Our cleantech team was all over Clean Tech Venture Day, and posted some great video interviews with Rene Savelsberg, CEO of SET Venture Partners on the topics of break through areas for 2010 and which markets to enter in cleantech.
Yesterday we reported that a big name team has come out with a new startup called Sofanatics. The team consists of Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman, a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
We have gathered some further information and believe Sofanatics is a service focusing on sociel viewing. Wikipedia describes a social viewing service as a practice revolving around the ability for multiple users to aggregate from multiple sources and view online videos together in a synchronized viewing experience. Typically the experience also involves some form of instant messaging or communication to facilitate discussion pertaining to the common viewing experience. This would fit our earlier prediction of ’something with video, football and doing all this is a social manner.’
Eniram, a Finnish startup, helps the maritime industry to save fuel, emissions and money. The company, based in Helsinki and established in 2005, currently employs forty people and has seen good growth during the last years.
Eniram uses IT in an old industry. They integrate their measurement system in ships, and with a simple UI the crew can optimize the performance of their ship. Installation takes two days and can be done on the water during operation, so it doesn’t hinder the driving of the ship. It can be installed on all kinds of vessels, from passenger to container ships. Annual savings of up to USD 400k can be made per ship, and payback times vary between two and fourteen months.
Remember Zipiko? The service with 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.”
Unfortunately the company that developed Zipiko, namely Zipipop, put the product development on ice already last June and moved on to service the growing Finnish enterprise customer base that is completely and utterly lost with social media wave that has hit the organizations. To scale their operations Zipipop, lead by its energetic CEO Helene Auramo, has teamed up with the former Managing Director of Accenture’s Finnish and Nordic offices.
Richard von Kaufmann of Zipipop states in the company blog the following:
E-readers and tablet MIDs are the new black. Eric Schmidt says they’ll be our new best friends by 2015, making internet consumption an orgasmic joy. But by now we all know about the strange fate that befell the Pad of Crunches. So, we’ve got 5 years to go from absurd FUBAR to utopian ecstasy and the team at bonnier_rd isn’t wasting any time. They sent their office overseer, Sara Öhrvall, to San Francisco yesterday where she will surely meet, work, and learn about lots of fancy new media things that are getting born there. She will, however, need to keep her eyes on the prize: a Bonnier Media Empire Tablet E-Reader. A media company with an “R&D” department is one of the perks of having a national media monopoly that is itself part of a regional oligopoly. But it is precisely Bonnier’s many content and distribution tentacles that make the prospect of it’s own e-reader so appealing. But as we learned this week, when you yourself know nothing about tech manufacturing, it tends to blow up in your face. Is the Bonnier Media Empire Tablet E-Reader™ a lawsuit waiting to happen? Or will it be the must have item for Swedish Christmas 2010? Continue reading »
There’s a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company – at least on the level that who’s on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve co-founder managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman. Nyman is a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto. Continue reading »
Daniel Jacobsen, CEO of Decision 3 came from the Faroe Islands to attend the Lahti Cleantech Day 09 to tell about his company’s product, GreenSteam. Fuel efficiency and optimization of existing ships is their business, and as the maritime sector is looking for ways to drive down emissions and costs GreenSteam is coming out right on time with their technology.
Seafaring is getting under a lot of pressure to minimize CO2 emissions, 15% till 2015 is what the International Maritime Organization demands, and with 6% of global CO2 emissions by 2020 being emitted by the sector its high time to look for ways to optimize. Given that fuel costs are often half of a seafaring company’s expenses, looking for ways to optimize should come natural.
This is our second video from Lahti (see the first here) where we visited at the Clean Tech Venture Day. I talked to Rene Savelsberg, Managing Director and CEO of SET Venture Partners. Rene is responsible for managing the € 50m Sustainable Energy Technology (”SET”) Fund based in Amsterdam with a pan-European investment focus.
We discussed which markets to enter, whether to focus on the home market or go big from day one. Rene went on to explain the pros and cons of each option. We also touched upon the role of entrepreneurs, scientists and PhDs, and how these different skill sets play out in a growth company.
