multimedia, health, finance, weather, sports, news, education, etc… The requirements are that the applications are based on the Adobe Flash Platform, will run on Nokia devices, and will work on multiple screens, including mobile, desktop and consumer electronics devices. The review criteria focuses on the innovativeness of the concept, appeal of the UI, robustness the application or planned implementation, and how well the application exploits the capabilities and features of Nokia devices, Adobe Flash (including Flash Lite) and Adobe AIR. It is stated in the fund’s FAQ that of special interest are connected applications leveraging core Nokia device capabilities such as camera, location/GPS, and user contacts. The concepts will be reviewed by “mobile and desktop application and services experts” at Adobe and Nokia. Accepted concepts will receive 25% of the agreed financing upfront and 75% upon project completion.

Open Screen Project ScreenshotOpen Screen Project is an industry initiative led by Adobe, aiming to provide consumers richer, more interactive, and more consistent user experience for web content and standalone applications on televisions, set-top boxes, mobile devices and other consumer devices. Adobe has gathered over 20 members aboard so far, including the top 5 mobile phone manufacturers, Intel, Qualcomm, and Verizon. The vision of Open Screen Project is to “Enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere.” The key is to establish a consistent runtime environment across different platforms and environments,  by reducing the fragmentation of devices, operating systems, and browsers.

So far Flash has a wide reach, considering numerous operating systems and devices, and and existing community of over million developers. Adobe is no doubt trying very hard to make Flash the de facto standard of mobile and the new converging web devices as well. Sun Microsystems is challenging Adobe in the runtime race by the introduction of JavaFX framework, which is boasted to provide simplicity and ease of design similar to Flash, but with much more extensive scripting features. Sun is also targeting e.g. IPTV and set top box manufacturers among others with JavaFX. In terms of installed base Flash has gotten a lot of head, though, with stated close to 40 percent of all new mobile devices shipped with Flash Lite in 2008. Adobe also just released Flash Lite Distributable player for over-the-air distribution of Flash Lite applications.

Interview With Oricane

by Antti Vilpponen, February 20, 2009 — Leave a Comment

OricaneOricane is a Swedish software company, making a difference in energy consumption. The company has had a strong track record with research into the technology they are now capitalising. One of our contributors, Daiva Naravaite founder of AlpinaSearch, had a quick interview with Fredrik Kallioniemi one of the founders of Oricane.

Daiva: Fredrik, what does Oricane do?

Fredrik: Oricane is a Green software company and our award winning technology is based on patented energy saving algorithms that makes decision processes in software more efficient, we can for example make packet classification and packet forwarding, more efficient.

Daiva: What is your signature product?

Fredrik: Oricane´s flagship product, BioCAM is an innovative solution to well known addressing scalability issues in the core Internet. Internet infrastructure is rationalized, bringing significant lowered costs and reduced power consumption by 75-95% depending on application. BioCAM and is also available in a mobile edition, which is an energy saving IT-security software solution designed for tomorrow´s mobile surfers that request not only a firewall when surfing but also an environmentally engaged operator and increased battery life time in the mobile device.

Daiva: So what else is in the pipeline?

Fredrik: Oricane is also developing an indexing and search engine based on a completely new technology adapted for large “enterprise search” applications. This will be launched under the product name BioDEX. It is a generic self learning search engine for a variety of applications including directory services (i.e., phone directories), data centers, web indexing, and digital communities. BioDEX is also available in a mobile edition that is a patented solution for compressing, storing and searching information in mobile phones and other small devices.

Daiva: How different are both products?

Fredrik: Whereas BioCAM addresses energy efficiency issues when transporting information through the network, BioDEX addresses energy efficiency when information is stored and searched.

Daiva: It looks to me that with this technology you could ambitiously address the world’s entire software industry? How?

Fredrik: We specialize in developing methods, technologies and software components to enable computer programs to “do a lot with little”. Quite simply, efficiency!

Thanks to Daiva for the Interview!

Skype Spear Heading A Bigger Change

by Ville Vesterinen, February 19, 2009 — 1 Comment

skype and nokiaWhatever you say about the materialized synergies of Ebay and Skype after Ebay paid $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock in 2005 to acquire the IP telephony trail blazer, Skype is currently really making me smile by changing the landscape.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the spiraling global economics outlook, Skype last year earned US$550 million in revenue, a 44 per cent rise, year on year. During the last ArcticEvening that we held in Tallinn, Stem Tamkivi, Skype’s Chief Evangelist, told me during the panel that interestingly Skype actually saw the economic downturn coming quite early as their usage started to rise like it has not risen in years.

