(To our readers in Sweden: There’s a little summer gift waiting for you in the end of the article.)
As filesharing, piracy, copyright and privacy issues, and the future of media in whole being the current hot topics, I sat down with Peter Alvarsson, Founder and COO Headweb, to hear his thoughts as an industry player dealing with the changing market space.
Headweb is a Swedish startup offering movies online for both rent and download. The company was founded 2006 being the first legal service to offer DRM-free downloads. Not just that, they also engourage and reward filesharing using a custom P2P technology to deliver downloads. The service is platform independent, by so far one of a kind in Sweden, running smoothly both on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Headweb is a premium service charging average $3 / $13 per movie (rent/download). The company is backed up by angel investors and has today a team of 10 people with offices in both Stockholm and Gothenburg.
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Hoist is one of the many Danish startups we had the pleasure of pitching us at the ArcticEvening Copenhagen last week.
Hoist is an on demand project collaboration tool joining the long list of business productivity services such as Basecamp. It was launched in private beta at Reboot conference held last week, where I fortunately managed to get a short demo. There’s not too much information found on the site so the best way to find out more is indeed to book a demo meeting, get lucky requesting a test account, or simply wait them to go public later this fall.
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The news that The Pirate Bay (TBP) is to be acquired by Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) for MSEK 60 (App USD 7.7 million) spread all over the media this morning. The purchase includes the domain name and related web sites, including www.thepiratebay.org, and amounts to consisting of at least MSEK 30 in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 30 in the form of newly issued shares in GGF. The transaction is scheduled to be closed in August 2009.
The deal was shortly after the announcement confirmed by TPB, whereby Peter Sunde, the spokesperson of TPB, turned off his phone having too many people calling. According to him the 20 million users of TPB shouldn’t we worried. It is merely time to pass TPB on to secure it’s further development and future. To quote: “Don’t worry, be happy!”
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Since the recently held European Election I keep getting questions about the Swedish Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay trial. I agree it might get a bit confusing trying to follow the evolving news on both, and while adding the newly enabled IPRED law to the equation one starts to wonder if, and how, it’s all connected. Here’s a summary hoping to bring some light into the current events. (Note: All link sources are in English, unless otherwise noted, mostly referring to The Register and Wired, who, imho, have been doing a very good job covering both stories outside Sweden.)
Firstly, to clear things up, The Pirate Party is unaffiliated with the Piratbyran, ”The Piracy Bureau”, which lies behind “the world’s largest Bit Torrent tracker”, The Pirate Bay. For example, Peter Sunde, the spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, has never been a member of the Pirate Party and voted for the Green Party at the recent European Election.
As widely reported, the European Election was a huge victory for the Swedish Pirate Party receiving 7,1% of the Swedish votes leaving three other established parties behind, as well as resulting to at least one seat in the European Parliament.
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Twingly, the Swedish blog search engine, announced earlier this afternoon that as of October 1st they will be shifting into the next gear by launching “what will become the next great platform for social media“.
Obviously they’ve not just been adding new flags to their partner list, but also busy cooking new stuff in the Twingly kitchen, or as to put it in their own words (The Announcement):
“With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use.”
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Listen To Blogs is one of the online services created during the 24 Hours Business Camp held in January this year. The service was literally developed within 24 hours with no sleep by Henrik Berggren, David Kjelkerud and Eric Wahlforss. Listen To Blogs is today run by Henrik and David, Eric having the role of an advisor.
Both Eric and Henrik are part of the Soundcloud team, and so is ListenTo Blogs built on the SoundCloud API, using Google AppEngine and Twingly.
Listen To Blogs is exactly what its name suggests – a way for you to listen to your favourite blogs, as podcasts. You don’t even have to have your own blog, you can just pick any of your favourite blogs and turn it into podcast using your own voice.
This is where Listen To Blogs differs from other similar services, it uses real voices, is crowdsourced and free. There are quite a few number of services offering conversion from text to speech, TTS, but so far I’ve only come across ones using variety of digital voices. PimpMyNews with a paid iPhone app is one of the popular ones, but to quote Mark Hopkins from Mashable, they’re “fun for 10 minutes”.
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ArcticStartup with its passion for entrepreneurship is media partnering with the Entrepreneurship Forum in Stockholm, Sweden. The Entrepreneurship Forum initiative, co-founded by Daniel Blomquist at Creandum, aims to promote entrepreneurship and create a meeting place for everyone (students, entrepreneurs, investors) interested in entrepreneurship.
The topic at this second annual event is How to Monetize Digital Content and they’ve got a really interesting set up for panel including absolute top players pushing the new Internet economy forward.
Henrik Torstensson (SVP Stardoll and General Manager Piczo), Sorosh Tavakoli (CEO Videoplaza) and Ted Valentin (annonskartan, sushikartan etc.).
More reading on Stardoll, Videoplaza and Ted Valentin here at ArcticStartup.
Ville is coming over to moderate the panel so get ready for some good time and great insights!
See you there!
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TechCrunchTalk Nordic was held yesterday in Stockholm. The event was sold out and gathered many familiar faces from the startup and VC communities for panel discussions, presentations and pitches followed by drinks and networking.
The panels and presentations had a good mix of representatives from the entire region and discussed topics covering the Nordic and Baltic startup and VC culture. In my opinion the most memorable message sent was by Pär-Jörgen Pärsson from the VC firm Northzone Ventures. He presented some hard figures and facts just to state how the Nordics is the best exit market in the world with 36% exit rate, Skype excluded. So – the startups in the Nordics rock!
