ArcticStartup

Government Backed Accelerators Chosen - March On Finland!

by Ville Vesterinen - July 24, 2009 - Leave a comment

vigo Vigo, a Finnish government run program to strengthen the currently rather dismal foundation of Finnish risk capital ecosystem and to create international venture accelerators and investors in Finland (see our previous story here), has come to an end and now it's time to see what we got. And it does not look that bad at all.

In total, three venture accelerators where chosen by the steering board, which was lead by Mr. Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of F-Secure Corporation, Member of the Board at Nokia and a prominent business angel among other things. It seems that the Vigo steering board was looking into finding teams to cover various different industries and compliment each other instead of creating competition into the Finnish venture capital scene. They seems to have found three such 'mutually exclusive' teams to fit the bill, namely Lifeline Ventures, Lots and Veturi Venture Accelerator. Here's a short description of each in turn.

Nosco Sells Shares In Ideas. Want To Buy One?

by Ville Vesterinen - July 23, 2009 - Leave a comment

This is the first post in a series of posts on startups that presented at the ArcticEvening in Copenhagen at the end of June. First up is Nosco, a nifty Danish startup that's specialized in idea management.

Nosco offers an idea management tool Idea Exchange. An online suggestion box, where you buy shares in ideas. I don't have experience in using the product, but by looking at some of their customers' experiences, there's clearly something there. Much more than in my previous job, where the management tried to engage and encourage the staff coming up with new ideas by going through all the trouble of setting up a one new email account. So if you feel an urge setting up ideas@yourdomainhere.com as your new organizational initiative, check out Nosco instead.

Piipl - Web 2.0 Tool For User-Driven Innovation Processes

by Miikka Kukkosuo - July 22, 2009 - Leave a comment

Piipl is a Danish web service focused on improving the innovation processes of enterprises, government agencies, and researchers by facilitating user-driven innovation. The service could be used for product or service improvement, change management, user research, or any similar process benefiting from interaction of and input from multiple persons. Piipl has been created in cooperation by three Danish firms, Copenhagen Living Lab, Workz, and 23 Visual.

Fruugo Burned Through 14,5M€ In 2008

by Antti Vilpponen - July 20, 2009 - Leave a comment

fruugo Fruugo has burned through 14,5 million euros in 2008, according to an article in Kauppalehti. Last year's books show (in Finland these are public for all limited liability corporations) that Fruugo's net loss for the year is 14,5 million euros and with no income, this is the investment Fruugo used in 2008.

Fruugo is the much debated startup from Finland that has gathered a lot of media attention in the recent year. One of the reasons they have done so is their attractive and well known board members that include Risto Siilasmaa (Founder, F-Secure), Jorma Ollila (former CEO and Chairman of Nokia) and many others. Fruugo's main product is a webshop that would aggregate all the different webshops into one.

Thank You Sponsors

by Sponsor - July 17, 2009 - Leave a comment

This is our periodic thank you note to our blog sponsors to describe what they have to offer.

The Sun Startup Essentials program is specifically designed to help startups get their business off the ground FAST with the right IT infrastructure at the LOWEST COST possible. This program is available in many countries throughout the world. You can also go directly to your local country's Sun Startup Essentials program web page to learn more.

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The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association is a non-aligned association for innovative, professional, growth-friven and entrepreneurial software business executives. Association drives the success of software business as an industry and supports individual software companies in their road to success.

Ohjelmistoyrittäjät ry on sitoutumaton, kasvuhakuisten ja yrittäjähenkisten ohjelmistoyritysten johdon yhteisö sekä ohjelmistoalan kehittäjä ja edunvalvoja Kehitämme kasvuhakuisten ohjelmistoyritysten toimintaedellytyksiä. Tavoitteenamme on, että yhä useampi suomalainen kasvuyritys ylittää kasvua rajoittavat esteet ja siirtyy kansainvälisille markkinoille.

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Dopplr Launches iPhone App, Sees Recession Easing In 2010

by Antti Vilpponen - July 17, 2009 - Leave a comment

On Thursday, Dopplr launched a very cool iPhone app that puts the social atlas into full use. In essence, it's a mobile travel guide getting its details from Dopplr. It's even better when you have an account with Dopplr, you can do the usual stuff of seeing where your friends are and best of all, contact them if you don't happen to remember their contact details at that moment (or don't have them on you).

Headweb - DRM-free Movies On Demand

by Paula Marttila - July 16, 2009 - Leave a comment

(To our readers in Sweden: There's a little summer gift waiting for you in the end of the article.)

As filesharing, piracy, copyright and privacy issues, and the future of media in whole being the current hot topics, I sat down with Peter Alvarsson, Founder and COO Headweb, to hear his thoughts as an industry player dealing with the changing market space.

