Ebay Finally Admitting The Acquisition Of Skype Was A Mistake

by Ville Vesterinen, April 15, 2009 — 1 Comment

skypeEbay just announced a plan for 2010 IPO of Skype. A lot can be said about the journey of the two companies so far, but we think it’s hight time for the relationship to end – For Skype’s and and for Ebay’s benefit. By not letting the Skype founders buy back the company, Ebay is sending a message of it’s own, but an Initial Public Offering pushed all the way to 2010 means practically nothing but that Ebay is not happy with Skype’s performance so far and that they are taking bids.

By pushing the date that far into the future and annoucing that “specific timing of the IPO will be based on market conditions” the company is effectively saying that anything can happen between now and then. They might not even let Skype go if it starts to perform or if it becomes a real strategic asset, which it hardly will.

The message to take away from this is that now even Ebay has confessed that there are no synergies between the two companies and that they made a bad investment -Ebay thought it would be an ideal way for buyers and sellers to talk to each other before the seller makes the purchase decision. All well, except that naturally the sellers don’t want to talk to all the buyers and answer all questions about the product.  Skype is not a bad investment per se, but a bad investment for Ebay. I believe Skype will have a bright future ahead with eight percent of all international calls and $551 million in revenue, but I would not hold my breath to see an IPO even in 2010. Much can happen before that.

You can read more about the announcement from the press release.

Grädde Wants To Invest In Tomorrow’s Internet Stars. Are You One Of Them?

by Paula Marttila, April 14, 2009 — Leave a Comment

“You don’t become an artist because you want to, but because you have to.”

The words are of Katja Lepola, a partner at Grädde Invest. Katja held a speach about venture capital for companies in early stages at the Geek Girl Meetup on 28th March in Stockholm, Sweden.

Her quote was strongly related to as of being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is most likely not something one chooses to become, but something one has to do. It’s very hard to be an entrepreneur, especially if one is to create a great successful company. To make it, one has to have a very strong commitment.

Katja’s advice for an entrepreneur

Besides from the fact that entrepreneurship is something one has to do, Katja shared her best advice for an entrepreneur:

  • Love your customer, or get customers who you can love. You’ll benefit greatly if you’re interested in creating value for your customer.
  • Create a company you love to work for, it’s going to be long hours along with ups and downs.
  • Build a company that is easy to sell. Do your homework on what type of companies are most likely to be bought.
  • There are no shortcuts to create value, it takes time. Be prepared on a fantastic, but a long and tuff journey.
  • No skeletons in the closet. Keep your records straight like if you were to get listed at the stock exchange the next day.

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Interview With Honour Pearson Of MoMail

by Antti Vilpponen, April 13, 2009 — 1 Comment

MoMailI had a chat with Honour in the ArcticEvening Stockholm in the beginning of April and got interested in their solution for a pretty regular mobile data use – e-mail. While many studies have shown that e-mail is the most popular mobile data use, there are still millions of people outside mobility of e-mail.

I decided to share this with you and resorted to their domain and did an e-mail interview with Honour after I got back to Helsinki. If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments section – I’ll let Honour know there are people interested in knowing more.
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Dedication And Leadership In Startups

by Ville Vesterinen, April 10, 2009 — 4 Comments

teamWhen thinking about investing in a very early stage startup where the technology or the market has not been proven yet, the focus shifts to the team. Naturally there needs to be a big enough theoretical market, the technology needs to work and product needs to make sense even if only to those few individuals, namely the team and the investors (think Twitter). But when the idea is only a very rough proto or just a concept, the team will make all the difference. Team is always important, but in early stage startups it’s hugely important.

I talked to a prominent VC over a dinner this week and he told me that despite all the attempts it is very hard to determine what are the key success factors for a startup ie. which startups make it and which won’t. But one thing where there was a correlation (not necessarily causation, but correlation) was whether the entrepreneur had previsous successful starups under her belt. So not just startups, but successful ones that he followed through with regardless of whether the idea evolved as they went forward. This might sound obvious, but it is interesting still that this is the only factor that can be shown to correlate with the success of a venture. What this comes to prove is that early stage venture capital is people business. Having said that, it does not mean that you need to be a succesful serial entrepreneur to be pull it off. If the entrepreneur doesn’t have a historical track record, and most people don’t, there are other indicators to look at.

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Amidst Downturn – Startups Are Recruiting

by Antti Vilpponen, April 9, 2009 — 2 Comments

ArcticIndexLast week we launched some new features to our ArcticIndex, the service you can use to find out about startups in the Nordics as well as Baltics and the people associated with these companies. On top of the shiny new design, we have launched a job board that has gotten fair share of interest already.

The job board is free for everyone to use. All you need to do is register your company to the ArcticIndex and add the position you need to get filled.

