Arctic Startup

Zipipop has been chosen to present their latest mobile service tomorrow in the Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona. Mobile 2.0 Europe is a extension of the famous Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco. The new service is called Zipiko and has been kept secret until the Mobile 2.0 Europe launch.

Zipiko is a quick and effortless way to see what your friends are doing and a way to invite them to your chosen venue whether it’s it a local cafe or your own place for drinks, lunch or whatever you fancy. You can also see what your friends are doing throughout the day from the main page where it’s only a matter of a few clicks to join an event, given that you’re invited.

The service itself has born out of Facebook application Mennäänkö Yhdelle (Let’s go for a one in Finnish) that Zipipop developed earlier on, where the best bits have been transferred to this new browser based mobile service.

I interviewed Zipipop CEO, Helene Auramo, after the festives had already started in Barcelona and she explained that “when you invite friends to a party they will receive an SMS to which they can then answer ‘Yes’ with a mere SMS. So the idea is that you don’t necessarily have to access the web at all to tell that you’re coming. And to make the experience complete one will receive a text message just before the event to know who else has answered ‘Yes’ to know who will eventually make it to the party” . Helene emphasized that the value of the service is in spontaneity and the ease of setting up a meeting on the fly.

Once you register to Zipiko you will receive 30 free SMS for organizing get-togethers, but in the long run Zipipop wants to bring in advertisers that would pay for the SMS messages, thus making the service free for the users. The advertisers would get their name on a discreet message at the end of the invitation SMS.

It seems that Zipipop has found a simple way to bring an aspect of a Jaiku/Twitter like service, SMS and Meetup together to organize spontaneous get-togethers . Now they only need to get the advertisers on board to pay for the SMS messages.

You can see a demo of the service here.

Techcruch also made a note about Mobile 2.0 Europe event and Zipko.

Floobs is taking part as the only Finnish company in the MIPTV’s Content 360 pitching competition in Cannes this year.

More precisely, Floobs is one of the three finalists in the “Advanced Mobile Interaction with TV Content” -series, where the two other contestants are Coded Vision, Twenty Six Leeds (UK) and BBC TV Talk, Wyndham-Leigh (UK).

Kai and Joonas let me know via e-mail that they will be sharing some comments from Cannes later on after their presentation.

Nexit Ventures, a venture capital firm stating to offer Nordic mobile companies a bridge to Silicon Valley markets, has announced an investment in Axel Technologies, a Finnish developer of mobile TV technologies. Other investor in the funding round led by Nexit is the company’s existing investor, a government-owned investment company Finnish Industry Investment Ltd. According to ITviikko the round was worth over one million euros.

Axel Technologies will use the financing to growth and internationalization, focus being on developing sales, marketing, and customer support.

The company provides mobile TV middleware and client solutions, and is targeting to get on the wave of first commercial digital mobile DVB-H standard TV services expected to be launched in Europe during 2008. So far there have been only 3G-based services available.

According to Pekka Salonoja, General Partner, Nexit Ventures, Axel Technologies is already one of top five developers of mobile TV middleware globally, customers including AMD and Thomson. Potential clients for the firm are mobile phone manufacturers, semiconductor suppliers, and mobile operators.

Nexit Ventures’ press release.

Fromdistance Ltd. has won the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and will represent us in MobileMonday European Peer Awards in Barcelona on February 11. The two other nominees were community-driven live TV streaming startup Floobs, and Intelligent SMS provider BookIT.

Fromdistance is actually registered in Estonia, though founded by a Finn. It was allowed to enter the competition nevertheless. The nomination was based on Fromdistance’s amateur reporting tool called Mobile Citizen Reporter (already available in Finland). The jury found the company to possess the strongest characteristics with an innovative idea, lucrative and high potential market with a global appeal, as well as a good overall presentation. The privately-owned company was founded in 2004, and sells software licenses to large enterprises and media companies.

The participation in the peer awards Finland competition was quite light, though, compared to e.g. Norway, which witnessed the following nominees for the Norway Peer Awards 2008:

• Opera Mini
• Colibria IM
• mBricks
• mobilize by Adactus
• Fluid by Favourite Systems
• Studio1: by Rubberduck MediaLab
• Zizzr
• Dextella by Mobiletech
• SMT Phonename
• Mobile Manager by Touch Mobility
• MobiSearch by ZapDance
• her.no by MobileInfo

According to still unverified news Adactus won with their cross-platform content delivery system mobilize. Interestingly, Adactus also offers a mobile reporter solution, although with not as end-to-end business offering as Fromdistance.

Altogether, despite lacking competition participants, there were some really interesting companies represented in the Helsinki event, which we’ll hopefully have a chance to cover later on.

Next week there are two interesting events, MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and the second annual StratMark seminar.

MobileMonday Helsinki will select a company having the best mobile application or service to represent Finland at the MobileMonday European Peer Awards on February 11 in Barcelona. The European winners will then continue to Global Awards Finals in Malaysia in May. Admission to tomorrow’s Helsinki event is free, just do it now.

StratMark program (all material in Finnish, though, except research publications) on the other hand is focused on improving the strategic marketing know-how of Finnish companies, along with creating an academic research paradigm on the subject. The seminar on Thursday is second of its kind, and unfortunately fully booked by now. There will be lots of interesting people from top Finnish companies, and academic highlights include marketing professor Rajendra Srivastava from Emory University, Atlanta.

I’ll be participating both events, so you can look forward for a report.