Not only that, according to PCWorld, Skype maintains that separate research points to 95 per cent of business users saving money using it, with about a third cutting their phone bills by half. Almost 80 per cent of the survey of ‘Skype for Business‘ users, showed that nearly 80 per cent had seen an increase in productivity and were working closer with their co-workers because of using Skype … [And] the research shows that some 62 per cent of business subscribers were using Skype to better communicate with their customers. Some impressive figures. For us, here at ArcticStartup, this is clear sign of the times.

Mark my words. If it wasn’t clear to you before that IP Telephony was taking its next significant step speeded up by the economic belt tightening in the firms, now it should be crystal clear and I believe we see sigficant even if gradual changes very soon in the way small businesses and individual employees start to exploit this opportunity in cross border communication.

I already personally make 100% of my business calls to Tallinn via Skype. Many firms in Estonia have even a separate Skype button on their website to contact them via Skype. This is surely something we could take upon and start running our business more wisely, not only across the Scandinavia and Baltics, but globally.

Yes, some still claim it does not cut it when it comes to the quality of the sound, and you just can’t afford to have a bad connection when you’re talking to customers. A fair point. But Skype 4.0, should now offer higher quality audio, through ’super wideband audio’ and a new bandwidth manager for video calling.

And we’re not alone in our praise. The Finish giant, Nokia, has also made a big move. On Tuesday Nokia announced that they are planning to fully integrate Skype into their devices:

The first Skype-enabled Nokia N97 devices will be rolling out from the third quarter. Using Skype on your S60 device isn’t new, but the level of integration with the service and the device is. Skype won’t be running as a separate application, but actually plugged directly into your contacts…

Congratulations for both companies and especially to the users. I have high expectations and it makes me hopeful seeing Nokia having the balls to stand up to the operators. The same enabler that works for small businesses can do much more for the developing countries, which are exactly the markets where Nokia is strong. This announcement alone could mean a bigger chance towards a higher quality of life over time to many people in developing countries than a whole lot of World Bank projects together. Yes, there’s a long way to go and now for example the WiFi hotspots are few and far in between in the least developed countries, but there’s still a lot of people who can benefit from this from South America to Africa.

ArcticStartup Visitor Traffic Statistics

by Ville Vesterinen, February 19, 2009 — 7 Comments

internet trafficMany people come to asking about our readership, where our readers come from and how fast we’re growing as a blog. These conversation have many times spurred very interesting conversations and made me analyze the value we provide much more closely as I would’ve otherwise done. I’m always thankful for all the comments and questions, since they make us think about how to build the blog into a more valuable destionation to our readers to visit and what they are most interested in reading.

The other days when I was reading a blog post by an American VC, Fred Wilson, who has probably the most read VC blog in the world, I realized that I have never told you directly those figures, even though the very conversations spurred by the numbers have been so valuable to us. So here goes.

We get little over 10 000 unique visitors a month and about 30 000 page views (and we very rarely cut the blog post so that you need to click to ‘Read more’ to see the rest of the story as for example TechCrunch does, since this effectively double’s the page views as the site loads again. A nice trick to fool the advertisers) . RSS subscribers we have about 600. All of this traffic is originating from no less than 130 countries. Yes, the growth has been very rapid as we are just little over one year old. But where it gets interesting is when we go beyond the pure readership.

Amazingly, we get a lot of the traffic from Facebook. I have pulled a feed from the blog to my Twitter account, which I have in turn plugged-in my Facebook status update, effectively cross- posting ArcticStartup blog updates to the services I use the most and where most of my social graph resides. Before I had my personal Twitter feed pulled to Facebook and all the @messages made little sense to my Facebook friends, I just recently decided to pull the ArcticStartup blog specific Twitter feed there, but for some reason it’s not working very well. Antti, Miikka and Karri all seem to import AS blog posts in different way to Facebook.  I believe Miikka imports the blog post as notes, whereas Antti and Karri occasionally post them manually. I might be wrong here though.

