The marketplace is crowded with products with no soul. I’ve always wondered who creates the masses of these terrible products and why they don’t they fix them: startups that run for months or years with horrible user experience.
It just seems that with a little bit of effort it could’ve been much better. In today’s world, you actually might need that extra effort.
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Arctic summer is in mid-season but ArcticStartup goes forward. I’m excited to present our new design which I have been working with for a while.
Our goal with the design was to make the content more appealing and declutter the site. In addition to design, I revisited our whole Wordpress installation, plugins and files to make the site faster and cleaner.
Another big change is that, due of requests from our readers, the content is now tabbed into categories: Digital (the ‘classic’ ArcticStartup) and Cleantech.
Discussion is something we very much like to encourage here in ArcticStartup. For that reason, comments are now threaded and separated from trackbacks. We’re also planning to bring some other improvements to make the discussion more meaningful.
If you need to browse older posts, the Archive is back. Team page is now merged with About page.
So what do you think? Did we nail it, or do you still prefer the old design? Give us your feedback, either to info at arcticstartup dot com or in comments.
Espoo Otaniemi boomed of startups and investors when Invest Tech Finland was held for the first time on last Tuesday and Wednesday. There was a real mix of companies from all round consumer web, nano, medical and material tech.
We got some taste of new startups, more seasoned companies seeking growth and some familiar faces marching forward with their plans. There were quite a few interesting companies to write about, the full list can be found here – check these out. Note that most of companies presented at the event already had some prototypes, partnerships, customers or revenues. Here is some of my picks (not in any particular order):
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ShirtsMyWay.com, a startup founded by two Danish guys, Michael Yang and Peter Crawfurd, lets you to design your own custom dress shirts with an online tool. It’s possible to select from several fabrics, combine with different cuts, thread colors, collars, cuffs, pockets and buttons and fit the shirt with your own measurements. You can order several or just one shirt with your own custom design and pay only for the base fabric.
The shirt design and order process is pretty nifty and you get a visual proof of every change. Co-founder Peter Crawfurd mentions about developing the site: “Not only is the programming of the site difficult, we had to make about two thousand images to make the shirt model work.”
In any case, the actual concept is far from simple, since the company is dealing with over 7 trillion different possible designs of an actual physical product. “This also means that we have a very detailed quality control check to make sure everything is as it should be.”, Peter continues. Founders believe that tackling a hard and unique problem is a key edge in a market as completive as clothing.
Company is actually headquartered in Hong Kong has been in business for a month. Founders tell us that they’re planning and making continuous improvements on the site but still gathering data deciding where to focus their efforts.
ShirtsMyWay’s concept is somewhat similar what we have seen with other on-demand online services like Lulu for book publishing and with those endless t-shirt stores. It’s interesting to see if the concept can be profitably transferred to other sectors as well from clothing and printing.
When mass-markets are ruled by big players producing standard products, is there a cap for small startups to deal with customers that want something different? ShirtsMyWay seems to believe so and shows it’s also possible without huge resources.
Plugg, the European one-day conference on celebrating of entrepreneurship and innovation announced today the 20 final nominees for the Startup Rally. Finalists also include three arctic startups: Burt and Senseboard from Sweden and Hammerkit from Finland. Plugg is taking place on March 12 in Brussels. If you’re interested to see the most promising European web and mobile startups, TechCrunch is offering a 15% discount.
HammerKit(from the ArcticIndex): is a web application service platform that has been developed to make it easier and faster to build dynamic, data-driven web sites. The platform allows an entire web site or application to be designed, assembled, deployed and managed online from reusable components in minutes.
Burt helps marketing agencies to perform better in the new read-write web. They want take advertising and analytics past the cost-per-click methods and banners. Current product offering includes: Copybox – “a Photoshop for copywriters”, basically a smart text editor, Mememachine – cloudcomputing for marketing data, and Rich – an analytics tool for campaigns.
Senseboard develops cool wearable technology on for hand gesture based computer interaction. Two hand bands or glovers enable a method for capturing, analyzing and interpreting hand and finger movements.
Total of 133 European companies registered to the competition and 20 were selected from these. ArcticStartup congratulates all the chosen startups and wishes extra luck for the arctic startups!
Despite the economical climate and the horde of naysayers, a Finnish based software company, Comformiq secures 3 million euros in investment round lead by Nexit Ventures Oy. Funding mainly comes from Suomen Teollisuussijoitus Oy(‘Finland’s industry investment Ltd’) and unclosed group of US angel investors.
According to their press release, with this new funding, Comformiq plans to transfer its business executives to US, but retain the product development in Espoo, Finland. Apparently they are also getting a new CEO, A .K. Kalekos, and former CEO, Antti Huima, will step down to CTO.
