TechCrunch ran a story on Spotify a couple of days ago, where Daniel Ek had commented on some very interesting issues. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke at SXSW and told in his keynote that, Spotify as a service consumes more bandwidth than the whole of Sweden (on certain days that is). Those wondering why Spotify is built in a P2P manner now fully understand the need for such a solution. Ek also commented that it’s a million dollar question why Apple remains to deliver all its digital downloads from a “single source” generating huge amounts of traffic that also need to be paid for.
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Antti Vilpponen
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Spotify’s Monthly Revenues Around 3 Million Euros
ArcticStartup’s Vigo Questionnaire
Disclaimer: This article is targeted mainly for our Finnish readers. We’re working to survey the effects of the Vigo accelerator program on the Finnish startup ecosystem. Other nationalities will surely find it useful once we release the results.
Vigo accelerator program has been a much debated issue here in Finland. Rightly so. It has been promoted with a lot of noise and much to its cause, it is the biggest change in the startup ecosystem for years. Now that it has been up and running for a while, we’d like to know every Finnish reader’s opinion on the program and what you think and know of it.
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Alan Wake Set To Release May 21st In Europe, May 18th In The States
The Finnish Helsingin Sanomat has interviewed Sami Järvi the writer of the game and in the article they also confirm the release dates for Alan Wake. The game is set to be released in Europe on the 21st of May and in the US, a few days earlier, on the 18th. A while back in a “Predictions for 2010″ -post I predicted that the game will be launched a few months late, but it seems that there is no reason at the moment to delay it. After all, the release date is about 2 months away.
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Two More Events To Watch: Frozen Rails And Garage48
A while back we covered this spring’s events in a summary format that ought to interest startups and we further received more events in the comments. If you haven’t checked those out, we strongly suggest to do so. There are also other events in the ArcticIndex events -page, make sure you have a look at that as well. However, I thought of doing a small addition to that list by further promoting two more events that deserve the visibility in my opinion, Frozen Rails and Garage48.
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TradeShift Looking To Further Digitalize Payments
There’s a startup in Denmark that went by the name of Porta for a long time. Since then, they have changed their name to TradeShift. TradeShift is looking to disrupt and shatter the oligopolies of EDI between large corporations and banks so that the technologies could be used by anyone – small and medium sized companies included. The founders of the company include an experienced bunch. They are Christian Lanng, Mikkel Hippe Brun and Gert Sylvest. Not a founder, but onboard the project is also Morten Lund who made himself famous by his personal bankruptcy some two years ago.
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Spotify Signs Exclusive Deal With TeliaSonera Finland
TechCrunch reports that Spotify has signed an exclusive deal with the Finnish side of TeliaSonera. The two year deal will give TeliaSonera the exclusive rights to sell Spotify Premium in Finland. The announcement comes on the same day as TeliaSonera unveils its IPTV service that is complete with a certain selection of television channels, video rentals and Spotify Premium. Spotify signed a similar contract with the Swedish side of TeliaSonera last year and it seems that the deal was worthwhile as the Finnish side of TeliaSonera also went forward with the partnership.
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Crowdsourcing Ideas For ArcticEvenings
As mentioned before in the summary of events for spring 2010, we will be organising three ArcticEvenings this spring. The show will most likely kick off with an ArcticEvening in Helsinki in April followed by ArcticEvenings in Tallinn and Stockholm most probably in May and June respectively. However, this time I thought it would be great to hear your ideas regarding the events and what kind of events you would like to participate this spring.
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Mediatonic Fund I Starts Financing Games and Media Products
Mediatonic Management has closed a 5 million euro fund that will begin to finance games and media products from Finland. The fund has been set up by investments from Fennia insurance, Henki-Fennia insurance as well as the Sonera Pension fund. People behind the fund include Tanu-Matti Tuominen and Marko Tulonen.
The fund is a project and catalog fund that will invest in commercial games, television formats and web services. The fund does not invest into the companies in the manner a venture capitalist would invest, but into the rights of the products and services sold. Therefore the fund’s business model is to take a commission from cash flows generated by the products and services sold.
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Picmeleo Helps Your Users Edit Photos
Picmeleo is a new Finnish photo startup that recently got in touch with us. They’re developing a new kind of service which in essence is a photo editing tool, but positioned in the market in a wise manner. The tool itself is sort of an external application that companies providing services online can add on top of their own service, instead of having to come up with their own tool.
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Fits.me, Lumo Research And GigsWiz Make Plugg.eu Finalists
Three Nordic and Baltic companies have made it to the group of finalists in the Plugg.eu Startups Rally 2010. In total, 116 applications were left to the competition and of these the 20 made it to the final. Plugg.eu is a very entrepreneurship focused conference organised in Brussels, Belgium and we’re happy to one of their media partners promoting the event. The three companies making it into the final are Estonian Fits.me the two Finnish startups Lumo Research and GigsWiz.
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Fuugo Creates A New Kind Of Watching Experience
Fuugo is a new kind of television product created by Axel Technologies, a company based in Turku. You can’t really call Axel Technologies a startup as it has been registered way back in 1988. However, Fuugo is a very interesting concept that requires more analysis into it. Fuugo claims to be the next generation TV application for mobile and handheld devices.
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Summary Of Some Of This Spring’s Startup Events
We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.
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Ideakone Hires Lemmetty, Reveals Future Plans
I had a brief chat this morning with Kai Lemmetty, one of the co-founders of Floobs, a Finnish startup now gone bankrupt. He told me that he has moved on from Floobs to a new startup where he’s helping the team with some new product innovations and bringing in new perspectives to running their business. He’s joined Ideakone, the creators of Kotisivukone (loosely translated as Homepagemachine) and the international version of it, Moogo.
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GrowVC Looking To Disrupt Global VC Business
GrowVC has slowly been marketing their concept in various social media networks and today is the date they’re finally coming out with the concept and explaining it to the public. Back in December I had a chat with Valto Loikkanen, one of the co-founders of the company, and he told me the concept has been in finetuning for the last two years or so. They’ve put in a lot of effort to make sure their companies are registered and managed in the right way so that they are ready to scale once things start taking off.
The concept GrowVC is looking to disrupt is the age old venture capital business model. Many have complained that while business models in the online and mobile world have been turned upside down, one model remains loyal to the way business is done and that’s the model of investing money into startups. Furthermore, the need for capital has gone down dramatically making smaller private investors more potential investors in startups than larger venture capitalists.
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RedLynx Sells 1.5 Million Games in 2009
Back in January we wrote about the Finnish multi platform gaming house RedLynx surpassing the half a million sales mark for their TrialsHD game on the XBOX 360. Last week they announced that altogether they have sold over 1.5 million games in 2009. Last year, they published four games Trials HD (Xbox LIVE Arcade), Monster Trucks Nitro (PC), Monster Truck Nitro (iPhone) and DrawRace (iPhone).
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