Equally interesting is the traffic coming from Twitter. This traffic has and is growing fast as the Nordic and Baltic countries are familiarising themselves with the new micromessaging communication tool. I’m quite certain we’re about the see a similar boom in Twitter adoptation as we saw with Facebook which didn’t leave anyone cold.  That said, It might take longer than it took for Facebook to swipe across the Nordic and Baltic countires. This is because it is not as easy to see the value in Twitter as it is in Facebook. Facebook most people got almost instantly and started visiting the site franticly already after the first week. With Twitter it takes much longer time which can mean from several weeks to months depending on how many people you start following. I also believe it’s not only in how many people you follow, it just takes time to build the habit of going back to the page (or client) and see the value in jumping on and off the funny stream of links and info bits. And some people might not ever get there. Still, I think it’s going to grow fast and we’re about the feel that also here in the arctics. It’s going to be the most talked about the service of 2009 and it’s going to be felt in every company and school.

arcticstartup statistics

Even more interesting the the traffic sources are the list of countries where the traffic is coming from. I find it nothing short of amazing that we receive traffic on average from 130 countries. Needless to say our readership is truly global.  The top 10 consists of the usuals suspects of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, The United States and UK, but what more interesting ones are India and The Netherlands. This is a clear measure of the activity around the technology startups in those countries.

arcticstartup statistics

photo by “abnelphoto.com”

Sfeed Is Twitter For Everything You Want To Have

by Ville Vesterinen, February 18, 2009 — 8 Comments

sfeedSfeed, an Estonian startup, is capitalizing on the popularity and dynamics of Twitter by introducing a service that let’s you follow a stream of updates that center around physical objects that people like be it a sofa, a designer watch or a Blade Runner movie (Yes, I ‘Sfeeded’ all of the above). Accordingly, the service is called a shopping microblog.

In a similar fashion to Twitter, in Sfeed you can follow people and instead of status updates you then see the objects they have ’sfeeded’ in your home stream. When you find a person with a similar taste to yours you can follow them and start receiving all their ’sfeeded’ objects which in effect are likely to be stuff you like as well. Once you have chosen to like (sfeed) a few objects, the service starts to understand to recommend more objects to you based on what you have liked in the past. Simple, but quite powerful and addictive as I have come to find out.


sfeed.com introduction from sfeed on Vimeo.

To add products you need to add an easy-to-use bookmarlet to your bookmark toolbar. Once you see an interesting item while visiting an online store just click the bookmarklet and it highlights the item, add it’s name and the service automatically adds it to your Sfeed feed. The bookmarklet can be added to most common browsers, namely Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. I added an item from a tiny Finnish t-shirt store, Puoti.fi. It worked nicely without any problems, so either Sfeed guys have already an agreement with the small store, or they add everybody and get a commission only from the bigger ones like Amazon before they get to the small ones.

You can also create sets (see my set below) and build your set on top of say a photo of your living room. This way you can immediately see whether the objects you have chosen to the set fit in your living room interior. Nifty! Similarly you can post a link of your own sets to Twitter, Facebook, all the other usual suspects or embed an html snippet to your website.

Since the service is build around physical things that are sold in stores, it’s not such a stretch to figure out possible business models for the service, which can go from commission to advertising and everything in between as long as there is enought traffic. As hinted above, currently Sfeed’s chosen method of monetization is referral sales commission (there is a link to a store that carries the item in question right next to it). That said, a sfeed like service isn’t very hard for a service like Fruugo to copy and direct the traffic to their partner merchants, which is a natural consequency of Sfeed being such a simple, clever and easy to implement service. Sfeed was build on Amazon Web Services and financed by a round of seed funding in 2008. Then again, there’s always ton of quirky little sites and products that Fruugo or might not be able to get or want to get in their selection, and it actually seems that the two work together quite nicely. Although, I doubt it whether Sfeed will ever get a commission from Fruugo, as Fruugo itself is asking a commission from its merchants.

All said, I very much enjoyed using the service and will make sure to visit again to find more aspirational things I would like to see in my living room.

ArcticEvening Helsinki Registration Open

by Antti Vilpponen, February 18, 2009 — 3 Comments

ArcticEvening Tallinn
ArcticEvening in Tallinn was a success in January.

ArcticEvening Helsinki registration is open. You can get your free ticket below. ArcticEvening will be held in Dubrovnik Lounge and Lobby on the 3rd of March, from 6pm to 9pm.

Just to summarise, we’ll have one excellent panel on startup financing with Artturi Tarjanne, Jussi Harvela, Nils Forsblom and Jouko Kiesi. These gentlemen have a lot of experience and I’m sure we’ll hear some interesting stories. You can read more about the panelists on the ArcticEvening page.

