Paula Marttila

Recent Posts

First Screenshot Of Planeto – Stealth Mode Online Quiz Game

by Paula Marttila, November 17, 2009 — 3 Comments

“Planeto takes quiz gaming to new heights. Now you can experience unprecedented quiz fun together with millions of players around the globe.”

Swedish startup Planeto is going after the wealth waiting in virtual goods and social gaming, besides from the modest goal of world domination in gaming. Planeto Quiz claims to be the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online Quiz (MMOQ). The game is first to combine elements of online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online with the accessibility and instant thrill of traditional quiz games.

Planeto’s been all hush hush from the beginning, even the names of the private investors of the company are still to be kept secret. But, as of today, we’ve got a little preview of what’s in the making!

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23 Video Disrupting The Online Video Business

by Paula Marttila, November 11, 2009 — Leave a Comment

I was recently given a demo of 23 Video, a Danish online service offering a plug and play web-tv platform to set up ones own web-tv channel.

The first thought that crossed my mind during the demo was the feeling of sligth anxiety that occurs when checking out the roaming costs on the phone bill. If not chockingly high, they’re usually more than expected. Even though you had checked out the costs in beforehand and were being sensible using your phone abroad.

How come? Because it’s the exact same feeling of uncertainty and confusion one often faces when dealing with streaming costs. It already starts with the business offer letter, usually three pages long with no mention of the actual final cost. And that after a meeting with a sales person who’s supposed to know your needs and demands by then. Need a video player, too? Call some more people.

23 Video is determined to kill that mumbo jumbo and all talk about difficulties surrounding online streaming and setting up ones own web-tv channel.

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Silverbakk Monitors Your Social Media Activity

by Paula Marttila, November 5, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Sweden has got its own social media monitoring tool, Silverbakk Briefing Room (we recently wrote about Icelandic Clara). Silverbakk measures influence, visibility and engagement in social media, probably the hottest topic at the moment besides real-time search and augmented reality. The company launched its product only three weeks ago promising an easy to use tool to start monitoring ones company, brand, event or competitors in just 60 seconds.

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Neo Technology Secures Seed Funding To Lead NoSQL Movement

by Paula Marttila, October 28, 2009 — 4 Comments

I probably shouldn’t be this ecxited, but I am. Swedish Neo Technology, developer of Neo4j, an open source graph database, has secured $2.5 million in seed funding to boost Neo4j’s presence in the emerging NonSQL movement market space.

I just received a happy call from Emil Eifrem, CEO Neo Technology, at the moment in US to talk about semantic web, NonSQL movement and the next step in Neo Technology’s life.
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Bambuser Picks New CEO From MySpace Nordic

by Paula Marttila, October 26, 2009 — 1 Comment

Things are cooking in the Bambuser kitchen. The Swedish live video streaming service has pointed out Hans Eriksson, CEO MySpace Nordic, to take over CEO tourch from Jonas Vig, co-founder and now previous CEO Bambuser.

As I met Måns Adler, founder of Bambuser, this weekend, he was very glad and excited about having Hans onboard, as well as where Bambuser is heading right now. Startups go through different stages and the time has now come to Bambuser to move on to acceleration stage where adding experience to team is a quite natural.

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Geek Girl Meetup Gathers 100 Women To Talk About Tech

by Paula Marttila, October 15, 2009 — Leave a Comment

ArcticStartup is joining Geek Girl Meetup as a media partner. Geek Girl Meetup is a Swedish unconference for women, by women, who are interested in technology, web, social media and entrepreneurship. The event takes place October 24-25 in Stockholm and is being organized for the second time despite its short existence. What started as a one day event for 50 participants in March has now turned into two day event with 100 women attending. And there’re still ladies on the waiting list!

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Win Exclusive Tickets To GoodMorning2019!

by Paula Marttila, October 12, 2009 — 1 Comment

GoodMorning2019

ArcticStartup is glad to be partnering with Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship to celebrate its decennial year with Good Morning 2019!

Good Morning 2019! is a full day event aiming to explore the future and investigating how organisations can become more entrepreneurial and innovative in order to stay competitive. Whether you represent a large company, a young start-up or you’re a student, this is the day you shouldn’t miss!

We have two exclusive tickets to give away to one lucky winner. Take a chance to get inspired, mingle and network with the industry in the beautiful Vinterträdgården at Grand Hotel in Stockholm!

The impressive list of speakers include so far an exciting mix of people such as Stefan Persson, Chairman of the Board H&M, Dr. Li Gong, CEO Mozilla Online Ltd, Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut, and Anna Omstedt Lindgren, Tasteline and one of Sweden’s 101 top super talents by Veckans Affärer.

When: Friday, November 13th 2009 (9 Am – 5.30 Pm)
Where: Grand Hotel, Södra Blasieholmshamnen 8, Stockholm, Sweden

UPDATE Congratulations to the winner! Thank You all for tweeting!

All you need to do is to send a following tweet on Twitter:

I want to join @arcticstartup at #GoodMorning2019! + link to this article

Last chance to tweet before we draw a winner is on Wednesday October 14th at 12 Pm (GMT +1).

Hope to see you in Stockholm!

Filehill, New Marketplace For Digital Content – We Have Gift Cards!

by Paula Marttila, October 8, 2009 — 1 Comment

Filehill is a new Swedish startup I ran into when first pitching their idea at TechCrunch Talk Nordic earlier this year. Filehill offers a platform especially designed to trade digital content such as reports, playlists and manuals. Besides from the music, of course. They’ve just released into open beta after a year and a half of development, and I was naturally curious to see what the new marketplace looks like.

