I ask myself pretty often why there is so much great web innovation coming from Sweden. Really awesome ideas and startups are much less common in my home country Germany, despite a population almost ten times as large as Sweden’s.
This time, it’s a new service called MyClubCards that caught my attention. MyClubCards offers a mobile application (currently iPhone only) which people who are members of one or more loyalty programs can use to collect points when paying in a store. So imagine you have club cards from three different loyalty programs that you carry in your wallet. Instead of that, you can add those cards to your MyClubCards collection by simply entering the program name and your personal customer number. MyClubCards generates a barcode for each of those cards, which you can show to the cashier next time you want to use your card at a point of sale. Instead of scanning the physical card, the cashier scans the barcode on your phone.
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Are Nordic countries particularly entrepreneurial? How do our societies perceive entrepreneurship as a career choice?
The perception already exists that the Nordic countries are among the most innovative in the world. The two most recent and comprehensive rankings supporting this belief came from the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Boston Consulting Group, both published in April 2009. The first of these studies ranked Japan as the most innovative country in the world, while in the second Singapore was at the top of the list. Nevertheless, Finland and Sweden ranked in the top ten for both reports, while Denmark and Norway also ranked impressively.
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The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.
The two online legs of an old media company are typically classifieds and editorially driven news sites. Alma’s classifieds segment, which includes such assets as the housing site Etuovi.com and jobs site Monster.fi, posted a loss of €0.7m with an €27m revenue. Sanoma doesn’t give out any information on its online classifieds.
On the online news side, Alma publishes Iltalehti.fi, the biggest website in Finland by unique visitors. Although the full year figures for the asset were not disclosed today, the Q1/09 report from April states a revenue of €1.2m, so the annual income is likely to be around the €5m mark. Given that Iltalehti.fi relies mainly on journalistic content, the site is – after full allocation of editorial costs – most likely loss-making or, if they’re lucky, posting a very small profit.
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A week ago, Facebook’s Zuckerberg said we don’t need privacy:
Many posts were written about how he’s wrong. He is wrong. I’m sure he knows it. However, framing the debate around the “trend of openness” draws attention away from the fact that FB is bursting blood vessels trying to think of ways to monetize all that information we keep adding, and is thinking less and less about the morality of this option versus that one.
The first volley arrived in the form of updated privacy settings, which gave you the option of sticking to the custom, stronger privacy settings you may have set before, or quickly clicking “accept” and suddenly have most of your content shown to practically anyone. EFF and others have commented quite thoroughly on the less-than-savory methods that were employed.
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Some ten years back I was fascinated about the stories Nokia told about the upcoming technological evolution of mobile phones. As a Finn, I was of course proud of Nokia’s success, and almost religiously believed in Anssi Vanjoki’s preaches. He said that in a few years, most of the cellphones would contain a camera, and a significant portion will also have a GPS receiver. Nokia would be shaping the markets dramatically. Now we can see that it was true.
In parallel with the device evolution, irreversible changes have emerged in business, communication, information, personal and social life and wherever you can imagine, along with the internet era. We have changed our behavior, thinking, expectations and so on because of so many internet-enabled services. We have learned to want services and tools that work. No more can we tolerate applications the setup or use of which requires a technical expert. And frankly, we want it and often get it for free. A great range of software applications, services, hosting, disk space, whatever – in practice for free. Just select what you like most.
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Guest post by Andy Cars, CEO of Seedcap. Andy evaluates hundreds of business ideas each year giving him an in-depth understanding of what it takes to succeed in a global market.
Seedcap AB help entrepreneurs and start-ups to raise capital. Here’s Andy’s 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital.
1. Trying to raise money too late
Raising money is time consuming. Count with an absolute minimum of 3 months, with a more likely scenario being 5 – 7 months.
2. Trying to raise money too early
There should be a logical relationship between the perceived value of the company in need of cash and the amount of cash to be raised. Trying to raise significant sums simply based on an idea usually fails, which leads us to point 3 below:
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Guest post by Daiva Naravaite, co-founder of AlpinaSearch. AlpinaSearch is a provider of global Search, Selection & On-boarding services for innovative start-ups and their investors.
Who would have believed that the country with the highest mobile subscription rate worldwide (138% as per World Economic Forum’s World Competitiveness report), the broadest high-speed mobile broadband coverage and the densest network of public internet access points in Europe is the small nation of Lithuania, sandwiched between Latvia, Belarus, Poland, Kaliningrad and the Baltic sea?
Prompted by comments I heard on numerous occasions (including geeky ArcticStartup and TechCrunch events), and equally inspired by the enthusiastic entrepreneurial community in Lithuania, I thought I’ll share a few facts.
