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.

ShareThis

In short, Fruugo positions themselves as the “trusted 3rd party of ecommerce”. The major problem Fruugo sees and is trying to solve is in the internet ecommerce supply chain. Reijo described that purchasing from the web is still quite painful; you enter some product name to a search site, and from the thousands or millions of hits you need to figure out where you could and should get what you are looking for. Then, after finding some etailer, the next questions arise around whether you trust the seller, payment options, etc. Also for the etailer, especially in Europe as an example, it’s hard to deal with varying regulations, laws, taxes etc. in different countries.

Fruugo believe they can offer the consumers and etailers easier, simpler, and safer way to do web purchases. They see big inefficiencies in the current web ecommerce supply chain, and believe they can streamline it a lot. Reijo didn’t want to comment the business model nor the technical concept in detail yet. Fruugo is essentially a consumer company, and their marketing activities will be heavily focusing on creating buzz and interest in the internet.

Currently Fruugo is building the technology platform with especially scalability and partner integration automation in mind, and establishing partnerships with key players in the industry. The service will be available in closed Beta in a few months. So far Fruugo has “some plans” for including also mobile into the equation, people’s roots being strongly in the mobile world, but not right from the start. Reijo comments they naturally see a huge potential in the mobile web, as mobile handsets are becoming the main way of accessing web in many parts of the world.

So, what does the mystic equation 1L + 1M + 1P = ? on their web site stand for? There have been all sorts of wild quesses thrown in the air, but Reijo now reveals it’s simply “1 Language + 1 Mind + 1 Purpose = Success”. So it rather describes the company’s culture and mindset than its offering, as was speculated. They are building the company around a strong vision and hand-picked people with strong can-do attitude.

Reijo also states all the key supporters have positioned Fruugo for real success - they didn’t even think about establishing the company anywhere else, as all share the same love for Finland. They really want to show that it’s possible to create a top-notch internet startup here as well. Naturally Fruugo is going to bring more international color to their team, but the “heart and soul” will be Finnish in any case.

We’ll be revealing more about Fruugo later on as things progress. Also note that Fruugo will launch their renewed web site by Monday, with a bit more content than currently.

ShareThis

M&M also reports on business figures (well, proportional at least). Sulake’s May 2008 is 20% bigger in terms of revenue than in May 2007. It is also said to be positive, making this year the first profitable one.

ShareThis

Juha Huttunen, the CEO, commented groups in the following manner; “We added groups because they are a crucial element for finding people that share the same travel passions. With groups it is now again easier to find tips related to your interest. You can now easily find the places and tips recommended by e.g. fellow surfers or party animals. You can also create your own group with just friends too.”

With regards to their moving out of private beta, Juha Huttunen did not reveal all that much. The list of todo-items isn’t apparently all that long - I’m guessing they are in the final stages of fine tuning code and sorting out the communications things with regard to getting everything in-sync. The launch date is still unsure, but we’re guessing that its set for August.

ShareThis

Fruugo will be hosting a breakfast meeting with a few bloggers. Fruugo is taking this first step seriously as the host for the session is none other than their CEO Reijo Syrjäläinen. VP of marketing, Janne Waltonen does not want to reveal anything regarding the event, however he wants to point out this is one of the first initiatives to support their open attitude towards social and participatory media.

If we could ask just one question from the CEO, Reijo Syrjäläinen - what would you want to ask?

Disclosure: I have worked with Janne Waltonen on founding Gyllene Skor, he is also a share holder in the company.

ShareThis

Click to Play

ShareThis

I also heard some good rumours regarding the Finnish startup scene. First of all, regarding Dopplr - Marko Ahtisaari, Lisa Sounio and Taneli Tikka have left, or are leaving the company to continue to new challenges. Taneli Tikka is currently very active with his new startup RunToShop, which is creating some buzz among Finnish startups. The moves at the moment are not official, but there is a lot of buzz around that.

Juha Huttunen of Tripsay was also nodding towards August with regards to their official launch. Therefore we’ll have to wait a few more months before we will be able to see the service they are coming out with. I understand they are currently making final moves towards the launch.

Last, but not least - rumour or not - the Iron Sky movie, followup to the largest Finnish movie ever distributed - StarWreck, will be launched in 2010. Currently the script is being finetuned for the “investment round” that will be a few million euros and that will begin during the end of this year.

However, there was a lot of positive talk among the startups there regarding various issues and I also received a lot of great ideas regarding our next event.

ShareThis

The remaining 15% is still owned by the management and will be acquired by Tanla in two parts, 5% after the first year and 10% after the second. Openbit has been one of the fastest growing companies in Finland in terms of revenue growth, ranking third in the Deloitte’s Finnish Technology Fast 50 list of 2007.

Seems like a potentially very good match for both companies. Openbit should be able to expand their channels and partners faster in Asia and North America, and Tanla gets extensive foothold in Europe.
Congrats to Openbit for the work well done so far!

See Tanla’s press release (PDF) for more information.

ShareThis

The winner Easy Vote is a mobile Flash Lite application enabling users to vote by mobile phone call, text message, or Web service via rich user interface. Kuneri focuses on creating applications and tools for Flash Lite development mainly on the Symbian S60 platform. The firm also offers KuneriLite, an application development toolkit for Symbian/S60 stated to extend Flash Lite capabilities and allow creating applications without any Symbian knowledge.

Kuneri’s blog post.

ShareThis

MySites has decided to go after gamers and university students.  MySites CEO, Ramine Darabiha, tells us that gamers and students are the kinds of users who respond the best to MySites as they tend to prefer sharing pictures and music. Many users also seem to use MySites as an “private online hard disk”, to access for example their school documents.

MySites had a strong presence at Lan79, a large European gaming LAN party. Ramine told us that this way they made important contacts there with key players in the online gaming industry, such as the largest online gaming news sites, event organizers , as well as several top teams.

This allowed MySites to gather attention for their own CounterStrike Source tournament that took place on the 9th of May when MySites organized a large one-night tournament for CounterStrike Source. The teams were competing for a total cash prize of 1000€. Coverage of this tournament was spread across 8 prominent online gaming news sites, namely Vakarm, Cadred, Team-aAa, eFever, Actu-Lan, London Mint, Team-Coolermaster, Inside Source. Additionally, Ramine told us that there was a live web tv stream of every match, which hosted up to 1000 spectators.

MySites has also been focusing their promotion on students, targeting student unions of universities of Oulu and Tampere. The company has been presenting the service to the heads of the student unions in order to get the most active members of the student body involved in promoting their services.

According to Ramine, as a result of these efforts, MySites is known by and has contacts in many of the top gaming teams and the staff of online gaming sites as well as uniniversity student unions. This in an interesting grass roots approach that reminds me of the the way Facebook spread in the early 2005 among university students before it hit the mainstream.

MySites is clearly facing the same IPR issues as any other site regarding the sharing movies and music online. Thus, it seems to be mainly a convenient way to store data into the cloud for one’s own personal use since it can hardly steel a significant share of the personal photo sharing business from Facebook, Flickr and the likes. In this respect the strategy of targeting niche audiences with specific needs might prove to be a wise approach.

Disclosure: MySites is sponsoring Arctic Startup Events

ShareThis