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.

Dan Gillmor of Dopplr has just announced their support for iCal. What you basically do is add a new calendar and upload its updates to the Dopplr -server.

Dopplr certainly has been updating their service more than Jaiku, but I’d still like to see more value innovation in terms of the users. What you can do always do is hand the development ideas over to your community in the style of IdeaStorm. I’m sure being such a simple idea, companies should use it a lot more.

Last week we were wondering what was happening to Jaiku as Petteri posted something that caught our eye. It seemed that he got the week’s mixed up as last night Google announced in Google Campfire that Jaiku will be one of the first services to be running on the new Google App Engine. Let’s hope this will shorten the somewhat lengthy development cycles we’ve seen since Google acquired Jaiku last year.

Google App Engine, according to TechCrunch (who’s Michael Arrington crashed the Google Campfire event with Robert Scoble), is an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services. According to Arrington the service is somewhat less flexible than Amazon’s S3 as it requires developers to lay the whole development stack on the Google servers where as in Amazon’s case you can pick and mix.

The Camp Fire website states that all users of Google App Engine get free quota of 500MB in persistent storage, and 5M monthly pageviews. In other words, developers are able to scale to a few million users without “infrastructure headaches”.

Something’s definitely happening in the UK and Mountain View today - according to Petteri’s Jaiku post. Petteri is the co-founder of Jaiku working in the UK, while Jyri Engestrom is working in Mountain view with his wife and son.

Yesterday we got our 20 invites and Petteri even replied to his Jaiku announcing those invites as “OK, sounds good. Expect some news shortly :)” - we’re on the lookout!

I met Christoffer Landtman the CEO of CompanyCube in our Open Coffee with Arctic Startup event. CompanyCube has a very interesting position in terms of their business. They have managed to penetrate the somewhat unsexy commodities market of traders with their product. More specifically, they offer steel traders a viable solution to handle their processes.

The service is provided over the internet, accessible from anywhere - even the mobile phone they claim. The service includes trading management, customer relations management and business intelligence. Trading activities are managed as seperate projects and each project therefore includes certain routines such as stakeholder management, scheduling and so on. CRM is the regular integration of customer data to match more closely to the trading activities. Business intelligence has been built in to give a quick dashboard type of display to running your business and help make decisions faster.

CompanyCube is positioning themselves in huge market, measured to be 318 billion USD in 2005 worldwide. Due to large acquisitions and mergers the IT solutions are a mess and largely fragmented, according Christoffer Landtman. They have started off well in Finland as SteelTeam, the largest trading house of steel has began to use their product to streamline their business.

Eero Aarnio, one of the most famous Finnish designers, has taken his work online to Playforia, the 3D virtual world created by Apaja. He created the timeless Ball Chair in 1963, which has been hugely popular around the world. Apaja, the company behind the casual gaming site, has built Playforia as part of their service portfolio to gather audience from the huge population living in online worlds. According to Asmo Halinen, one of the founders of the company, over 30% of the users in Playforia and Aapeli are over 30 year olds.

Apaja is venturing into the same direction as Sulake, who has done a lot of co-operation with 3rd party content suppliers in their Habbo Hotels. It’s definitely a feasible way of bringing in valuable content and creating that link between the virtual and real world that users normally crave for in some sense.

Disclosure: the author is a former employee of Apaja.

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]

Dopplr, the social network or business travellers, has just announced at ETech a teamup with AMEE. AMEE stands for Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine and they provide a neutral, open platform for measuring the “Carbon-Footprint” of anything. Dopplr states on their blog that they are still putting finishing touches on the feature, but will be releasing it soon to the public.

I’m not sure if this has anything to do with saving the world from excessive carbon emissions, but at least it should make frequent travellers think of the consequences of their travels. Nevertheless it’s a move to the right direction.

Innofile, a Helsinki-based startup founded in 2006, launched Innofile Courier service this week. The service allows customers to send large files easily over the internet, as opposed to using often-awkward email attachments. The service targets especially media, publishing, and engineering industries, where larger-than-email files may still be transferred physically using CDs and DVDs.

The user interface of the service looks pleasantly simple and straightforward to use. You just select the files to upload, then enter your activation code (you pay 1 euro per uploaded file package), and then get the access link to your files, which you can share with any number of recipients, or fire off email notification directly from the site. Simple, fast, and elegant.

However, large file delivery market is facing some tough international competition these days with a huge amount of players. There are many free services available, though pretty much all of them include ads in the site and/or emailed messages, what is not typically a favored feature when sending files to business partners. Ads may also make one question privacy and security. Many sites offer also ad-free and even white label services, but those are typically based on monthly subscription fee. Innofile’s pay-per-shipment model may thus lower the threshold to try their service (though the initial invoiced upfront payment is 50€), offering also a cheap alternative to subscription for infrequent usage.

I think it’s clever from Innofile to position their new service as “digital courier” - when you want to send somebody a physical delivery, you use physical courier services like UPS. So when you want to send digital content to somebody, you select the digital one… If Innofile manages to anchor this idea to people’s minds, it might just take off, at least on some scale. Though 1€/delivery is not necessarily the price point you expect these days for distributing information. But nevertheless they at least have revenue model, so it’s good to see this approach as well, as regards the scale vs. revenues question. It’s very interesting to see what kind of reception Innofile gets.

Innofile’s press release (in Finnish).

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.