The iPhone craze is hot as ever, with over 50,000 developers reportedly registered, 800 million apps downloaded, and VC investments being made to pure-play iPhone firms. Some have commented that cream really rises to the top from the hundreds of new apps daily published in the App Store, but there have been even bigger amount of complaints that lots of great apps or games go unnoticed. A big fuss has also been the pricing competition, reducing prices to 0,99 or even below in order get visibility on the Top lists and drive downloads that way. In my opinion, lots of the aspiring developers should look in the mirror rather than criticize Apple or others for their poor performance.
As sexy a business as iPhone and for example games is, it does not mean that normal business rules would not apply — you cannot just build a product, make it available to the world and expect a huge success. iPhone has been great in that it gives the developers direct access to consumers world-wide. But along with the access comes also a big bunch of responsibilities and headaches. You need to do marketing as well just as in any other business. And that is what most small developers are poor at.
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The Finnish corporation behind the overwhelmingly successful teen community site Habbo Hotel, Sulake, has reported a €4.8 million profit for the financial year 2008. The company also created record sales, up more than 20% in December, closing in at €50 million for the year 2008. Even though Sulake has made a nice profit, there is still plenty of downside to cover in the coming years to make up for all the loss it has accumulated over the years. This is the first year Sulake has reported a profit since its founding in 2000.
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This year’s Red Herring 100 finalists from Europe were announced last week. The competition is held annually to find Europe’s most promising tech companies. This year the list is nicely populated by companies from the Arctic area. More than 40 of the finalists this year come from the geographic area we cover – nicely done! Sweden, Norway and Finland are most represented and after that come Denmark and Estonia. Latvia and Lithuania still shine with their absence.
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Here in the Northern Europe many hard core Web 2.0 developers and entreprneurs follow religiously Diggnation, the famous video show by Kevin Rose (of Digg.com fame and a famous Silicon Valley party kid) and Alex Albrecht.
Now, we’re getting our own except that it’s pink and pretty. Helene Auramo, CEO of Zipipop, and her friend Sanna are Digitytöt (tranlates into Digitalgirls from Finnish). Auramo is a long time fan of Kevin Rose and have been working on the project for some time now with her new team during the weekends, while running Zipipop during the week.
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There’s couple of interesting events well worth visiting coming up.
First one, BarCamp is happening on 4th April in central Helsinki, Finland. Since it’s BarCamp anything is possible. Come along, propose a session, and if there is interest from someone else, then you are up. So prepare things in advance! Un-conference does not mean un-prepared. Sessions can be any format; discussion, Presentation, demo, workshop, the limiting factor is time (and can you make it interesting!). Read more here.
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Even though Skype is not a startup anymore, I believe there is a great story behind this news item. Wall Street Journal has written about Skype, how they are under pressure from eBay stockholders to create more revenue or be sold off. Reports show that Skype has hit 400 million users and has created some $145 million in revenues during the first quarter of 2009.
Sten Tamkivi told us in Tallinn this January that they have seen a rise in Skype usage as the recession hit the finance markets. Seems the figures support this strongly. Even though Skype has been built as a consumer product they are under pressure to create more revenue for their owners. One of the new areas they are targeting is the business communication industry as well as moving into the territory of other Nordic VoIP companies such as Rebtel.
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ArcticStartup is evolving as any healthy venture needs to. After talking to a lot of our readers we are ready to expand our editorial scope towards covering more of what all of us here are so passionate about, not just one industry but startups in general.
We chose the direction that we’re most excited about apart from the area that we already cover. We’re going for cleantech (or greentech depending on what you want to call it)! Irrispective of what you call it, we are now looking for a writer to join our ranks here at ArcticStartup and be a full fledged member of our editorial team.
Not just any blogger though. We are looking for the same passion that drive us each and every day. Naturally, we expect you to know the area of expertise and have something to show for it, be it a job, a resume, magazine articles, a blog, an event you organized, you name it. We are not particularly interested what you’ve done or what you do, as long as you’re passionate about cleantech and everything around it, and want to share what’s happening in the cleantech startup industry in the Northern Europe with our readers.
Some of you might have justified fear what happens to the current editorial that revolves around internet, mobile software startups and growth entrepreneurship. It gets stronger, that’s what! Each week we get a deeper and better view into the Northern European internet and mobile startup industry and each day we are more excited about it. We keep blogging and pushing the scene stronger than ever, now we just have the Northern Europen cleantech startup industry growing with us.
Long story short, If you understand cleantech, are passionate about cleantech startups and would like to share your insight with the world, write to us at info[at]arcticstartup.com. There’s 30 000+ page views a month and 130+ countries following after all, so you’re set for a wide readership. If you’re not sure whether you qualify, write to us anyway. If in doubt whether you know enough about the startup industry in cleantech, write to us anyway. Only thing we absolutely require is passion.
Kind of a catchy title, but it caught your eye – right? Dopplr has just added a new feature titled the Social Atlas. Social Atlas is a simple, yet very useful tool for sharing the places you’ve been to and liked.
It’s an ingenious step towards a new model for sharing and suggesting places around the world. Once you have large anough group of people who share places with you they’ve been to and liked – Dopplr is able to start using these recommendations to filter the locations and make them more relevant and useful for you. A simple, crowdsourced, alternative for a recommendation engine.
