Arctic Startup

Snoobi Oy, online business intelligence company founded in 2004, has announced a partnership agreement with a new Estonian company High Times Factory. The agreement covers distribution of Snoobi’s web analytics products in Estonia along with providing customer support, and there are already Estonian customers using the service. According to Snoobi the expansion to Estonia will be a proof of the scalability of their service, and it is only the very beginning in the company’s internationalization.

Snoobi’s products allow companies to analyze their website visitors and website traffic to improve online sales and marketing, especially in B2B context (as opposed to Google Analytics). With the solution clients can better decide on the most effective online marketing mix and design more targeted and goal-oriented websites. Recently Snoobi’s solution was selected by The S Group in Finland who runs over €10 billion business and 80+ digital services.

Snoobi has fared well against the competition with active B2B marketing, especially to SMEs, and by targeting their offering to marketing executives, along with providing valued customer support. It drives home the point that knowing how to differentiate and position your offering, demonstrating value, and continuously building on customer relationships will make it possible to compete successfully even with big players.

Tekes organizes a free morning seminar “Doing Business in the USA - An Overview of the Opportunities and Challenges” April 7th in Helsinki.

Keynote will be delivered by Marshall S. Ferrin, Director, International Business Development Program, George Mason University. He will provide an overview to business opportunities in the East Coast USA, especially in the capital area, and related challenges to Finnish firms. You can also schedule one-on-one with Mr. Ferrin, taking place after the event.

Vailoma Oy, a company enabling community generated guides and tips for travel planning, has secured seed financing from Valve Branding Oy and Veraventure. The amount invested was not disclosed.

Vailoma offers currently over 260.000 destinations, cities, sights and so forth to help make decisions on the next travel destination. The content is gathered from all over the internet and filtered by the community. You build up a profile to enable suggestions based on what kind of holidays and travels you enjoy.

Valve Branding, which also invested in Jaiku, wants to seek new investments in the area of internet startups. “Valve sees Vailoma as an interesting opportunity to participate in the development of an interesting web service. We received some experience with Jaiku and this time we wanted to be a more active”, says Toni Laturi from Valve.

The investement is aimed towards internationalisation and the launch of the service (it is currently in private beta). Vailoma is also recruiting - web developers and GUI designers.

Update: Apparently Valve did not invest in Jaiku and therefore the information above was false.

Helsingin Sanomat arranges a competition for finding out the most promising innovative growth company in Finland. The event is held in Sanomatalo, downtown Helsinki, on Tuesday Jan 8th at 4pm. Admission is free for everyone interested.

Helsingin Sanomat has come up with 10 most prominent Finnish firms that are deemed to be on the way to great success based on votes for 160 firms by VCs and other experts working with growth companies. The firms are Beneq, Codenomicon, Digium, Ekahau, Floobs, Idean, Movial, Plenware, Sulake, and Xtract. Each firm is given two minutes to pitch their plan for taking over the world.

The winner will be chosen by a jury of six students from Helsinki University of Technology, The University of Art and Design Helsinki, and Helsinki School of Economics (two each). In addition there is separate public voting also, the results of which will also be published in the event.

Information from The Student Union of Helsinki University of Technology tells that also Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President and CEO of Nokia, would be giving a speech at the event, though I couldn’t confirm this from anywhere else.

The choice of firms may be controversial or not, so the results are better not to be taken too seriously, but it’s nevertheless a good opportunity for all participants to practice pitching…

Alarm:clock euro pointed us to Aito Technologies getting another injection of VC capital, this time from Creandum to fuel its international growth.

I’ve heard from relatively reliable sources that Aito is definitely onto something big and good here. Initial demand for the product/software they are building is incredibly good. The software as far as I’m informed, is a tool to analyse network traffic and thus serve as an indicator for operators to streamline their services. For example, as funny as it sounds - not many operators know the percentage of successfully delivered MMS messages in their networks and as far as I know, Aito’s software will help with these sort of problems.

