Mediatonic Management has closed a 5 million euro fund that will begin to finance games and media products from Finland. The fund has been set up by investments from Fennia insurance, Henki-Fennia insurance as well as the Sonera Pension fund. People behind the fund include Tanu-Matti Tuominen and Marko Tulonen.
The fund is a project and catalog fund that will invest in commercial games, television formats and web services. The fund does not invest into the companies in the manner a venture capitalist would invest, but into the rights of the products and services sold. Therefore the fund’s business model is to take a commission from cash flows generated by the products and services sold.
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Many cleantech companies are large scale companies who aim to work with the utilities, who require millions in investments for R&D, production facilities, and rolling out their product. Quickly one forgets about the smaller players, and one of those smaller players is Tuulivoimala, who develops and markets wind and solar power solutions to private customers, and who are quite successful with their venture.
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Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.
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There’s much talk about the new Aalto University in Finland, which is what came out when Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and Helsinki University of Art and Design were molded into one school to rule them all. A lot of potential I’m sure, but wait, there’s more!
There’s a new kid in town. Many of our readers felt the waves from Aalto Entrepreneur Society last year. The student group headed by Kristo Ovaska hasn’t been resting on their laurels. Now they are coming with a new Y Combinator-esque university accelerator program, Aalto Bootcamp. It’s a five week program for students and researchers to get a feel for the joys of entrepreneurship and build a company. And yes, become a bona fide entrepreneur.
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Picmeleo is a new Finnish photo startup that recently got in touch with us. They’re developing a new kind of service which in essence is a photo editing tool, but positioned in the market in a wise manner. The tool itself is sort of an external application that companies providing services online can add on top of their own service, instead of having to come up with their own tool.
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TNS Gallup, Finnish subsidiary of the biggest industry market research expert TNS Global, has teamed up with a mobile customer experience management startup QAim to provide Finland wide tracking of mobile website usage metrics.
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Three Nordic and Baltic companies have made it to the group of finalists in the Plugg.eu Startups Rally 2010. In total, 116 applications were left to the competition and of these the 20 made it to the final. Plugg.eu is a very entrepreneurship focused conference organised in Brussels, Belgium and we’re happy to one of their media partners promoting the event. The three companies making it into the final are Estonian Fits.me the two Finnish startups Lumo Research and GigsWiz.
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Fuugo is a new kind of television product created by Axel Technologies, a company based in Turku. You can’t really call Axel Technologies a startup as it has been registered way back in 1988. However, Fuugo is a very interesting concept that requires more analysis into it. Fuugo claims to be the next generation TV application for mobile and handheld devices.
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We recently argued that Schibsted will give Finnish media companies a run for their money in classifieds and market places. Now Schibsted Classified Media Finland’s CEO, Jussi Lystimäki, tells us that Tori.fi just passed the one million unique visitor water mark last week. This comes from a firm who just opened their Finnish site in December.
Lystimäki further commented that they are adding tens of thousands of products a month. No doubt, this traffic has not been cheap, but it comes to show that that digital marketing is fulfilling its overdue promise and that ROI is superior compared to the traditional channels. If marketing’s focus is moving online, it should also be the media’s.
Finland is not protected from what has been happening in other markets for some time and it’s high time for the Finnish companies to wake up to reality. I might be overly optimistic here, but perhaps they may even start innovating on their own and who knows, maybe we will see quality content emerge beyond classifieds. Never have Finns been as innovative and performed as well as when the crisis has been the deepest. And deep it is.
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You must have wondered what happens to the gazillions of batteries (or 200 000 tons in the EU to be more exact, to quote the Finnish environment minister) that are increasingly used in the things we play around with. Finnish expansion company Akksuer knows. We talked to CEO Jarmo Pudas about the expanding battery recycling market.
What kind of batteries do you handle and why is the way you do it unique?
Basically everything… We handle laptop and mobile phone batteries (polymer), Li-ion, Ni-Mh. We do it without chemicals, without heat and without water. We have our own factory. We have an online sorting system and use dry technology (crushing and gas treatment) to recycle the materials.
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Those who say there are no interesting opportunities in the Nordics clearly don’t know what they are talking about. An ideal place to start the exploration is our job board at http://www.arcticstartup.com/jobs/. This is invaluable destination for those who are not yet confortable setting up their own shop, but want to learn to the ropes with a solid team that already know what they are doing, but still want to be in the eye of the storm.
Working in a startup is ultimate experience and much more. You are running against time with too little resources, a boat load of passionate people who just absolutely love every little bit of their product, team, people and purpose. And everyday single day is different, very different. How much more fun can one have while still not breaking the law?
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Scred, a house hold Finnish startup who we have used to seeing tracking debts and shared expenses is now shifting their focus towards more comprehensively managing money.
They start with managing money for different groups such as bands, indie film crews, event organisers and associations. The point is to offer a solution for communities which often don’t have good online financial applications and don’t know about accounting.
Along with the new focus the guy have also redesigned the site. Kudos to the team for learning the design tools as they went along. As Kristoffer from Scred told me “We ended up learning how to do design ourselves as we couldn’t find anyone sufficiently skilled and available to work with our bootstrapped approach”. Whether that was a good choice, I left to the user to decide herself.
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The debate on the tax code for entrepreneurs in Finland is becoming more surreal by the day. The origins of the debate lie in the tax code working group set up by the Finnish Parliament. This group, headed by Martti Hetemäki, is to devise a new tax code for areas such as capital gains, options and carried interest for VC funds. The biggest verbal and rhetorical battle is waged around the double taxing of dividends in non-listed companies.
Just as with any tax code, the more transparent and simple the tax code to understand, the better it incentivizes people to invest in a risky and uncertain future. The tax code should make it easier to see how the future plays out for businesses, not make it more difficult. All the scenarios the working group is considering are rather complex and won’t help the state of entrepreneurship in the country.
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According to the EU’s climate and energy package, Finland is expected to increase its share of renewable sources from the present 28 per cent to 38 per cent of energy production by 2020. Fulfilling this obligation require a significant increase in Finland’s use of wood-based energy, waste fuels, heat pumps, biogas and wind energy during next years.
This is no easy feat, especially given the rather modest Finnish feed in tariffs in the sector (premium tariffs and investment subsidies amont annually to roughly € 30 million). Nevertheless, the market can be potentially really really big and the need is dire. We’ve already seen some groundbreaking news surface this week in cleantech sector from the US. But make no mistake, Silicon Valley is not the only place where cleantech blossoms. Far from it. This week Wärtsilä came out with news that the world’s first solid oxide fuel cell unit, running on landfill gas, has successfully concluded the first phase of its validation programme.
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We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.
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