While much of the attention at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is on new handsets and software, Suntrica from Finland silently announced that they got their Solar Strap approved by Apple. Their new Solar Strap, which comes now in four nice colours and got even lighter, is working with the iPhone 3G and 3 GS, as well as the iPod Touch, Classic and Nano. This is a great opportunity for all the Apple fans to charge their iPhones and iPods while away from an outlet, be it in the city or hiking.
For those who don’t have an iPhone or iPod but are looking for an environmentally friendly way to load their phones and gadgets, Suntrica still has the normal SolarStrap which is compatible with a range of phones, and also can be loaded up via USB for those rainy days and carried as a backup. Finally, the company is also helping out the people in Haiti, as relief workers are powering their mobile phones with Suntrica chargers – a great sign that they are not only interested in profits, but also in the well being of other people.
Mobile Dev Camp is coming to Helsinki on February 27. The second time this event brings together all the mobile developers across the region to hear about the latest trends, meet the other mobile honchos and, well, to develop for mobile platforms.
The event was born from the realization that the hey days of mobile phone manufacturing where behind us here in Finland. Regardless, or maybe because of it, the country is full know how on mobile service development and people with skills to match.
The two themes of the evening of 27th are cross-platform development and mobile apps versus the mobile internet. A timely topics given the state of the web. This means key note presentations, workshops and a MobileDevCamp-Challenge competition. And a hell of a party if its anything like last year.
Swedish university students are to begin using a near field communication payments system (NFC) developed by payments processor Payex and secure mobile solutions specialist Accumulate.
For this, PayEx along with existing investors have invested US$2m of venture capital in Accumulate. The money will be used to further develop Accumulate’s mobile payments and mobile security business.
20,000 students are expected to be enrolled on the system by the end of this year, with a total of 100,000 students at a number of universities going live over the next six months, beginning with Uppsala University and Linköping University.
Plugg, one of the better conferences in Europe, is held 11 March in Belgacom Surf House at Brussels. It’s a one-day conference with a clear focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and raising global awareness for those European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field that stand out in the crop.
There’s certainly not too much celebration of entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and we are excited to see Plugg bringing together some of the best thinkers and startups on the continent. Our good friend and established writer at TechCrunch, Robin Wauters is at it again and is going to showcase the best that Europe has to offer. Plugg is a must for anyone who’s anybody in the European startup scene.
Gemalto, provider of end-to-end security solutions, has acquired a Finnish startup Valimo Wireless. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Some of Valimo’s investors included Altine Group, Risto Siilasmaa and SpringBank TechVentures.
Valimo has developed a two-channel, two-factor authentication based on Public Key Infrastructure, combining an over the air platform with a software client in the SIM to generate a legally binding electronic signature. What this jargon from the press release means is that Valimo enables mobile phone users to securely authenticate themselves, digitally sign documents and confirm legally binding transactions simply by entering a self-chosen passphrase or a PIN code. Voilà!
ArcticIndex, our directory for Nordic and Baltic startups, people, startup jobs and events, just got iPhoned. ArcticIndex iPhone app is developed by Arun Prakash Rajendran, a passionate mobile entrepreneur living in Göteborg, Sweden. You can check out the App at Prakash’s app gallery, or get it directly here.
I have used the app for couple of days now and love the ease I can check out the new events listings. Similarly, if you’re looking for a startup to join its a whim to check out the latest jobs at ArcticIndex and see what the company is all about from the Index.
We will introduce more features for ArcticIndex soon, so make sure you have your iPhone App ready when that happens.
Grey Area, a small startup operating in stealth mode, is gearing up to change the cityscape for everybody. I get back to how they are going to do this later in the post, but the story of how this startup came to be is equally interesting.