We’ve also had a chat with our friends at Dopplr and created a group called ArcticStartup. Feel free to join the group and share your travels with us. The reason is simple – you can see the whereabouts of other people in the field and if you happen to be in the same city, go for a beer. This falls well inline with our mission to enable and promote entrepreneurship in the Nordics and Baltics through better networking. Enjoy!
Grand One 2009, a competition for the Finnish new media scene to showcase their year’s work, came and went. As we wrote earlier on, we got an invitation to partner with Grand One since they want to push the event forward every year and be on the pulse of all things digital, which is nothing short of admirable. This time being on the pulse meant to invite startups to the competition. This was the first time ever! If someone has missed (or ignored) the fact that startups have lately entred the mainstream hear in the Northern Europe and become the cool thing to do, now even they have to recognize the shift: When the marketing scene comes knocking on the door it means you have just hit the mainstreet.
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Ted Valentin, Swedish serial web entrepreneur, has lately been buy building a map mashup empire. Ted disclosed his maps gather 100′000 to 150′000 unique visitors per week at the moment, and growing. That is a great accomplishment considering all services are still mainly targeted for Swedish users.
Ted’s latest service is a hotel map, hotellkartan.se. It essentially aggregates the global hotel infromation from (currently) three services, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia.com. It shows the hotels geographically on top of Google Maps, so that one is able to visually browse the hotels.
The great thing about the service is that you can search for the hotels in a variety of different ways. You can search alphabetically, by rating, by distance from a certain map point, by price – or the cheapest hotel within 1000 m from London Paddington station, for example. In my opinion, this makes it one of the most useful mashups I have ever run across. Having spent much too long a time lately looking for the perfect hotel trying to optimize location and distance along with price and hotel selections from different services, I just love this elegant solution to the problem. Continue reading »
Finland’s Minister of employment and the economy, Mauri Pekkarinen, has announced last week that Finland will be adding more capability to commercialise innovations with a €45 million fund. The fund is put together from governmental organisations such as Tekes and Finnvera’s seed financier Vera.
The aim of the new fund is to attract more international talent from overseas to help the companies grow and also enable more targeted investments. One of the ways international talent is attracted is the financial upside. The goverment is willing to invest into these companies, if a private sector individual (person or organisation) invests. Thus the financial upside is the invested amount in the company.
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Taneli Tikka, Finnish serial web entrepreneur, has told in his personal blog that he will leave the online Muslim community Muxlim’s Board of Directors, and hand over his seat to a “senior International figure in the online media world”. The purpose of the new board member is to “help Muxlim become a world class online media” in order to attract advertisers according to Taneli.
Taneli also notes that he will end his CEO assignment at RunToShop 1st of April, as the company reaches the milestone of getting ready to launch their product for webstores that adds “social layer” of recommendations, reviews, and opinions. But Taneli is not done with RunToShop, instead he will join the company’s Board, and continue putting in part-time effort guiding the firm. Taneli sounds confident RunToShop will have a successful 2009, assisted by the recently finished a new funding round in December.
Taneli states he is now looking for new challenges, either starting a new project or joining something existing, and invites all suggestions.
Traveas, a Swedish travel information startup, has signed a deal with travel agency network European Travel Interactive AB (eTRAVELi). eTRAVELi operates big travel sites under different brands such as Seat24, Supersaver, Flygvaruhuset, EasyT, Töölö, and Travelfinder in seven European countries.
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Due to a absolutely overwhelming demand we have issued 20 new tickets (here) to our 6th pan-regional event taking place in Stockholm, in the Obaren (map) on the 2nd April from 6pm to 9pm. Taking into consideration the size of the venue we cannot issue more than 20 new tickets. If you have a ticket, do let us know ASAP if you can’t make it and we’ll be able to reallocate your ticket. Thanks.
The evening’s theme will be startups and the future of mobile. Come and hear what’s hot in mobile, where we are going, what’s in store for the future and where does the biggest opportunities for mobile startups lie.
Make sure you’ll show up if you get a ticket (they are free!), or you’ll end up on our black list which means there’s no coming to our events in the future.
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BlueWalks is a Swedish startup online service for travelers who enjoy walking and sightseeing. In essence it is a Google Maps mashup, allowing users to browse, create, and share walking tours.
The founders state they want to give travelers a chance to plan their trips easier and faster. In the future, the BlueWalks team also wants to eliminate the need to carry along travel books and other material. The value proposition is users can create and browse unlimited amount of different routes around various points of interest, compared just a few routes typically listed in printed travel guides.
BlueWalks has been founded by an international team of students from the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship (SSES). The team members have roots in Sweden, Spain, Singapore, and China, providing a global view into developing the service. BlueWalks just took part in the international business plan competition Venture Challenge in San Diego, sent as a delegate of SSES. (Well, international in this case seems to mean that out of 25 teams 1 was from Canada, BlueWalks from Sweden, and the other 23 teams from the U.S.) BlueWalks did not get to the final, though.
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The iPhone craze is hot as ever, with over 50,000 developers reportedly registered, 800 million apps downloaded, and VC investments being made to pure-play iPhone firms. Some have commented that cream really rises to the top from the hundreds of new apps daily published in the App Store, but there have been even bigger amount of complaints that lots of great apps or games go unnoticed. A big fuss has also been the pricing competition, reducing prices to 0,99 or even below in order get visibility on the Top lists and drive downloads that way. In my opinion, lots of the aspiring developers should look in the mirror rather than criticize Apple or others for their poor performance.
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