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Twingly Channels, Social Filtering On Real-Time Web, Launches Private Beta

by Paula Marttila, October 1, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Twingly Channels is launching into private beta today, opening up to the wide public later this year. At the moment one has to apply for an invite by suggesting a channel topic.

Swedish Twingly have been building up the hype since early June when they first announced Project Shinobi, the working name for Twingly Channels we then got a sneak preview of for a month ago at the Sweden Social Web Camp. And they certainly are reaching for the stars, or as Martin Källström, CEO Twingly, puts it:

 ”Twingly Channels lets people cut out the noise of online search and the real-time web — to instantly see what news and content to spend time on. By following topics rather than bloggers or outlets, Twingly simplifies the challenge of RSS, social search, and the real-time web.“

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Load Impact – On Demand Web-based Load Testing

by Paula Marttila, September 24, 2009 — 1 Comment

Those of you who have been working on building dynamic request intensive web services, know the importance of load testing and the challenges that come with it. You also know that somehow the test environment hardly ever is ”really” an exact mirrowed version of the live environment. That said, load testing of ones services can be a tricky one. There’s also so many variables that can make the service to jam up. One can test successfully almost every function separately but when having all working together things start to happen. Those knots are usually not as easy to spot.

So, when I first run into Load Impact, a Swedish startup running its easy online load testing service for six months now, I must admit I was a bit sceptical at first.

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JayCut Takes Online Video Editor Mobile With Moblin

by Paula Marttila, September 15, 2009 — 3 Comments

“Creativity just went mobile”, Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut

JayCutJayCut, the Swedish online video editor startup will as of today be available on Moblin-based ultra-portable devices like netbooks and mobile internet devices (MIDs). Moblin is an open source Linux operating system which is optimized for Intel® Atom™ processor based devices. JayCut’s been working closely with Intel on the new Moblin v2 that offers advanced Internet, media and social networking experiences. The mobile editor is primarly launched within their white label product, but hang in there, a public version is on its way, too. Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut, is excited about moving on to the mobile space with MIDs, thus changing the way content producers and publishers will work in the future. Having the publishing system in ones pocket gets publishers whole new opportunities to interact with its audience closer to real-time.

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Sweden Keeps Innovating On Search: Blogipedia, Twingly Channels and Spezify

by Paula Marttila, September 10, 2009 — 6 Comments

There’s no “One way” to do search. Traditional search engines compete for space and co-exist with nisched, inspirational, visual, social and now with the latest trending topic, real-time search. As the blogosphere with user generated content keeps growing, the search space keeps expanding with it. Our personal online presence increases through social networking etc. which means we need to keep track of our own digital footsteps, preferably real-time.

Regardless of the lack of an existing business model, search remains a very attractive space, and within past three months, three Swedish players have been added to the fields of nisched, visual and real-time search.

 

 

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EmotiCards – Your Best Pictures As Postcards Via Facebook

by Paula Marttila, August 27, 2009 — 4 Comments

Swedish startup EmotiCards is one of the many projects that saw its daylight during the 24 Hour Business Camp earlier this year. Today, six months later, Emoticards have seven employees and have just launched in beta on the Swedish market. The Company is a self-funded joint venture project between Spontu, Pixell Productions and KST Info Services. The idea of offering to send real, printed postcards using ones own pictures isn’t a unique one, but EmotiCards are trying to differenciate their service.

Environmental Approach With Premium And Free Cards
Apart from the obvious efforts to try to keep the interface very simple with few steps and easy payment, EmotiCards are printed on FSC-certified paper. Printing itself is as far as possible done locally close to the recipients thanks to the Xerox Premier Partner Network, shrinking delivery times and the need for air mail.

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Videofy.me Monetizing Online Video Content

by Paula Marttila, August 20, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Videofy.me is a Swedish startup enabling online video content publishers to monetize their content. The company was founded in August 2008 by Robert Mellberg and Oskar Glauser, both having their background in Internet communications and advertising. Neither one of them is a huge video blogger but as working in advertising they kept witnessing the fastly growing gap between the online video content on blogsphere and the lack of ad solutions available for the long tail content publishers. Since the release of the first beta for four months ago they’ve been gaining traction among content publishers.

I stopped by Robert Mellberg, CEO Videofy.me, at their office in central Stockholm to hear how the user-generated online video market is doing and what’s on the drawing board.

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Auktionsfynda – Find Your Last Minute Online Auction Bargains

by Paula Marttila, July 24, 2009 — 1 Comment

Auktionsfynda.seAuktionsfynda, Swedish online auction search engine service launched today. It’s focusing on listing the auctions about to close, thus triggering the great feeling of satisfaction when finding the best bargain. The service initially indexes five auction sites (Tradera, Auktionskompaniet, Brabud, Metropol, Lauritz) and is planning to add two more in the next coming weeks. For time being only Swedish auction sites are included.

Auktionsfynda is a service with a simple search and clean GUI, the main page displaying random selection of items that have 10, 30 or 60 min. left to bid. The search results include a short description of an item, time left to bid and link directly to the respective auction. No transactions, nor bidwatching is handled by the service, at least not yet. I think on demand notifications on auctions closing shortly would add value, since many of the bidwatching applications and services on the market are made service specific, especially for eBay.

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