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Whether you’re running a business or organizing a tech conference today, it’s all about the cloud. I talk to startups talking to venture capitalists, and there’s no way of pitching without having ones solution running in the cloud. As hard it’s been to agree on a proper definition for cloud computing, it’s been the thing for both service providers and businesses to move on to. Even the telecom companies are now getting into the game of cloud computing.
Not surprisingly cloud computing was also one of the buzz words at the recently held Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg, where Witsbits caught my attention when pitching their new business model.
Witsbits, a Swedish startup company, is the first and so far only actor in the Nordic and Scandinavian region providing cloud computing services. They started already in 2004, in the era when cloud computing still was called utility computing. The journey into cloud computing began in 2003 when running Render Planet, an automated render farm service offering free, remote, distributed rendering over the Internet. Rendering 3D images required a lot of hardware resources, which resulted in developing their own utility management software. The first cloud computing service saw its daylight, and Witsbits today is a profitable business with number of customers in their storage cloud. Now with cloud computing booming the company feels it’s time to refocus on their core competence, the software development.
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Booli is a real estate search engine service in Sweden where the market demand for Internet search is reaching new heights. According to a recent study (in Swedish) done by Skandiamäklarna, 84% of the buyers find their new home today via Internet, showing a 25% growth just from last year.
The service doesn’t require registering and is free for both users and the over 600 real estate agencies in Sweden. By registering to the service one can for example save a search profile to receive notifications for matching objects. The real estate agencies are offered to add and update information on the objects they have for sale. Booli indexes and updates all available objects once a day, always linking back to the origin of the object descriptions.
The company is privately owned by its 10 employees together with private investors and the Firm Factory Network. The business model is based on advertising focused on the services close to housing, such as insurance, electricity suppliers, banking and broadband.
I sat down with Anders Kyhlstedt, VP Marketing, to talk about what’s been going on since Booli left beta in the beginning of this year and how they are copying with the current economic state affecting the real estate business.
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Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg was held today in the Southern Sweden together with Öresund Entrepreneurship Academy. The region is growing and has an active ecosystem of entrepreneurship and startups, suiting well the Seedcamp initative. The event gathered 20 excited startups and over 50 mentors from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and England.
The day was kicked off with five minute pitches by the teams, and included buzz words such as cloud computing, crowdsourcing and smartphone applications. The pitches were overall above the average, but as Tommy Ahlers, a mentor from ZYB, reflected, the early stage startups preferably need to focus on the concept rather than trying to present a business plan.
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“Prezi is one of the most exciting companies I have worked with during my 13 years as a serial Entrepreneur, and I see great opportunities for Prezi in the US and Silicon Valley, and I think that Microsoft and Google should watch Prezi closely, because Prezi is disrupting the way we present information.”
- Nicolai Wadstrom, CEO and founder of BootstrapLabs (The complete press release here).
Prezi, the recently launched online zooming presentation tool, has entered into an agreement with BootsrapLabs to help them establish a US presence. Nicolai Wadstrom could hardly hide his excitement when I met with him last week. I couldn’t agree with him more, as I’ve written about Prezi earlier.
What is BootstrapLabs?
BootstrapLabs, as the name states, is a company to bootstrap and serve as an out-post for non-us companies wanting to establish in the US and Silicon Valley, i.e. your company’s home away from home, including offices and expertise.
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JayCut, the Swedish startup offering online video editing technology, can add another achievement on it’s list. They were recently selected as one of this years Red Herring 100 Europe winners. Congrats!
Since we last talked to JayCut, they have been busy developing a new editor. Last weekend I attended a blogger and tech geek event in Sweden’s first nuclear reactor R1, and got a demo by Jonas Hombert, the CEO of JayCut.
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“You don’t become an artist because you want to, but because you have to.” 
The words are of Katja Lepola, a partner at Grädde Invest. Katja held a speach about venture capital for companies in early stages at the Geek Girl Meetup on 28th March in Stockholm, Sweden.
Her quote was strongly related to as of being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is most likely not something one chooses to become, but something one has to do. It’s very hard to be an entrepreneur, especially if one is to create a great successful company. To make it, one has to have a very strong commitment.
Katja’s advice for an entrepreneur
Besides from the fact that entrepreneurship is something one has to do, Katja shared her best advice for an entrepreneur:
- Love your customer, or get customers who you can love. You’ll benefit greatly if you’re interested in creating value for your customer.
- Create a company you love to work for, it’s going to be long hours along with ups and downs.
- Build a company that is easy to sell. Do your homework on what type of companies are most likely to be bought.
- There are no shortcuts to create value, it takes time. Be prepared on a fantastic, but a long and tuff journey.
- No skeletons in the closet. Keep your records straight like if you were to get listed at the stock exchange the next day.
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Both the Spotify and the developer community were absolutely delirious when the news about libspotify, Spotify API, were released on Tuesday evening. At first.
“The libspotify C API package allows third party developers to write applications that utilize the Spotify music streaming service. Hopefully, this will enable and inspire you to build some really cool stuff. We’re looking forward to seeing what you can come up with.“ So far so good.
Then they read the Terms of Service and were not quite as happy.
- “Approved Device” does not include any mobile wireless handset or any other internet-enabled device that is designed to be handheld.”
- “The Application Key must be embedded in your Application, including in all updates and revisions thereto, in a secure manner not accessible by third parties.”
- “Spotify reserves the right in its sole discretion to revoke your Application Key for any reason or no reason, without notice, and to block access to the API and Service by the Application, without any liability to you or your users.”
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