Whatamap.com Ltd published Thursday a new mobile map service allowing users to create, find, and share maps on the web, and download those directly to the their cell phones as Java applications anywhere in the world. The target of Whatamap.com is nothing less than to be the world’s best consumer map service.

CEO Matti Saarinen explains Whatamap.com takes you from where you’re left with Google Maps mobile. He stated one can use Google or Nokia maps to get somewhere by car, but when you get on foot, you’ll need something more detailed than just road maps showing buildings or park areas. Pedestrian maps should look nice and show information related to the specific usage context, like store locations, restaurants, and meeting places in parks. This is backed up by also Nokia stating interest in pedestrian maps.

Whatamap.com’s offering includes fully-customizable maps, which can be either created by private users, or offered to visitors by different public and commercial property owners. Whatamap.com is currently building up its customer network in Finland, while developing partnering deals in Middle-Europe. The business model is built to scale - partners abroad can handle sales, implementation, and deployment by themselves with the web tools.

In the press conference were Risto Räikkönen, Managing Director of the Children’s Day Foundation (operating Linnanmäki amusement park in Helsinki) and Atte Köykkä, Shopping Center Manager of Shopping mall Itäkeskus (biggest in the Nordic countries) explaining their organization’s reasoning on getting aboard. Both are pioneering with the solution, and Itäkeskus already offers its visitors the possibility to download the map of the mall to their mobile just by sending a normal SMS to a shortcode number presented on the info signs.

Partners can also add context-related information and places on the map along with advertisements. Similarly consumers can create and share their maps on the web automatically, and add points of interest (e.g. interesting places, bars, shops) and - GPS points. Adding the GPS points makes all the difference, since by doing that you can locate yourself even on a totally custom-made and shaped map with your GPS phone.

An impressive example is the map of Himos (a smallish skiing center in Southern Finland) - it presents a panoranic map of all skiing routes, but also the services from rentals to restaurants and first aid. (Most of the services you can also call to with just a couple of clicks.) With Whatamap.com’s proprietory technology, GPS positioning will work on this panoramic map also - and on any other type of map, as long as you’ll place a few GPS fixed points on the map, done by using Google Maps interface on the Whatamap.com’s web page.

This born-global company has been founded in the beginning of 2007, and it currently employes 11 people, out of which most are owners. There are former Nokia and TeliaSonera managers aboard to bring business and user focus to the company. The map technology is based on several patents, with more coming. Whatamap.com has been operating with TEKES funding so far, but the first VC funding round will most likely take place early next year. The firm is looking for international venture capitalists to speed up access to global markets.

It’s great to see a new Finnish startup with real drive to grow and conquer. Having tested their service on both web and mobile, it seems Whatamap.com might very well be onto something here. We’ll be following up closely on this one.

A related hint on the topic:
If you know Finnish, you might want to see recording of last Wednesday’s A-plus talk show, with Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki (Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia) and Google’s Petri Kokko (Country Manager, Finland) in studio discussing the convergence of mobile and internet. Maps are an essential part of the conversation, and Vanjoki e.g. states the mobile map in the always-on mobile internet age is a whole new platform with huge amount of possibilies, while Kokko also concords mobile maps will offer lots of services in addition to just routes.

Is game development considered as a “real job” if it’s about developing serious games? Or has the growing game sector in Finland already proven to be business enough to be taken seriously? Either way, HappyWise, based in Oulu, Finland, is all out developing games to corporate training markets and public sector.

The objectives of the games range from introducing new products to education and process training. HappyWise claims games with educational content can be used to motivate learning in wide variety of fields, and in any any group. In essence games show the immediate causality of player’s actions, thus triggering learning. HappyWise is founded in 2006, and announces it’s current headcount to be 10 people. One of their newest games is Growwwings.net, a cross-curricular internet-based educational game teaching sustainable development.

