MyWidz is a Swedish startup aiming to create a mobile widget community and taking user generated content to the mobile phone. The service is currently in early Beta.

The company plans to tab into the mobile marketing market that they estimate to grow into a 19 billion USD market by 2012. I am not quite as optimistic about the mobile marketing as such, but if done right via an innovative community approach it might yield better results than what have been more traditional approaches, namely blind spamming.

MyWidz is a community service that takes user generated content to the mobile phone by aiming to make development, sharing and collection of widgets easy. WyWidz widgets can be developed by anyone with simple step-by-step widget wizard and then get them send to one’s mobile phone. More advanced users can use MyWidz unique script language to write their widgets from scratch, or use other users widgets as templates.

Before one can start using the service she needs to install a Java client to her phone. For me the client did not work that well as I only got an error message after a several tries. I will keep fiddling with the client on my Nokia N95 and hopefully get to work on my first widget soon, but so far I’ve not seen beyond the MyWidz home page.

That said I did see lots of potentially useful widgets on that home page including a CNN News widget, an Aljazeera News widget, a Weather-Stockholm widget, a UK traffic information widget, and even a Find McDonald’s widget. When the MyWidz guys can push the service beyond the early Beta they are facing tough competition from the likes of Nokia Widsets and Plusmo.

As a market the mobile widget area is as hot as it can get even during economic times like these. Just look at the Apple App Store growth figures. The question is how you can beat Apple in their own game call it a widget or an app, and whether the app market will develop into a centralized or decentralized one over time.

Some of you may have experienced some problems with our recent server move in the form of old content suddenly jumping to the top of the page. This basically means you are accessing the old server as the information regarding the location of the new server has not propagated across the internet fully just yet. There is nothing you can really do about this, but wait a few days. We set the move to happen over the weekend, but full propagation usually takes about 24 to 72 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience.

On another note, we are extending the Slush and TechCrunch ticket competitions by one extra day. So go on, have a go at explaining Sisu in the comments.

Image by Eggplant (CC:by-nc-sa)

Slush, an event for startups by startups, will take place next Monday in Helsinki, Finland. We have a whole lot of people already coming, but wanted to give out 2 tickets for two lucky persons who still haven’t bought their tickets.

Also, we have two tickets to give away for the TechCrunch Brunch @ Slush that takes place the day after Slush itself. Mike Butcher, the editor of TechCrunch UK will come to Finland for the first time to host an event for the local startup scene:

TechCrunch UK is partnering with Slush, and we’ll be throwing a breakfast brunch event for 100 start-ups, entrepreneurs, investors and key industry players the day after the Slush conference, so you’ll be able to come along and network over some great Helsinki coffee. If you’re a Scandinavian or Baltic startup, then this should be an event right up your street. It will be on Tuesday, 25th November at 09:30am to 01:00pm.

We will award a ticket to Slush and to TechCrunch Brunch for two persons who come up with the best English translations for the Finnish word Sisu. Every successful entrepreneur has a lot of this magical stuff that gives her the will power to push through against all the odds. Here’s the Wikipedia translation to get you started.  You should write your own version into the comments below.

The description should be a one or two sentence punch line. We will choose the winner sometime tomorrow afternoon, so you have until that to write your version in the comments.

If you rather buy your tickets make sure you do it soon, since Slush is less than a week away. You can buy your ticket to Slush here, and your ticket to the TechCrunch Brunch for the day after here. Hope to see you at both.

Photo by Phineas H (CC:BY).

We have signed a sponsorship deal with Nodeta, a Finnish hosting company. With this deal, we were able to move our hosting over to the Nordics and thus dramatically speed up the service for the people in Europe.

Nodeta will also be our partner with regards to the future services we’ll be rolling out so a big thanks to the guys at Nodeta. They’ve been very helpful with us from the start and offered top notch service, something that you can’t get from too many places nowadays. So if you’re in need of quality hosting for an affordable price - make sure you ask Nodeta for a quotation.

Blyk, the free Finnish born (but operates only in UK) mobile network for 16 to 24 year-olds funded by advertising, has signed a frame agreement with Aito Technologies, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution provider, for the delivery and implementation of its Business-Driven CEM software product, Aito, to UK market. This follows a successful 3-month pilot installation, which began in May.

Aito takes business intelligence from network traffic data and offers Blyk an easy-to-understand, in-depth analysis of service usage, member behavior patterns and trends.

The information that the software generates is given to key staff directly involved in business management – sales and marketing managers, member service teams, product managers – in a form which is easy to use and act on.

In essence, Aito is an easy-to-implement tool that’s a user-friendly method of making sure mobile subscribers are having a great network experience, at all times, whether making a voice call, sending a text or MMS, or, in the case of Blyk, receiving relevant mobile adverts with their services. The carrier-grade Aito will provide Blyk with a 360° view of the activities and overall experience of its entire subscriber base. .

CEO of Aito Technologies, Anssi Tauriainen, said, “Like Blyk, we know that mobile advertising is set to be one of the most important business models and revenue-generating network activities offered by operators in the future [...]“

Mobile advertising has been already coming from years and is still as annoying as ever. Yet, this is hardly Aito’s fault and I admit not having tried Blyk services. That said, even if Blyk works like charm, I already pay fixed monthly sum for practically unlimited calls, SMS and data and can’t really imagine the future any other way. For cash-strapped 16 to 24 year-olds teens who adore brands there seems to be something there though. Blyk users receive 6 sms/mms from the chosen brands per day in exchange for 217 txts and 43 minutes of voice calls each month.

For the segment the service seems to be working: Blyk has currently 200,000 member in the UK, which is the only market they are currently serving. Now Blyk is ready to slice and dice the market data into an easy-to-use format with Aito Technologies’ help and are well equipped to follow their plans to go pan-European in 2009 potentially reaching 40 million young consumers.

The advertisers seems to be happy as well: Big brands like L’Oreal have seen tremendous results with average click through rates of 29% (ranges between 12 and 43%). Quite a lead from the average mobile advertising average CTR that hovers around 3-6%.

Finnish media Digitoday knows that in addition to Blyk, Aito Technologies has currently six commercial pilots running in Europe, including Finland. Digitoday also reports that Aito has around 700 potential customers, traditional and virtual mobile operators. Along with these, Aito is going after ring tone, community and added value service providers in the mobile space, which there are around 2000 to 3000.

Aito Technologies is owned by the employees as well as two reputable Nordic investement funds, Creandum and Conor. The company has currently 25 employees.