Arctic Startup

Zipipop has been chosen to present their latest mobile service tomorrow in the Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona. Mobile 2.0 Europe is a extension of the famous Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco. The new service is called Zipiko and has been kept secret until the Mobile 2.0 Europe launch.

Zipiko is a quick and effortless way to see what your friends are doing and a way to invite them to your chosen venue whether it’s it a local cafe or your own place for drinks, lunch or whatever you fancy. You can also see what your friends are doing throughout the day from the main page where it’s only a matter of a few clicks to join an event, given that you’re invited.

The service itself has born out of Facebook application Mennäänkö Yhdelle (Let’s go for a one in Finnish) that Zipipop developed earlier on, where the best bits have been transferred to this new browser based mobile service.

I interviewed Zipipop CEO, Helene Auramo, after the festives had already started in Barcelona and she explained that “when you invite friends to a party they will receive an SMS to which they can then answer ‘Yes’ with a mere SMS. So the idea is that you don’t necessarily have to access the web at all to tell that you’re coming. And to make the experience complete one will receive a text message just before the event to know who else has answered ‘Yes’ to know who will eventually make it to the party” . Helene emphasized that the value of the service is in spontaneity and the ease of setting up a meeting on the fly.

Once you register to Zipiko you will receive 30 free SMS for organizing get-togethers, but in the long run Zipipop wants to bring in advertisers that would pay for the SMS messages, thus making the service free for the users. The advertisers would get their name on a discreet message at the end of the invitation SMS.

It seems that Zipipop has found a simple way to bring an aspect of a Jaiku/Twitter like service, SMS and Meetup together to organize spontaneous get-togethers . Now they only need to get the advertisers on board to pay for the SMS messages.

You can see a demo of the service here.

Techcruch also made a note about Mobile 2.0 Europe event and Zipko.

MySites, a Finnish startup providing a single location to save, manage and share content online, has decided to focus their marketing efforts selectively in two niche audiences. This is an interesting marketing strategy for a startup since it might make it possible for a startup to reach a critical user base without an acceptance from a wider community for what is still a rather generic service.

MySites has decided to go after gamers and university students.  MySites CEO, Ramine Darabiha, tells us that gamers and students are the kinds of users who respond the best to MySites as they tend to prefer sharing pictures and music. Many users also seem to use MySites as an “private online hard disk”, to access for example their school documents.

MySites had a strong presence at Lan79, a large European gaming LAN party. Ramine told us that this way they made important contacts there with key players in the online gaming industry, such as the largest online gaming news sites, event organizers , as well as several top teams.

This allowed MySites to gather attention for their own CounterStrike Source tournament that took place on the 9th of May when MySites organized a large one-night tournament for CounterStrike Source. The teams were competing for a total cash prize of 1000€. Coverage of this tournament was spread across 8 prominent online gaming news sites, namely Vakarm, Cadred, Team-aAa, eFever, Actu-Lan, London Mint, Team-Coolermaster, Inside Source. Additionally, Ramine told us that there was a live web tv stream of every match, which hosted up to 1000 spectators.

MySites has also been focusing their promotion on students, targeting student unions of universities of Oulu and Tampere. The company has been presenting the service to the heads of the student unions in order to get the most active members of the student body involved in promoting their services.

According to Ramine, as a result of these efforts, MySites is known by and has contacts in many of the top gaming teams and the staff of online gaming sites as well as uniniversity student unions. This in an interesting grass roots approach that reminds me of the the way Facebook spread in the early 2005 among university students before it hit the mainstream.

MySites is clearly facing the same IPR issues as any other site regarding the sharing movies and music online. Thus, it seems to be mainly a convenient way to store data into the cloud for one’s own personal use since it can hardly steel a significant share of the personal photo sharing business from Facebook, Flickr and the likes. In this respect the strategy of targeting niche audiences with specific needs might prove to be a wise approach.

Disclosure: MySites is sponsoring Arctic Startup Events

Kauppalehti, a Finnish business daily, reported yesterday that Sulake’s CEO, Timo Soininen, is planning to take the company public. According to Mr. Soininen the earlierst possible date for the listing would be sometime next year.

Soininen thinks Sulake starts to be big enough for an IPO. Soininen’s comments takes place after Sulake was valued 9th in Alley Insider valuation (at 25 times revenues) for digital startups. Read more on the story here.

Soinen added that Sulake is profitable and aims to a 20 percent increase in turnover this year. Last year’s  turnover was 43 million euro.

Despite the Alley Insider estimation Soininen himself refuses to comment on his company’s valuation.

The investment groups Ambient Sound Investments or ASI for short (from Skype fame) and Seed Fund Vera make an equity investment in Senseg, a Finnish company developing a breakthrough touch interface technology. The sum of the investment remains undisclosed.

Senseg is one of the startups whose journey to Israel to meet Israeli investors we have been following. It only makes sense that Senseg comes out with the announcement right before they pitch to the local VCs on Wednesday, May the 21th to capture the full benefit of the announcement.

