Mentory is a new global mentorship community from Denmark, targeted for match-making between mentors and protégés. In addition to matching people for the traditional one-on-one mentoring relationships, the web service allows for open “mass-mentoring” among the whole network. The key target users are businesspeople and entrepreneurs.
Aspiring Global Mentorship Community Mentory.com
Finnish Gaming Monopoly Ready To Sue An iPhone App Maker
It seems that the Finnish gaming monopoly, RAY, is the latest in the game of playing the big bad wolf who doesn’t want to play nice. Finnish Helsingin Sanomat reports that they are ready to sue an iPhone app maker Elias Pietilä, for creating a game of the similar concept from one of the oldest coin games in Finland, Pajatso. Elias Pietilä calles his version of the game Pajatzo.
RAY (or the Finnish Slotmachine Association) has referred to the trademark law, law regarding good business practices (laxly translated) as well as the ever-so-famous copyright law. The first odd issue that puts the whole case into perspective is that RAY does not own the trademark to Pajatso, the original game concept.
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JayCut Takes Online Video Editor Mobile With Moblin
“Creativity just went mobile”, Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut
JayCut, the Swedish online video editor startup will as of today be available on Moblin-based ultra-portable devices like netbooks and mobile internet devices (MIDs). Moblin is an open source Linux operating system which is optimized for Intel® Atom™ processor based devices. JayCut’s been working closely with Intel on the new Moblin v2 that offers advanced Internet, media and social networking experiences. The mobile editor is primarly launched within their white label product, but hang in there, a public version is on its way, too. Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut, is excited about moving on to the mobile space with MIDs, thus changing the way content producers and publishers will work in the future. Having the publishing system in ones pocket gets publishers whole new opportunities to interact with its audience closer to real-time.
Estonian PV Start-Up Crystalsol Closed 2,5 Million Euros First Round
Estonian Crystalsol, a photovoltaic developer, closed 2,5 million euros first round financing two weeks ago by Conor Venture Partners, Energy Future Invest and public agencies (a link to press release).
Crystalsol’s revolutionary technology, now on prototype level, enables the solar based electricity generation at the cost levels competitive with the conventional energy sources. ” The use of proceeds include for further development of the semiconductor material, upscaling the production as well as module process design” said Jari Mieskonen, Managing Partner at ConorVenture Partners last week.
Crystalsol targets commercialization within the next three years: the technology is applicable for all grid connected solar installations. The next round will follow within the 18 months estimated Jari Mieskonen. Continue reading »
Nokia Pulls The Plug On Friend View
Back in November we wrote a lengthy piece on the new Nokia Friend View. The service was supposed to focus around location based microblogging. Today Nokia announced they have pulled the plug on the service (or actually did so already on the 2nd of September) on the project website and through an e-mail to its users.
The guess is that the service adoption figures weren’t attractive enough and as such there’s no point in putting effort into a service that nobody is using. The website shows community messages dating back to August 2009 so the small community was active, but apparently not large enough. Furthermore, we’ve grown away from the hype days of microblogging. The market has been divided basically by two major players globally, Facebook and Twitter, with smaller companies grabbing local markets.
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Erply Only Nordic And Baltic Company In Seedcamp
Erply, an Estonian web startup, is the only company to make it to Seedcamp from the Nordics and Baltics. But what a great idea that Erply has, despite being a tiny company with only 4 employees. The company is actually working to create a single solution for small retailers and service companies to handle all their daily operations. Daily operations include everything from handling your inventory, having a digital cash register, billing and accounting software.
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BookaBooka Halts Business To Find Agreement With Finnish Copyright Agencies
Back in April we wrote about how BookaBooka, the Finnish book lending service, had received a cease-and-desist letter from the Finnish copyright agencies. Now BookaBooka decided to halt their business to work out the legal aspects of their lending business to keep the copyright agencies at bay.
The initial contacts from the Finnish copyright agencies weren’t exactly co-operative. I had an e-mail chat with the founder of BookaBooka, Jussi Riku, and he confirmed that they were asked to stop their business on threat of 2 years behind bars. After this BookaBooka agreed to direct their SMS revenues to the copyright holders through the way that would be the best possible for the copyright agency. This was not negotiable and thus they were back to square one. According to Riku, all the discussions between BookaBooka and the copyright agencies were had in public media and thus the talks were not very fruitful.
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The Web At A New Crossroads
Guest post by Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström (thanks to Brynn Evans for editing and Brad Fitzpatrick for comments on the draft)
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Around 2003, things began to change.
Technology was then the black sheep, having left overnight millionaires destitute and without change to afford their $4 lattes. Even the posers had left San Francisco and gone back to suburbia to be office managers at Walmart.