Conformiq focuses in model-based testing tools, with their main product Conformiq Qtronic. The real innovation with this product is that usually you would need to write tests, but Conformiq Qtronic generates and executes tests itself based on the design model. A recent study(pdf warning) suggested that Test-Driven Development(TDD) takes 15-35% longer but leads to 40-90% fewer bugs. Conformiq says that they can decrease development time by speeding up the test design by 20-fold.
It’s great to see yet another funded software company that breaks free from the arctic blizzard. As myself, I see the software industry as a something what we arctic dwellers could really excel in global scale. Hopefully more great people and funding find this sector.
Blue White Partners, which Finnish and US based team helps Finnish hi-tech companies to go global might shed some light in it. Blue White investigated(pdf, in Finnish) over 1100 Finnish hi-tech companies’ visibility on the web. Average Blue White Web Score for Finnish companies was 39/100 where as global average is 50. The score is made by investigating content semantics, language, search engine rank and index, and presence in social media.
The top100 mostly consisted of big companies but there were even few startups like 8. Muxlim(95), 13. XIHA(93), 14. Kuneri(93), 15. TripSay(92). (On side note ArcticStartup got 94.)
There has been some discussion what is the actual importance of SEO or is it a complete fad. While methods ranging from white to shady black, I wouldn’t argue that SEO is the most important thing to consider when building a startup or product, but you shouldn’t ignore it either. Consider making your product crawlable. Provide some information on the inner workings of your service. Every public page should be your landing page. Use Google tools, like Adwords to select keywords for your product.
We living in the online world tend to forget how much less offline people know about current developments of the web. Help them to find you.
What is your experience, how important is SEO? Does search engine traffic stick?
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Edit: Added top42 companies, by Blue White Partners (note: may be subject to change)
Google announced that they’re closing or ceasing development of variety of services, including Jaiku.
As mentioned eariler, Jaiku has been in process of porting to Google App Engine and there have been some rumours of opening the Jaiku platform. Official release now states that Jaiku Engine will be open sourced under the Apache Licence, and supported by volunteer team of Googlers.
This probably means that Google will not have any plans of integrating or bringing Jaiku to other platforms like Android. Jaiku will transform into a general microblogging platform and the open source efforts will help keeping Jaiku.com development alive. Other than that, this is a huge hit on the Jaiku.com community, brand and service. There are benefits of building platforms, but usually a more intense community is not one of them.
Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku and now a Googler, stated in recent Jaiku discussion (1, 2) that current schedule for release is during this spring.
It will be also intresting to see what kind of changes App Engine will need to run the full feature set of Jaiku.
LeWeb has announced their startup contestors and judges for this year’s Startup Competition. From the 30 companies there is one from China and Israel, five from US and 23 European companies, including Finnish Zipipop(previously covered) and Estonian based instant website creator Edicy.
The deal is that each company gets 7 minutes to pitch to the judges on the day. Winners of the competition will then have a chance to present their companies on the LeWeb main stage and additionally SUN Microsystems will offer a server to three final winners.
We at ArcticStartup congratulate and hope for the best for all startups but especially for our own Zipipop and Edicy. At least Zipipop has a nice track record with a win at Mobile 2.0 Europe and recent experience at Mindrek Startup Launchpad.
See the full list.
Seems that Engadget Mobile got its hands on at least a partial roadmap or a list of S60 prototype devices available within Nokia or for the third-party developers. Roadmap starting from 2007 through 2009 lists product codes and codenames, operating system versions, prototype availability, development status and some of the actual features.
For example, list includes a upcoming Qwerty-slider model for AT&T and model with a 3 inch sized VGA display. See the full list.
Jalbum Ab, Sweden based community for online photosharing, announced yesterday that they have closed a second round of investment with Nordic Venture Partners. This new deal brings the total raised capital up to 23 million SEK (approx $3.2M). In addition, the company’s board of directors named serial entrepreneur Andreas Sjölund as the new Chief Executive Officer of the company.
Sjölund is formerly known as co-creator of Skype and one of the first employees of KaZaA. Founder and former CEO David Ekholm will stay with the company and continue as a CTO.
Jalbum offers a mix of photo album software and social photo sharing. What separates Jalbum from other services like Flickr is that they have executable cross-platform client. Client enables the user to do basic photo editing, organizing and uploading photos. With the tool you can also design own or use some user created pre-existing skins for your album. Another appealing aspect is that you can publish your album where ever you like, not only on Jalbum.net.
Even though the downloadable clients have been regarded as somewhat painful practice, apparently it has worked for Jalbum. The client is now downloaded over two thousand times a day and over 24 million albums have been published with the software.
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
BitbarHelsinki, Wroclaw, Oulu, Cambridge