Sponsors
We’d also like to thank our sponsors Sombiz and Hammarström Puhakka Partners for making the event possible.

Get your ticket here:

Sold out!

Connected Day Attracts Popular Board Directors

by Antti Vilpponen, February 17, 2009 — 2 Comments

ConnectedDayThe Finnish business paper Kauppalehti has dugg up some interesting facts about ConnectedDay, the Finnish based startup that focuses around photographing and videoing children in day care centres. The photos and videos can then be shared with parents wanting to have an eye on their children while at work.

Sari Baldauf, a former Nokia Networks chief, has invested into the company and now owns 25 percent stake in it. Risto Siilasmaa, another well known investor has invested into the company with a 35 percent stake in it. According to Timo Airisto, CEO of ConnectedDay, Siilasmaa and Baldauf are seen as both investors and mentors to the company.

According to the Finnish tax authority, the company had no revenues in 2007 and according to Airisto, last year was still in the red, but they are looking to break even this year.

MySQL Founder Invests In WOT

by Antti Vilpponen, February 17, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Web of TrustEsa Suurio, one of the guys behind Web of Trust or WOT being developed by Against Intuition, tweeted about Michael “Monty” Widenius’ investment into their company. Web of Trust produces a browser addon that keeps you acknowledged of unsafe websites, online scams, spyware, etc. The service works in a crowdsourced manner where by other web users rate websites and let other webusers know of unsafe web destinations. Esa Saario also told in his tweet that the addon has now been downloaded more than 3 million times.

Monty Widenius is one of the founders behind MySQL. He sold the company in January 2008 to SUN Microsystems for a billion dollars. It is one of the all time success stories of Nordic technology startups. Monty invested through his Open Ocean -venture company. The amount of the investment was not disclosed, but he will be taking a board of directors’ seat with the investment. WOT does not disclose how the money will be spent.

Nokia Launches Ovi (App) Store

by Miikka Kukkosuo, February 16, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Nokia Ovi logo

Nokia has just announced at Mobile World Congress that the company will launch its own app store called Ovi Store, as was rumored. It was expected that Nokia places this service under its global Internet services brand Ovi.

But it will not  be just an “app” store – Ovi Store will serve ringtones, wallpapers, videos, podcasts, applications and games in various languages like Java, Flash lite, widgets. The Ovi Store will thus replace Nokia’s previous services like Download!, Mosh, and Nokia Software Market, thus greatly unifying and simplifying the consumer content offering of Nokia. Interestingly, Ovi Store features social discovery, meaning that users will be recommended and promoted content which is used by their social network. Also location aware featuring will be supported by Nokia. The social features will be supported apparently by at least Facebook and MySpace, who both give a statement in Nokia’s press release.

Nokia Ovi Consumer main imageDevelopers are offered 70 % of the revenue share, similarly Apple App Store. However, the net revenue will hugely depend whether the consumers use credit card or operator billing – they will have the option to choose the method. According to Nokia’s experience on N-Gage billing, vast majority of the consumers select operator billing when given the choice. It is unsure whether it would be possible to offer slightly lower price for credit card purchases to encourage this option – it is unlikely, though, given Nokia needs the approval the operators to include the store in the operator phone variants.

I have not been able to try out the actual user experience yet, but if Nokia has taken note from their cumulated learnings with previous services and Apple, this could be a major boost to the company’s content business and the S40 and S60 software ecosystem. After all, S60 has been, and still is, the platform of choice for many application developers due to the sheer handset volumes in the market. In the gaming market Nokia has a tough task in competing with iPhone, though.

In the beginning, only selected content providers and publishers are allowed to publish in the store, but Nokia will gradually open up the support to all developers. Developers can register for the Ovi Store at publish.ovi.com.

Yandex Launches Yandex Answers

by Antti Vilpponen, February 16, 2009 — 1 Comment

Yandex AnswersSeems like innovation is diminishing at least on some level, since now the Russian search giant Yandex has launched their own Q&A service. Yandex Answers is similar to many of its rivals in the western world, like Yahoo Answers. Yandex Answers is not alone however – Google has its own service as does Mail.ru.

Yandex Answers has an added value to the service however. It has readily indexed more than 4.5 million questions and 14.4 million answers from various blogs and forums. This should give it a head start compared to its rivals. On top of these, the regular Yandex member can answer the questions as an expert on the topic. Currently the only visible business model on the site is advertising.