Arctic Startup

The travel information organizer Vailoma has changed their name to TripSay. Also the website has been polished up. TripSay’s service aims to ease up the process required to plan new trips and vacations, by providing easy access to relevant and complete destination content, which is both updated by users and aggregated from around the web.

The company has also created a new embeddable application called the Destination Module, which is designed to share TripSay’s content with travel agencies and other partners enabling them to get dynamic destination content from the web and travelers onto their site without any effort. The application can be checked out on Kaleva Travel’s web site (the site’s in Finnish, but scroll down a bit and you’ll see the app), which has the first implementation of the application. TripSay has also plans to open up an API to allow tailored services, though no indication of the release schedule is given yet.

TripSay plans to monetize their service by targeted advertisements, along with commissions from bookings done via its site. Hopefully the new name is more descriptive to international users and helps to spread the word.

[via Startupbin , TripSay blog]

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.

Alma Media, or more precisely Iltalehti has bought the Finnish online TV-guide Telkku.com.

Telkku.com gathers over 500 000 unique visitors each week and is growing. Our guesses are that Alma Media is growing Iltalehti to be the biggest online “portal” in Finland. Many of the media sites are still lacking in innovative revenue models apart from the traditional display advertising and thus the more unique visitors you gather the better media you are when the advertiser considers her options.

It remains to be seen, whether Telkku.com will remain independent under the Iltalehti brand or not.

(via HS)

Whitevector and Gyllene Skor have announced cooperation to enable Gyllene Skor’s customers to better utilize knowledge from web discussions their business. Gyllene Skor will utilize Whitevector’s web-based analytics application TracSense in measuring, tracking, and making sense of web conversations and their effects from the clients’ marketing communications point of view.

Whitevector is a Finnish startup founded in 2005. The company helps marketers, PR consultants, journalists and other professionals to monitor the digital news and social media discussions in the Internet. Whitevector’s TracSense product offers various business benefits from improved online reputation management and staying aware of consumer trends to tracking word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. For journalists the product offers possibility to complement traditional news with the latest insights from blogs and forums. Whitevector promotes TracSense by hosting a service picking up recent topics Finland is discussing about.
Among Whitevector’s owners with a minority stake is M-Brain, a Finnish intelligent digital news monitoring and analysis solutions provider.

Gyllene Skor is a new digital media company, just founded this autumn, aiming to be a strategic partner for its customers on e-business and marketing solutions, driving revenue growth and gaining competitive advantage through better use of digital media. Owners of Gyllene Skor include the management, Marketing Agency Bob Helsinki, and Engagement Agency Toinen Helsinki.