The development of serious games in general is expected to boost in Finland. The horrors of “edutainment” are fading, and the new rise of games with objectives beyond entertaining is expected to break through in a few years. The major reason for this is that serious games development is finally being driven by gaming rather than teaching professionals. The game development gathers still together very versatile teams; for example HappyWise’s team includes computer scientists, game designers, content providers, graphic designers and business expertise, along with specific experts depending on the target field of different projects.

In addition to HappyWise, there’s a healthy, developing gaming industry chapter in Oulu with a bunch of new firms. Also Turku is catching the wave, with Turku Games Organisation founded just recently to amass efforts. IGDA Finland on the other hand has been active in Helsinki area already for quite some time. Looking forward to cover other interesting gaming startups later on..

The Finnish Apaja Online Entertainment has closed a 1.75 million euro round A financing with Martinson Trigon Venture Partners. Apaja’s main product is the online gaming community known in Finland by Aapeli and the international brand of Playray.

Discussions on the round were started during early summer and continued to closer discussions with MTVP during the autumn. According to Inka Mero, the CEO of Apaja, negotions were continued with MTVP as they have a strong understanding of the Eastern-European markets as well as Central European markets.

The investment is used for growth and internationalisation of the brand.

Disclaimer: The writer of this post has previously worked at Apaja Online Entertainment.

Iprbox Oy, founded in 2006, offers a variety of different intellectual property rights services to help companies better utilize IPR as part of their business and internationalization operations, as well as maximizing the value of IPR.
Potential customers include inventors, researchers, research institutes, business incubators, high-growth companies, and licensing partners.

According to the company it’s the first time a single company can offer all IPR services required for commercial success. It has introduced IPR360°® service concept for helping firms to integrate IPR with core business operations. Iprbox offering includes defining IPR strategies and processes, screening markets and competitors, helping with registering patents and trademarks, and controlling and liquidating licenses. The company also offers an IPR marketplace bringing together IP owners and potential purchasers, and offers help in different kinds of new venture spin-offs.

While Iprbox claims that IPRs are “the single most important investment for high-growth companies, as intellectual capital represents around 80 percent of their value”, it naturally depends greatly on the business whether intellectual capital should or could be protected. Furthermore, the management of the fastest growing Finnish companies consider the most valuable intellectual capital to be the people (quite precisely in my opinion). For perspective, though, one has to also notice 7 of those top 10 companies are in the business of software, as opposed to selling physical products where it’s possible to sometimes build virtual monopolies around the technology (while software patents of course don’t qualify ‘as such’). Nevertheless, IPR strategy is an important part of business as well, and the IPR landscape should be investigated and risks identified beforehand when entering new markets.

Open Source service company Nomovok is the number one in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list of 2007. The list ranks firms based on the revenue growth over the past five years (having at least 5 years of operations is thus one of the prerequisites). The revenue growth of Novomok over the past 5 years has been impressively over 2300 %. Only a bit behind comes Bluetooth technology provider Bluegiga Technologies. Third is Openbit, provider of mobile DRM solutions, with 1636 percent growth.

Last year’s first Sulake and third Digium have slightly dropped, although still in top 10. The 2006 number two Cidercone was just recently acquired by OMX-listed Ixonos.

Deloitte’s Tuomo Salmi, partner, Services, describes that according to the accompanying qualitative study the most critical factors affecting success have been concentrating on the core business, committing the personnel, and leadership-related factors, as seen by the management of the companies. Having and being able to keep skillful and entrepreneur-minded people was deemed even more important than customer accounts.

Deloitte Technology Fast 50 competition in Finland is arranged in cooperation with Kauppalehti, The Finnish Venture Capital Association, The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association, and Tekes. Top companies will automatically participate in EMEA Fast 500 competition. Last year Sulake positioned 12th in the EMEA Fast list with 8095 % growth, while Cidercone was 65th with growth of 2086 %.

This might implicate that this year’s top Finnish growth companies may not position anywhere in top 50 in EMEA. More arrogant and audacious growth entrepreneurs needed?