Already, five companies are looking for talent. Do apply for the positions if they are of interest and hey, if you know someone in need of a job during these times – be sure to tip them of these killer positions:

Spotify Opens Up The Door

by Paula Marttila, April 8, 2009 — 1 Comment

libspotifyBoth the Spotify and the developer community were absolutely delirious when the news about libspotify, Spotify API, were released on Tuesday evening. At first. 
“The libspotify C API package allows third party developers to write applications that utilize the Spotify music streaming service. Hopefully, this will enable and inspire you to build some really cool stuff. We’re looking forward to seeing what you can come up with.“ So far so good.

Then they read the Terms of Service and were not quite as happy.

  • “Approved Device” does not include any mobile wireless handset or any other internet-enabled device that is designed to be handheld.”
  • “The Application Key must be embedded in your Application, including in all updates and revisions thereto, in a secure manner not accessible by third parties.”
  • “Spotify reserves the right in its sole discretion to revoke your Application Key for any reason or no reason, without notice, and to block access to the API and Service by the Application, without any liability to you or your users.”

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Sulake Opens Mobile Virtual World Bobba

by Antti Vilpponen, April 7, 2009 — 12 Comments

BobbaSulake, the Finnish company behind the successful Habbo Hotel, has opened up Bobba to public beta. Bobba is a mobile only virtual world and is in very early stages of adoption. I was the 113th registered user on the site. This is something we heard of a while back with Sulake’s report on their 2008 profit.
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The Next Web Brings The European Startup Scene To Amsterdam

by Ville Vesterinen, April 7, 2009 — Leave a Comment

amsterdamThe Next Web 2009, the fourth edition of the conference that began in 2006, will be held again in the beautiful city of Amsterdam on the 15th to 17th April.

The great guys at The Next Web gave us 10 passes with 20% discount to give out to our readers, you guys. First come first served, so be quick. You can buy a discount ticket here.

TheNextWeb also announced the 19 startup competition finalists. Among other we’re happy to see Prezi on the list. Congrats to all the finalist!

The conference has traditionally had a solid line up of speakers and this year is no exception. You can see the whole list of speakers here and the agenda for the three days here.

I will be in Amsterdam for the three days, so if you’re coming join ArcticStartup Dopplr group and drop me an email if you want to meet up. See you in the windmill country!

Photo by earcos (CC)

Prezi Zooms Right In To Public

by Paula Marttila, April 7, 2009 — 4 Comments

When was the last time a presentation tool gave you a must-have feeling?Prezi

Prezi does that to you. Prezi is an online, nonlinear presentation tool from Zui Labs based in Budapest, Hungary. It makes the user think differently about the presentation by using zooming as a central part of the storytelling. The user can zoom in and out on pictures, videos, notes and PDF’s, thus making the presentation more alive and flexible. You work with your presentation online, after which you can dowload it on your computer. The best way to get an idea what Prezi is about is to take a tour in their tutorials and try out for yourself. 

Prezi, one ot the 19 Rising Sun Startup Rally finalists on The Next Web Conference, went public yesterday after being in closed beta for almost a year. Along with the launch they released Prezi Desktop for offline work, updated editor, and most of all, a freemium model with three different types of licenses. The core difference between the three is that the free one only supports public presentations, you can’t make them private.

One of the people behind Prezi is Swedish Peter Arvai, the CEO of the company. Peter, previously Mobispine, has a wide experience on launching startups on an international scale. He can also be found on this years list of The Entreprenour of The Year, presented by Internetworld. (In Swedish)

 

My first Prezi experience

My tip, don’t start with your first Prezi on the night before your presentation. It takes a while to get into the mindset of how it’s supposed to work, but as soon as you get it, and trust me you will, it’s a nice ride. There was no hazzle in downloading the presentation afterwards and it ran as smoothly online as offline. Regarding the editor I’d like to have the Undo function closer to the actual editing, and I found the Clear Path function dangerously close to the Path function.

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Paula Marttila, Welcome On-Board

by Ville Vesterinen, April 6, 2009 — Leave a Comment

paula marttilaNot only did we held a very succesfull ArcticEvening event in Stockholm last week, we are also very exited to announce that Paula Marttila will join our editorial board from Stockholm, Sweden.

Paula is an online strategist who loves Jaiku and all electronics with an Apple logo. A Finn living in Sweden. She’s also survivor of the 24 Hour Business Camp and co-organizer of the Geek Girl Meetup in Stockholm, Sweden. Previously she spent eight years on developing online media and payment services at Aftonbladet, the largest daily newspaper in Sweden. At the moment she’s helping out at Swedish Skincare System.

Paula will direct most of her attention on what is happening in the Swedish startup scene since she knows the ins and outs of the scene. Paula is a great addition to the team as currently we are slightly Finland heavy, but now Paula will balance the game. Warm welcome to the team Paula! We’re lucky to have you.

If you think you have a startup based in Sweden and think you are the next big thing, register your startup at ArcticIndex (here) and then email Paula at info[at]arcticstartup.com and write your company name followed by Sweden on the subject line and she will take a close look at what you’re cooking.

