Are you aware that sailing enthusiasts earn annually almost double the income compared to amateur golfers in the US? That was news to me when I chatted with the co-founder of sailingregister.com (later abbreviated as SR), Vesa Lindqvist. They have tackled a tightly defined, but potentially lucrative, niche of sailing races.

SR offers something for all parties that include spectators, sailors and race officials. SR’s key service is a secure sign-up system for sailors and race organizers. Sailing event organizers also lack proper services for providing race coverage for sailing spectators ashore and home. SR proposes to provide a reliable, secure and feature-rich alternative.

Their initial business model is to charge a premium from fees collected from race participants. However, the founders have a strong background of mobile business and we can expect the service to offer a range of premium rate mobile services for spectators in the future. Furthermore, they plan to offer social network driven marketing services to advertisers targeting this high-networth customer segment.

With many vertical social networks currently popping up this space is also contested with players such as Regatta Network and Compete-at-sailing. However, I believe SR is on the right track as they target enterprise customers as well with their marketing services. One has to bear in mind that according to Mr. Lindqvist, the total size of the sports industry internet spending in the US alone is circa $239 million.

SR is currently self-funded. They continue their negotiations with lead customers so that they will be ready for sailing season 2008.

I wish the SR guys all the best and good sailing.

Another Technopolis event coming up is MoneyTalks™ Forum Special on 8th of May, claimed to be the largest investor event in Finland during the spring of 2008. The event is invitation-only and targeted to VCs, business angels and promising high-tech & innovation based start-ups seeking financing. Companies interested in pitching in the event should check for further information.

The bi-annual special event promises to feature the rising stars of the Finnish high-tech scene and prominent early stage investors from Finland and abroad. Participants should have plenty of opportunities for one-one-one meetings with investors and entrepreneurs.

Photo by cpalmieri.

Fiksuhuuto.fi is an online bidding company founded in early 2008 by Jussi Mäntylä and Tuomo Siurua. The idea behind the concept is simple yet unique. There are open bids on the website put up by the company. You purchase a right to bid for those products (priced between 1,90 and 0,84 euros). Every bid you make increases the price by one cent. Also, when you place your bid for the product the countdown to close the bid starts from the beginning. The coundowns are usually between one and two minutes.

Jussi and Tommi have filed a patent application for the idea. Currently they employ 12 people and ship around 100 products per day. If you calculate 30 bids per product (which is probably far too little), they would be getting somewhere around 3000 euros a day (on an average bid price of 1 euro) just for the bids.

I did a video interview of Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen from Floobs some time in February. I never had time to edit and go through the video, but I finally managed to do so in the Easter holidays. During the editing of the video, I noticed that the add-on microphone was slightly faulty and it only recorded the left channel - therefore the sound quality is quite bad, apologies for that. Nevertheless, I decided its better to release the video late than never - so here it is:

I met Christoffer Landtman the CEO of CompanyCube in our Open Coffee with Arctic Startup event. CompanyCube has a very interesting position in terms of their business. They have managed to penetrate the somewhat unsexy commodities market of traders with their product. More specifically, they offer steel traders a viable solution to handle their processes.

The service is provided over the internet, accessible from anywhere - even the mobile phone they claim. The service includes trading management, customer relations management and business intelligence. Trading activities are managed as seperate projects and each project therefore includes certain routines such as stakeholder management, scheduling and so on. CRM is the regular integration of customer data to match more closely to the trading activities. Business intelligence has been built in to give a quick dashboard type of display to running your business and help make decisions faster.

CompanyCube is positioning themselves in huge market, measured to be 318 billion USD in 2005 worldwide. Due to large acquisitions and mergers the IT solutions are a mess and largely fragmented, according Christoffer Landtman. They have started off well in Finland as SteelTeam, the largest trading house of steel has began to use their product to streamline their business.