It was a sad time for everyone — that is, except the die-hards and the hackers. The web for them had never been about making money, but about reshaping culture and toppling the old order. 2003, therefore, was the perfect time for a resurgence: the people who kept pushing on in the Valley and elsewhere were a concentrated motley crew of innovators and builders. They cared about technology for technology’s sake and about developing and advancing web culture.
What they didn’t realize, however, was that the services and technologies that they were destined to build would need to be cobbled and sewn together using a system that would fight them every step of the way — not out of spite — but because of its architecture. By definition the network available was decidedly anti-human: in 2003, there was only the document-centric web.
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Enemy Unknown Relies On Open Social And Sees Gaming Business Lucrative
I managed to have a chat with Thor Olof, the CEO of Enemy Unknown a while back. Despite being a simple chat between two people, there was a lot of good about the business of online games and decisions they have taken as a company that I thought I’d share with you. Enemy Unknown is the company behind the service Avatars United. Avatars United in turn is a service – let’s put it this way; it’s Facebook for in-game avatars.
Enemy Unknown has taken the slightly different and perhaps not that common approach with their technology. They have adopted the Open Social initiative as part of their technology. Open Social, as you may know – is a single standard of an API that has the bigger idea of making sharing data between sites faster and easier to come by (as developers don’t have to learn propietary APIs from different sites).
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Piratebay Buyer A Bigger Pirate?
According to news released today, the Pirate Bay sale may be in danger of going through. This is due to the fact that Global Gaming Factory X has been kicked out of the stock exchange for constantly braking the rules, according to a Finnish online publication Digitoday.
Global Gaming Factory X was reported in June to be buying the online property of PirateBay for large chunks of money. This deal is now in danger of following through due to financial problems of the buyer, GFF.
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Sponsor: Sopima Demystifies Contract Management
Note: this is our periodical blog sponsor message.
“Online Contract Bank – A Contract Management Software-as-a-Service from the Microsoft Azure Cloud.”
Sopima takes a different approach to the entire contract management sphere. Sopima service is not an enterprise application that requires an IT project and contract professionals to make it happen. Sopima makes contract management easy and available for all size of companies; from large to small and medium size businesses too. With Sopima, your life with contracts is easier and you get value from day one.
Sweden Keeps Innovating On Search: Blogipedia, Twingly Channels and Spezify
There’s no “One way” to do search. Traditional search engines compete for space and co-exist with nisched, inspirational, visual, social and now with the latest trending topic, real-time search. As the blogosphere with user generated content keeps growing, the search space keeps expanding with it. Our personal online presence increases through social networking etc. which means we need to keep track of our own digital footsteps, preferably real-time.
Regardless of the lack of an existing business model, search remains a very attractive space, and within past three months, three Swedish players have been added to the fields of nisched, visual and real-time search.
Mindtrek Launchpad Finalists Chosen
This year’s Mindtrek Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The companies went through the detailed analysis of the pre-jury (disclosure: I was one of the pre-jury members voting for the finalists). The MindTrek Launchpad competition will award the most innovative Finnish digital media product, demo or concept – and the people behind it, who have the urge to make it big. Six finalists from the submitted The finalists, in alphabetical order, are:
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Social Gaming Firm Ironstar Helsinki Launches In Facebook, Appoints New CEO
The Finnish social gaming firm Ironstar Helsinki has announced appointing a new CEO Tiina Zilliacus and expanding its platform reach to Facebook. Ironstar Helsinki runs a social gaming world MoiPal, which up until now has been available on the web and as a downloadable mobile application. MoiPal has currently 200.000 registered users in Finland along some international ones, and is now looking to accelerate the international growth.
Wireless Powerkiss Coming To Town in Q4/2009!
People often forgot to unplug their chargers. If all Nokia cell phone users globally would plug off when battery is full charged, energy savings would be as much as 100.000 average-sized European homes annual consumption.
Powerkiss provides a new charging solution, which transforms a charger in to public product, instead of private accessory. The company has two products: a module integrated into furniture and a charging stick plugged in the device (cell phone or a laptop). The stick is plugged in and the device is placed on the charging table top. The battery is charged automatically. The charging time remains almost the same, depending on the device. Right now, the Powerkiss is able to power devices up to 40W, next year up to 100 W.
Powerkiss has signed the first deals with furniture manufacturers Martela and Isku on commercialization during autumn 2009. By the end of this year, Powerkiss will introduce the charging sticks for Nokias and mini-USBs (by October), Apples, micro-USBs and netbooks (by November). The company targets to introduce bigger laptops on the portfolio in Q1 2010. Continue reading »
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