ArcticEvening Was A Blast – Thank You Stockholm!

by Ville Vesterinen, April 6, 2009 — 2 Comments

arcticevening stockholmLast week we held our 6th pan-regional ArcticEvening event in Stockholm, Sweden. It was yet again a big success. We had a packed house, an amazing panel on Startups and The Future of Mobile with Gustav Söderström of Spotify, Teemu Kurppa of Huikea and Morris Packer of The Bonnier Group and people enjoyed their time. We want to thank our sponsors for making the event possible: Thank you to our trusted startup friendly law firm Hammarström Puhakka Partners, Sombiz and The Borneo Family.

We also want to thank everybody who showed up and who we met during the trip. We loved city and atmosphere and were amazed by the number of quality people you can met during one night. We’ll be sure to be back in Stockholm before the year it out.

You can find photos of the event here and see the video below. Also find clips by Bambuser here. Continue reading »

ArcticIndex redesigned and launched with new features

by Antti Vilpponen, April 3, 2009 — 1 Comment

ArcticIndexArcticIndex, the best resource for finding out information regarding nordic and Baltic startups, has been redesigned and launched with new features. Thanks to our great development partner, Kisko Labs who have done a magnificent job with the rapid and flexible iterative development.

ArcticIndex, for those who are not yet familiar with the service, is a one stop shop for your information needs regarding Nordic and Baltic startups. We have close to 200 companies in the service and over 100 people affiliated with startups. The service is a community effort in building a coherent and wide information resource for everyone of us in the startup community and we’re growing strong!

We have now redesigned the website and made it slightly different in branding compared to ArcticStartup. There’s no point in confusing people with the two websites. Furthermore, the redesign has come in handy adding some usability fixes to the service.

One of the biggest new features in the release is the addition of our free job board or a recruiting service. This is the first release and we’ll be adding features to it as we go on. However, it already works fine and we’ll be promoting companies looking for talent in the job board on ArcticStartup on a regular basis. Make sure you enter your recruitment needs there – we’ll do some free promotion on it in the near future.

We’ll also be adding a smaller development blog to ArcticIndex to enable dialogue with the startup community to create the kind of service the community wants. We’ll let you know when the blog is live – shouldn’t take too many days though.

As always, we’re more than glad to hear your comments on these improvements and don’t hesitate to share any ideas you might have with the service. We’re developing this to make the startup community in whole function better – so you’re part of the team that we want to listen to.

MicroFundr – Not Just Yet

by Ville Vesterinen, April 2, 2009 — 4 Comments

microfundrYesterday we announced news that a joint group of European blogs, including us, The Next Web, TechCrunch Europe and TechCrunch France were setting up an investment fund MicroFundr™ to invest up to €14,000 Euros (USD $18,500) in Micro blogging start-ups and uses Twitter for funding process.

Some of you called us out on it, and some bought the story right up. Truth to be told it was the mother of all April Fools scams, but the point remains: The VC industry could do with some innovative new models. Even if having a smaller fund means smaller management fees.

Not only that, we also love to co-operate with the great people at The Next Web and at TechCrunch.

Back to the scam. We orchestrated the scam with Boris and the rest of The Next Web, without whom could not have done it. David from The Next Web opened up an Twitter account, whipped up graphics and the ball was rolling. Altogether we got 121 Twitter follower and numerous retweets. The full gory story is at The Next Web.

We apologize to those startups for raising false hopes, but at the same time hope that Angels and early stage funds will take note and look at Twitter not only as a bygone investment opportunity, but also a useful for tool for their trade.

MicroFundr, First Pan-European VC Fund, Will Use Twitter For Funding Process

by Ville Vesterinen, April 1, 2009 — 7 Comments

microfundr1Small Change Venture Capital is launching MicroFundr which will invest up to €14,000 Euros (USD $18,500) in Micro blogging start-ups and uses Twitter for funding process.

The Invest Fund raised just under €14 million (USD $18m) from a group of small banks and informal investors. A joint group of European blogs, including ArcticStartup(that’s us!), The Next Web, TechCrunch Europe and TechCrunch France are happy to announce the launch of the MicroFundr investment fund aimed at European small, mini and micro start-ups. We are honored to be part of such a high quality group of European blogs.

We are also excited about the new innovative way a startup can submit its application – via Twitter! As this was presented ot us it only made sense, since the best startups can communicate all they need to only in a few slides anyway, so why not to use something that helps the startups to be consice. We reiterate what Dick Vogels, VP for Small Change Venture Capital, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, says:

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Marketing 101 For iPhone Apps

by Miikka Kukkosuo, April 1, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Photo by thepatricYesterday I wrote (or ranted) about the need to also market your iPhone apps instead of just throwing them into App Store and complaining people do not find them. This time I will elaborate more on the marketing tools. There is a multitude of ways you can market your app and one could write a book on that, so let’s just cover the basics here (which should not be much news if you have thought about things at all).

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