I first met the guys back in OpenCoffee Helsinki what must be more than a year ago. I remember Mikko Hämäläinen telling me how they were exploring possibilities to set up a company with two of his friends, Andreas Karlsson and Teemu Tuulari, from Ericsson. All three had started at Ericsson in 2003-2004 and met when they were put in the small team with the task of developing an Ericsson network node.
ArcticStartup have earlier reported about a promising Nordic visual search engine initiative – the Stockholm based Spezify.com, a visual multimedia search engine founded by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson, digital creatives and freelancers. Their concept have a great potential to grab a big piece of this market. Continue reading »
Some ten years back I was fascinated about the stories Nokia told about the upcoming technological evolution of mobile phones. As a Finn, I was of course proud of Nokia’s success, and almost religiously believed in Anssi Vanjoki’s preaches. He said that in a few years, most of the cellphones would contain a camera, and a significant portion will also have a GPS receiver. Nokia would be shaping the markets dramatically. Now we can see that it was true.
In parallel with the device evolution, irreversible changes have emerged in business, communication, information, personal and social life and wherever you can imagine, along with the internet era. We have changed our behavior, thinking, expectations and so on because of so many internet-enabled services. We have learned to want services and tools that work. No more can we tolerate applications the setup or use of which requires a technical expert. And frankly, we want it and often get it for free. A great range of software applications, services, hosting, disk space, whatever – in practice for free. Just select what you like most.
Rightware is really a spin-off from Futuremark that was just founded at the end of 2009. At the same time the company announced the deal with Futuremark, they announced a closing of a €3m investment from Inventure and Nexit Ventures.
With the funding, Rightware will accelerate development and marketing of Kanzi. Kanzi is a taylor made solution specifically for mobile phones and automotive applications as well as Futuremark’s established device performance measurement products and services for mobile and embedded industries. Kanzi enables manufacturers of mobile phones and automotive display & infotainment systems to create richer and more intuitive user interfaces in radically less time than it takes with conventional tools and methods.
In an interview with Econsultancy, GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs talked about his vision for apps and how they will take over the internet. We disagree.
GetJar is the world’s second largest mobile app store founded in Lithuania offering over 57,000 apps for all mobile devices and serving over 55m downloads per month. To date they have achieved over 750m downloads and attracted 300,000 registered developers and 50,000 registered beta testers.
In the interview Laurs’ says that the battle of the app stores will culminate in a dramatic change to the market over the next 12-18 months, and at least 90% of app stores will fail. Further, the importance of global mobile billing will become critical: Several $10M-a-year mobile app businesses will appear in 2010 as the apps market gathers momentum. The billing processes and agreements will improve in 2011 and 2012, stimulating the app economy and the rise of the $100m app businesses.
Steam Republic, a Finnish startup in the mobile space, is focusing on digital fan oriented marketing. They are big in mobile and want to enable bands to control the relationship with their own fans and consequentially make money through that.
Steam Republic was previously called Backstage Alliance. The company has participated and won several competitions under both names. Latest is the Appsfire App Star Awards where they were a finalist (see video below). They have also landed their first international agreement with EMI record label (UK) and are pushing out their first international pilot with You Me At Six already at the end of this week if all goes as planned.
Sponsor: Zokem – Your Life. Share it. Automatically.
http://zokem.com/
Zokem is a mobile communications and lifecasting startup that enables users to automatically share their daily activities to their friends’ mobile phones, to the Internet and to social networking services, such as Facebook and MySpace.
Zokem takes people’s activity information from mobiles to the Internet, not the other way around as most of the existing services do. Zokem offers its users a completely new way to communicate and keep in touch with friends and family by automating many of the normally manual messages between people, where the content is created by people simply living their lives.
Zokem aims to provide its service to all users no matter what device or service they are using. Therefore, Zokem has built a native mobile application to all major platforms (Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android, iPhone and Java), and it is integrated with all major social networking services to enable its users to share their lives automatically through one single channel. Users may also define what information they want to share with different services and friend groups, as in real life.