Headweb.com Headweb is a Swedish startup offering movies online for both rent and download. The company was founded 2006 being the first legal service to offer DRM-free downloads. Not just that, they also engourage and reward filesharing using a custom P2P technology to deliver downloads. The service is platform independent, by so far one of a kind in Sweden, running smoothly both on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Headweb is a premium service charging average $3 / $13 per movie (rent/download). The company is backed up by angel investors and has today a team of 10 people with offices in both Stockholm and Gothenburg.

Oppifi Building A Digital Scrapbook Of Memories (Video)

by Ville Vesterinen - July 13, 2009 - Leave a comment

As soon as Ilkka Tiainen, Oppifi CEO, told me about the service I thought of MyHeritage and Geni, but as he quickly pointed out Epooq, Oppifi's first product is more about subjective count on our memories than objective family tree what the two formerly mentioned services focus on.

Oppifi, a Finnish startup, is aiming to build solution for gathering and sharing subjective 'life-experiences'. We all have our own experiences from the life that we have led and whereas many of us have aimed to get all those memories between the covers of a scrap book, Oppifi wants to help out by giving us better digital tools to do it. The founders are confident that there are demand for a such a service from the get go and will also charge the user from day one.

The service is still early stages, but we got a quick look at the alpha version and talked to the team about the service. See the video below.

Welcome to the New ArcticStartup

by Karri Saarinen - July 12, 2009 - Leave a comment

arcticstartup20 Arctic summer is in mid-season but ArcticStartup goes forward. I'm excited to present our new design which I have been working with for a while.

Our goal with the design was to make the content more appealing and declutter the site. In addition to design, I revisited our whole Wordpress installation, plugins and files to make the site faster and cleaner.

Another big change is that, due of requests from our readers, the content is now tabbed into categories: Digital (the 'classic' ArcticStartup) and Cleantech.

Discussion is something we very much like to encourage here in ArcticStartup. For that reason, comments are now threaded and separated from trackbacks. We're also planning to bring some other improvements to make the discussion more meaningful.

If you need to browse older posts, the Archive is back. Team page is now merged with About page.

So what do you think? Did we nail it, or do you still prefer the old design? Give us your feedback, either to info at arcticstartup dot com or in comments.

Spotify And SoundCloud Winning At The Europas

by Ville Vesterinen - July 10, 2009 - Leave a comment

The Europas, the inaugural TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, were held last night in London, UK. Nordic and Baltic countries had a rather strong representation among the nominated startups and consequentially took home no less than 5 out of 15 categories. But these five wins did not scatter around just any startups. Four out of the five were taken home by Spotify and the fifth one belonged to SoundCloud, which has also its roots in Sweden just as Spotify does.

So Sweden truly lead the Northern European pack and really were an example to the whole Europe: Spotify not only took home 5 wins, but more impressively won Best New Startup, Summer 2008-2009, Best Startup Founder(s) and Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA) as well as was given the The Europas Grand Prix award by the 19 expert advisors, which included some industry movers and shakers and which I had a privilege to be included in (consider this as my disclosure). SoundCloud on its part won the Best Entertainment Application or Service (EMEA).

Pikkoo Partners With Foreca To Offer Realtime Mobile Weather Screensavers

by Miikka Kukkosuo - July 10, 2009 - Leave a comment

Pikkoo has teamed up with Foreca weather service and introduces Foreca Live Weather Screensaver for mobile phones. The product is said to bring interactive location based weather forecasts to mobile from 140.000 locations worldwide.

Spotify Aims For €230 Million Valuation

by Ville Vesterinen - July 08, 2009 - Leave a comment

spotify We all love Spotify here at ArcticStartup and use it everyday to listen our favorite tracks. We also know that it was not cheap to begin with for the VCs to invest in Spotify even though it was (and still is) the early days, since the founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had plenty of experience, capital of their own and know what they were doing. But if you thought it was expensive before, the Times Online reports that "Spotify is trying to drum up a valuation of close to £200m (roughly €230m) as it seeks new investment of between £20m (€23m) and £30m (€35m)."

Times Online further reports that If it Spotify achieves the valuation it aims for, the company will have almost trebled in value since it sold a £13m stake last autumn to Nordic investors Northzone Ventures and Creandum.

We are excited and for once, think the high valuation is for a very good reason. Just recently in an investor forum I heard a VC who had invested in Spotify proudly stating that Spotify is the next Skype, meaning that it will be the next big Internet service success story coming from the region. They certainly have the right direction and I don't think I have seen any company have the same potential since. Regardless of whether Spotify ever reaches a $2.6 billion exit (with current exchange rate some €1.87 billion), or exit at all for that matter, I, for one, would invest in a heart beat.

Bloglovin' Redesigns For The Ladies

by Antti Vilpponen - July 06, 2009 - Leave a comment

Bloglovin', the Stockholm based startup that is making reading RSS feeds easier, has redesigned their site and added a bunch of improvements while doing so. Mattias Swenson, an active player in the Nordic startup scene and a co-founder of Bloglovin', got in touch with us and told us about the improvement. Mattias told us that the facelift was mainly done for usablity purposes and I have to agree, the new site looks a lot better and intuitive. The layout of the new site can be seen at the end of this post.