Tuxera is a Finnish software startup specialized in file system interoperability software. The firm has developed Windows-interoperable file system drivers for NTFS and exFAT, allowing device manufacturers who use Linux or other non-Windows platforms to still provide plug and play access to the files from Windows or Mac computers. It claims to be the only company currently providing such system drivers to device manufacturers who use Linux or other non-Windows platform.
ArcticEvening Tallinn sold out yesterday, but we decided to add another 50 tickets to the event. The evening will be a very interesting one with 3 entrepreneurs in different stages of their company explaining about the importance of marketing and how it is made successful for the company. You can read more about the event in our previous blog post, but just to sum it up we’ll have Martin Koppel from Fortumo, Petteri Koponen (former Jaiku Co-Founder) from Lifeline Ventures and Kai Lemmetty from Floobs. Continue reading »
The Malmö, Sweden based company who’s facial recognition powered visual search technology is very well regarded, announced on their blog this afternoon that they’ve appointed Carl Silbersky as their new CEO. In a move that seems strangely similar to Spotify’s announcement earlier, the new focus will be on developing Polar Rose’s mobile service. The fact that Former CEO Nikolaj Nyholm will remain on the board of directors gives us a good clue about what this new direction really means for Polar Rose, the respected but ultimately profitless company whose A-round was way back in 2006. Continue reading »
Spotify blog has a post out that they have appointed a new CTO, Oskar Stål. He comes to Spotify from mBlox, a mobile transaction company he helped grow to a $100M business from a five-man team. The experience from mBlox is the main reason behind hiring Stål. Andres Sehr from Spotify writes that his experience in the art of building high performing technology teams and producing scalable, robust services in a fast growing environment is a significant advantage. Continue reading »
I talked to Videoplaza founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli just last week and Sorosh told me that videoplaza is very bullish on online video monetization. They see that throughout the industry the number of started video streams are up and the number of ads per video are up, on average moving from three to seven. Overall in the video advertising market demand is growing faster than supple and big media companies are waking up to online video.
During our call Tavakoli went on to tell me that Videoplaza could be cashflow positive if they wanted, but they are focusing on growth.
Today Videoplaza walked the talked and put out a blog post where they are looking for no less than 10(!) new employees to recruit before the end of Q1 2010. This is no small announcement in the current economy. The company is clearly scaling up for the storm ahead in 2010. Continue reading »
Last week we visited Lahti at Clean Tech Venture Day. I talked to Rene Savelsberg, Managing Director and CEO of SET Venture Partners. Rene is responsible for managing € 50m Sustainable Energy Technology (“SET”) Fund based in Amsterdam with a pan-European investment focus.
In the first video we discussed about SET Venture Partners’ investment focus, how their deal flow looks like and where it comes from. Lastly we touched on the current state of the Nordic and the Dutch clean tech enviroment and where its progressing.
In the second video we discussed what one should consider when dealing with VCs and taking VC money. Rene also gave his take on what are the break through areas in clean tech in 2010.
I’ve been longing for a service like Last.fm, but for movies, for quite some time already. To my surprise, I had an e-mail waiting in my inbox last week regarding such a service. It’s called Filmgator and it’s still in beta, but the service works in the way you’d expect it to. FilmGator is a Finnish startup, based in Helsinki. The service aims to answer the question: “What are people watching?” Continue reading »
It seems like everybody got new jobs this week. Spotify announced their new CTO, Oskar Stål, and took the fun out of guessing what their mobile strategy is (can you say, “transactional model”). Polar rose announced their new CEO, Carl Silbersky, and added fun to guessing who will be acquiring them in the next 12 months. The hotshots at Videoplaza announced they will be hiring ten (10!) new people before the end of Q1 2010. We here at ArcticStartup are hiring too! We’re looking for a Stockholm based Co-editor, let us know if you’re interested.
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There’s a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company – at least on the level that who’s on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve 
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I’ve been longing for a service like Last.fm, but for movies, for quite some time already. To my surprise, I had an e-mail waiting in my inbox last week regarding such a service. It’s called 
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