Senseg has developed a new technology to produce touch-like sensations. The technology has a wide range of applications, for example generating the feeling of virtual buttons on smooth surfaces such as mobile phones and other touch screens. Iphone with a keyboard you can actually feel, anyone?

Dr. Ville Mäkinen, Senseg’s CEO, described the technology nothing short of revolutionary:

Senseg’s technology is something completely different. It is a novel communications technology based on human sensation. […] The technology has unrepresented potential. I can be licenced easily and used in hundreds of different ways and applications. Senseg’s technology can therefore initiate a significant and fundamental change in how consumer gadgets are designed and used.

According to Moaffak Ahmed, Chairman of Senseg, the technology will be available for a select group of equipment manufacturers in the second half of 2008 and be officially launched when the first products are introduced to the market, which he expects to be in 2009.

Arctic Startup will follow Sensig and other Finnish startups throughout the week and report on how they manage to attract attension from the VC scene in Israel.

The informal Finnish marketing bible, M&M reported today (article in Finnish) that Fruugo, a mysterious Finnish startup with a world class Board of Directors including Jorma Ollila (Shell, former Nokia), Risto Siilasmaa (from F-secure fame and an active Finnish Angel investor) and Marko Parkkinen (from Bob Helsinki fame), has hired three Helsinki digital agency-world big timers, namely Janne Waltonen, Sami Keinänen and Kim Stenbäck.

According to the Finnish trade register Fruugo’s line of business includes market place software development, digital market place maintenance and related activity. To shed further light into the startup, all Mr. Waltonen is ready to reveal at this point is that Fruugo is aiming at international markets right from the beginning.

More on the topic by Startupbin here and here.

Tripsay has gotten TechCrunched. There’s a lot of good and encouraging commentary in the follow up to the blog post. Erick Schonfeld has done a good job explaining the service that is currently in private beta.

Congrats to Leo and co!

Talk about clear value proposition? How about getting your own webstore opened and running within one minute? That’s how it works with MyCashflow, a recently opened service for creating your own shop on the web.

With signing up, the Middle Finland-based company instantly sets you up with search engine optimized store including most usual payment methods, inventory management, and easy admin tool. The subscription-based plans range several options from free, max 10-product store, to an unlimited premium one currently priced at EUR 249/month.

The service is currently provided only in Finnish, but listen up as the co-founder Ismo Ruotsalainen tells more about the company.

1. Could you introduce briefly what MyCashflow is all about?

MyCashflow is an elegant webstore software designed for small businesses and web designers.

2. How do you position yourself against and differentiate from the
other webstore providers?

There are lots of differences. For example, you can open your own webstore in few seconds, but I think the most important ones are the admin interface and HTML/CSS themes.

The admin interface is practical and dead simple to use. We have been working hundreds of hours to improve workflow and productivity. We’ve got tons of great feedback about our admin interface – people really like to use it.

HTML/CSS themes are something what web designers really respect. Finally they can design premium quality webshops without any programming experience. They just embed codes like {ShoppingCart} into HTML-template.

3. Can you let us know what led you to the idea for MyCashflow?

There’s nothing particular. We have worked with webshops for a long time and the idea just evolved naturally. We noticed that there is a lot of need for improvements in the e-commerce software business and thought that we have a lot to give.

4. What have been the early successes and challenges with releasing your service?

We launched 2 months ago and there are 350 shops at a moment. Also web designers have been pleased to MyCashflow. There are now more than 10 marketing agencies that use our service. Whole thing has started well but there are still lots of things to do.

5. What can we expect from MyCashflow in the future? Are you going to release international versions?

MyCashflow is designed for the global market, that’s why the English name. We started with Finnish version on purpose, because we wanted to learn how to walk before running. Finland is like a beta-test or a dress rehearsal.

Global, multilingual version is a next big step. First step of testing starts in few weeks and we launch when we are ready.

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Thanks Ismo, and good luck to MyCashflow with rolling out the service on a large scale! With all the talk regarding entrepreneurs and small businesses not utilizing web enough in their business, there should be healthy demand for a simple and fast to adapt no-nonsense solution.

Kauppalehti reports that Fiksuhuuto, the cent bidding website that we wrote about over here, is under police investigation due to possible misuse of the Finnish lottery law.

The Interior Ministry’s spokesperson Jouni Laiho has told Kauppalehti that they believe Fiksuhuuto is in the lottery business and due to this they are investigating the claim. We had a lot of debate about this last time in the comments and seems the government shares your views on this.

Update (@5.21 pm): Helsingin Sanomat reports, that the company has moved its headquarters to England and are running the company from a server on Malta.

Dan Gillmor of Dopplr has just announced their support for iCal. What you basically do is add a new calendar and upload its updates to the Dopplr -server.

Dopplr certainly has been updating their service more than Jaiku, but I’d still like to see more value innovation in terms of the users. What you can do always do is hand the development ideas over to your community in the style of IdeaStorm. I’m sure being such a simple idea, companies should use it a lot more.