A US based startup Groupon offers users deep discounts on products and services from local businesses, but you need a minimum number of users to sign-up into a deal before getting the discount. And you have only one day to do this. TechCrunch knows that Groupon is on track to generate $100 million in gross merchandise sales in 2010 of which they take a 30%-50% cut. That sounds like a real business.
Now Offerium has opened its doors in Finland. In short, Offerium is a localization of the Groupon concept. The founder of the company, Oskari Lehtonen, was running MyButler before founding Offerium. MyButler asked users what they are interested in and then negotiated two-for-the-price-of-one deals from the given advertisers for the users.
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We all know the Swedish startup Videoplaza has been on a roll lately with their ad serving technology for managing and monetising online video. Venture capitalist are not disagreeing: Today Videoplaza announced the completion of its €3.5 million (US$5 million) round of investment led by Creandum and Northzone.
Not surprisingly, the capital was raised to support a further commercial development and a roll-out across Europe. More specifically, the funding will enable Videoplaza to accelerate the deployment of its Monetizer ad server platform technology for managing, displaying and tracking advertising in and around publishers’ online video content into more European territories, including Germany, Spain and Italy.
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TechCrunch ran a story on Spotify a couple of days ago, where Daniel Ek had commented on some very interesting issues. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke at SXSW and told in his keynote that, Spotify as a service consumes more bandwidth than the whole of Sweden (on certain days that is). Those wondering why Spotify is built in a P2P manner now fully understand the need for such a solution. Ek also commented that it’s a million dollar question why Apple remains to deliver all its digital downloads from a “single source” generating huge amounts of traffic that also need to be paid for.
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The Finnish film industry is looking more and more lively nowadays. The international successes have not been that many in the past, compared to e.g. the Swedish movie industry focused on strong story telling, like the recent Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Saga. However, in the past few years the Finnish industry has been showing signs of much increased international ambitions. One of the most widest distributed Finnish films ever has been the animation Niko & The Way to the Stars, published in 2008.
The next big take seems now to be The Sampo, a feature length 3D stereoscopic animation film based on the Kalevala mythology by Northern Digital Film Company NDFC Helsinki, founded in 2006.
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Disclaimer: This article is targeted mainly for our Finnish readers. We’re working to survey the effects of the Vigo accelerator program on the Finnish startup ecosystem. Other nationalities will surely find it useful once we release the results.
Vigo accelerator program has been a much debated issue here in Finland. Rightly so. It has been promoted with a lot of noise and much to its cause, it is the biggest change in the startup ecosystem for years. Now that it has been up and running for a while, we’d like to know every Finnish reader’s opinion on the program and what you think and know of it.
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The Finnish Helsingin Sanomat has interviewed Sami Järvi the writer of the game and in the article they also confirm the release dates for Alan Wake. The game is set to be released in Europe on the 21st of May and in the US, a few days earlier, on the 18th. A while back in a “Predictions for 2010″ -post I predicted that the game will be launched a few months late, but it seems that there is no reason at the moment to delay it. After all, the release date is about 2 months away.
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A while back we covered this spring’s events in a summary format that ought to interest startups and we further received more events in the comments. If you haven’t checked those out, we strongly suggest to do so. There are also other events in the ArcticIndex events -page, make sure you have a look at that as well. However, I thought of doing a small addition to that list by further promoting two more events that deserve the visibility in my opinion, Frozen Rails and Garage48.
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The Club of Leaders Good 2 Work with seems to be one of the well-kept secrets of Russia (and would have stayed so, had it not been registered on ArcticIndex). Good 2 Work is a virtual place (or sort of a closed social network) for executives and entrepreneurs of different levels and from different industries and countries. It is meant as tool for leaders to learn from and about each other in the field of business leadership. The primary means are professionally pre-recorded video conversations.
The club was established in April 2008 by Yuri Barzov, who was a partner with the executive search companies Ward Howell and Spencer Stuart. Yuri has also founded the 200+ thousands strong Russian learning community of managers, E-xecutive.
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There’s a startup in Denmark that went by the name of Porta for a long time. Since then, they have changed their name to TradeShift. TradeShift is looking to disrupt and shatter the oligopolies of EDI between large corporations and banks so that the technologies could be used by anyone – small and medium sized companies included. The founders of the company include an experienced bunch. They are Christian Lanng, Mikkel Hippe Brun and Gert Sylvest. Not a founder, but onboard the project is also Morten Lund who made himself famous by his personal bankruptcy some two years ago.
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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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TechCrunch reports that Spotify has signed an exclusive deal with the Finnish side of TeliaSonera. The two year deal will give TeliaSonera the exclusive rights to sell Spotify Premium in Finland. The announcement comes on the same day as TeliaSonera unveils its IPTV service that is complete with a certain selection of television channels, video rentals and Spotify Premium. Spotify signed a similar contract with the Swedish side of TeliaSonera last year and it seems that the deal was worthwhile as the Finnish side of TeliaSonera also went forward with the partnership.
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As mentioned before in the summary of events for spring 2010, we will be organising three ArcticEvenings this spring. The show will most likely kick off with an ArcticEvening in Helsinki in April followed by ArcticEvenings in Tallinn and Stockholm most probably in May and June respectively. However, this time I thought it would be great to hear your ideas regarding the events and what kind of events you would like to participate this spring.
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Mediatonic Management has closed a 5 million euro fund that will begin to finance games and media products from Finland. The fund has been set up by investments from Fennia insurance, Henki-Fennia insurance as well as the Sonera Pension fund. People behind the fund include Tanu-Matti Tuominen and Marko Tulonen.
The fund is a project and catalog fund that will invest in commercial games, television formats and web services. The fund does not invest into the companies in the manner a venture capitalist would invest, but into the rights of the products and services sold. Therefore the fund’s business model is to take a commission from cash flows generated by the products and services sold.
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Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.
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