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Somewhat surprisingly, one of the most efficient wind turbines on the market is coming from Finland. A good reason for us to shed some light on WinWinD and their excellent products. Jari Varjotie, the COO of WinWinD, took some time out of his schedule to answer my questions.
WinWinD was established in 2000 in the city of Oulu in Finland. The founder, Jouko Tiuraniemi, has a long career in the field of energy. In 1995 Tiuraniemi started to think about a new, highly efficient wind turbine, as he realized that the key to success was not to try to compete on their terms with the Germans and Danes who were dominating the market, but to create a turbine that would be technically superior. WinWinD chose the Multibrid technology as basis for the WWD turbine, and going forward with the Multibrid low speed technology was the first strategically important decision for the company. In 2001 the WWD-1 wind turbine pilot project was completed. The WWD-3, a 3 Megawatt turbine, followed in 2004.
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Jerri Laine is the CEO at Innavation Manager where he helps companies with their Tekes and T&E-Centre funding proposals.
Tekes, shorthand for the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, is publicly funded expert organisation for financing research, development and innovation in Finland.
I have been asked this question dozens of times – as in the past I have been working in Tekes for seven years in evaluating all kinds of project proposals.
Since the year 2000 Tekes has grown to an icon of Finland’s innovation success story and it has had its implications. Tekes’ budget has grown remarkably, it’s staff has been grown and changing and it has got a lot of new norms, instructions and directives from it’s owner Ministry, from internal inspections and of course from EU. In short Tekes has got bureaucratic.
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When talking about car manufacturing, one normally thinks of Germany, Italy, France, Japan and the USA. Finland, on the other hand, comes seldom to one’s mind. That much more interesting it is to see that a plug-in hybrid is build right here in Finland, the Fisker Karma.
The Karma is, as Fisker puts it, “a beautiful and environmentally friendly car for people who do not want to compromise luxury”. The car uses a small gasoline engine which turns the generator that charges the lithium ion battery pack, which powers the car in normal use. You can configure the car so that it comes with a solar roof which helps to charge the car. The car drives 80 km before it starts to run on gasoline, and it seats four plus sufficient place for luggage. Finally, the design is beautiful, and conveys the image of speed and luxury.
Valmet Automotive is the company building the car in Finland. Valmet signed the deal with Fisker Automotive in November 2008 and production will start an the end of 2009. Their plan is to reach a volume of 15.000 cars per year, while the contract between Valmet and Fisker runs for several years. The reason that Valmet was chosen over their competitors was the quality and speed necessary to reach Fisker’s production goals, and because more than half of Fisker’s sales are expected outside of North America: Valmet represents an ideal international foothold, according to Fisker Automotive CEO, Henrik Fisker.
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The guest post is written by Niko Nyman, a Finnish consultant and a flash developer, with former careers in graphic design, web strategy, and music production. He has also co-written a book about social media called Yhteisöllinen media ja muuttuva markkinointi 2.0 (In Finnish). As a former professional musician Niko has a unique perspective to observe and comment on the current state of digital music industry, its latest darling Spotify and the challenges it faces against established players like Apple. You can find our previous post on Spotify here, where Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder, discusses the rivalry with iTunes.
Spotify is growing strongly, and everybody seems to be talking about it. Spotify even made the news on Finnish national TV last week! It’s David Bowie’s music like water pouring down the internets, and if Mr. Bowie’s 2002 epiphany is to be believed, the aging 20th century music industry will exist no more after three years. Three years!
(See also music like water, as popularized by Gerd Leonhard.)
So what is the future of Spotify?
It is difficult to envision any other serious competitor for Spotify but Apple. I find it quite brave of the small Spotify to go against the big Apple in the music market — and they will go against each other, even if they do not yet compete directly. I’m not claiming to have any information on either company (I haven’t even done my research, really) so this is just speculation, mainly to entertain my tired brain after work.
Here are a couple of possible scenarios for what might lie in Spotify’s future:
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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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Editorial note: We’re publishing Kristoffer’s report from Seedcamp as they made it to the semi-finals for screening. Depending on the feedback we’ll see if we should make this a habit in the future as well. Please let us know in the comments. Thanks to Kristoffer for an excellent report!
On the left two founders from Uniki, Teemu and Tuomas from Scred and Adil and Anthony from Entrip.
Last week we got fantastic news. Scred had been shortlisted as one of only about 40 companies to be interviewed by Seedcamp’s distinguished panel — a group of prestigious international VCs. Considering that several hundred companies, from all around Europe (and even some from outside) had applied, this was huge for us. In fact Scred is the first Finnish company to make it that far, and was one of only two Nordic companies present.
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