Zokem is one of over 200 startups from Finland participating in BizSpark program. All startups, building their own software application, earning less than $1M/year of revenue, and that are privately-owned, can participate to BizSpark program.
“BizSpark has been an uncomplicated and easy partnership with nothing but pleasant surprises. It has helped us with tools that start-ups usually lack, and for young companies, like Zokem, there is only an upside in the business. BizSpark is also a good launching pad for being noticed globally.” Zokem CEO Ludovic Gaudé comments.
Startups get a MSDN premium subscription for three years, for each of their developers. Each subscription includes all of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Expressions Studio developer tools, and all the platform software (Windows, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, etc) that they need to build and test the application. The majority of startups are also building web-based applications, which they’ll host themselves or though a hosting service provider like Nebula Oy in Finland, so BizSpark also provides free server licenses to put those applications into production. The production license allows unlimited use of Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, SharePoint Server and Systems Center during the three-year membership.
Startups can enroll on http://microsoft.com/BizSpark. There they’ll see a list of organizations (BizSpark Network Partners) any of whom can enroll them in their own country, or they can contact Microsoft directly.
Note: this is our periodical blog sponsor message.
Zokem is a mobile communications and lifecasting startup that enables users to automatically share their daily activities to their friends’ mobile phones, to the Internet and to social networking services, such as Facebook and MySpace.
It seems that the Finnish gaming monopoly, RAY, is the latest in the game of playing the big bad wolf who doesn’t want to play nice. Finnish Helsingin Sanomat reports that they are ready to sue an iPhone app maker Elias Pietilä, for creating a game of the similar concept from one of the oldest coin games in Finland, Pajatso. Elias Pietilä calles his version of the game Pajatzo.
RAY (or the Finnish Slotmachine Association) has referred to the trademark law, law regarding good business practices (laxly translated) as well as the ever-so-famous copyright law. The first odd issue that puts the whole case into perspective is that RAY does not own the trademark to Pajatso, the original game concept. Continue reading »
“Creativity just went mobile”, Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut
JayCut, the Swedish online video editor startup will as of today be available on Moblin-based ultra-portable devices like netbooks and mobile internet devices (MIDs). Moblin is an open source Linux operating system which is optimized for Intel® Atom™ processor based devices. JayCut’s been working closely with Intel on the new Moblin v2 that offers advanced Internet, media and social networking experiences. The mobile editor is primarly launched within their white label product, but hang in there, a public version is on its way, too. Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut, is excited about moving on to the mobile space with MIDs, thus changing the way content producers and publishers will work in the future. Having the publishing system in ones pocket gets publishers whole new opportunities to interact with its audience closer to real-time.
While much of the attention at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is on new handsets and software, Suntrica from Finland silently announced that they got their Solar Strap approved by Apple. Their new Solar Strap, which comes now in four nice colours and got even lighter, is working with the iPhone 3G and 3 GS, as well as the iPod Touch, Classic and Nano. This is a great opportunity for all the Apple fans to charge their iPhones and iPods while away from an outlet, be it in the city or hiking.
Swedish university students are to begin using a near field communication payments system (NFC) developed by payments processor 
Some ten years back I was fascinated about the stories Nokia told about the upcoming technological evolution of mobile phones. As a Finn, I was of course proud of Nokia’s success, and almost religiously believed in Anssi Vanjoki’s preaches. He said that in a few years, most of the cellphones would contain a camera, and a significant portion will also have a GPS receiver. Nokia would be shaping the markets dramatically. Now we can see that it was true.
Finnish startup 
In an 
It seems that the Finnish gaming monopoly, RAY, is the latest in the game of playing the big bad wolf who doesn’t want to play nice. Finnish Helsingin Sanomat reports that they are ready to sue an iPhone app maker Elias Pietilä, for creating a game of the similar concept from one of the oldest coin games in Finland, Pajatso. Elias Pietilä calles his version of the game Pajatzo.
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