Fisker Karma To Challenge Tesla Model S

by Guest Blogger - July 03, 2009 - Leave a comment

Fisker_Karma049 When talking about car manufacturing, one normally thinks of Germany, Italy, France, Japan and the USA. Finland, on the other hand, comes seldom to one's mind. That much more interesting it is to see that a plug-in hybrid is build right here in Finland, the Fisker Karma.

The Karma is, as Fisker puts it, "a beautiful and environmentally friendly car for people who do not want to compromise luxury". The car uses a small gasoline engine which turns the generator that charges the lithium ion battery pack, which powers the car in normal use. You can configure the car so that it comes with a solar roof which helps to charge the car. The car drives 80 km before it starts to run on gasoline, and it seats four plus sufficient place for luggage. Finally, the design is beautiful, and conveys the image of speed and luxury.

Valmet Automotive is the company building the car in Finland. Valmet signed the deal with Fisker Automotive in November 2008 and production will start an the end of 2009. Their plan is to reach a volume of 15.000 cars per year, while the contract between Valmet and Fisker runs for several years. The reason that Valmet was chosen over their competitors was the quality and speed necessary to reach Fisker's production goals, and because more than half of Fisker's sales are expected outside of North America: Valmet represents an ideal international foothold, according to Fisker Automotive CEO, Henrik Fisker.

Hoist Lets You Create Your Own Collaboration Tool

by Paula Marttila - July 03, 2009 - Leave a comment

Hoist is one of the many Danish startups we had the pleasure of pitching us at the ArcticEvening Copenhagen last week.

Hoist is an on demand project collaboration tool joining the long list of business productivity services such as Basecamp. It was launched in private beta at Reboot conference held last week, where I fortunately managed to get a short demo. There's not too much information found on the site so the best way to find out more is indeed to book a demo meeting, get lucky requesting a test account, or simply wait them to go public later this fall.

NewsToScreen Files For Bankruptcy

by Antti Vilpponen - July 02, 2009 - Leave a comment

NewsToScreen, the service by Finnish marketing men that aimed to charge consumers for watching ads, has filed for bankruptcy according to Kauppalehti. We covered the company just little over a year ago in March. Later last year I talked to the CEO Marko Parkkinen back then and he quoted them having 80 000 users. Apparently not everyone was paying the 29€ annual fee as it would have brought in revenue of over 2 million euros.

The company had a very respectable board including Marko Parkkinen a reknown marketing man in Finland, Seppo Sairanen known for making his wealth from the private banking corporation FIM (and having invested into Fruugo). Other members of the board include Lauri Hulkko and Ilkka Seppälä. One thing that does surprise me is the resignation of Parkkinen as the CEO just 15 days before filing for bankruptcy. He had resigned the position on the 15th of June 2009 and the company had filed for bankruptcy on the 30th of June, 2009.

While it is never good to see startups going belly up, you have to admit and give it to people for trying. However, despite encouraging entrepreneurs - this is one idea that I never saw taking off, even in my wildest dreams. I remember talking to Parkkinen about the future of NewsToScreen and he was optimistic about the new course they had been taking with licensing the service to large corporations as a tool for communication. Needless to say, marketing without understanding the fundamentals of business does not work very well.

Part II: Danish Strongholds In Renewable Energy

by Päivi Kangasmäki - July 01, 2009 - Leave a comment

Denmark is a great example on effective use of public promotion instruments on renewable energy. And now we are not speaking merely about the effecitive use of manpower on transportation (bicycles account for 18 per cent of all trips taken in Denmark)!

Oil crisis in 1970's created a basis for Danish renewable energy production. In those days Denmark imported 99 per cent of all energy used. After 30 years, Denmark has enjoyed an economic growth ( GDP 56 per cent higher since 1980) with reduced CO2 (35 per cent lower since 1980). In 2004, Denmark has the lowest energy consumption per unit in EU countries.

Dazzboard, An 'Open iTunes'. We Have Invites

by Ville Vesterinen - July 01, 2009 - Leave a comment

dazzboard We all know and love Apple for giving us the almost seamless experience to manage content between the web, our laptop and ipod or iPhone via iTunes. Only problem is that it's as closed system as it gets. Linkotec, a Finnish startup is aiming to come to rescue with Dazzboard.

Dazzboard wants to become a non-proprietary, web-based personal portal for storing, organizing and sharing (via different of social networks) songs, photos, videos and other media content. Ideally, with Dazzboard you can sync anything with a memory to store your content.

Dazzboard overview from getdazzboard on Vimeo.

The Pirate Bay To Be Acquired - Don't Worry, Be Happy?

by Paula Marttila - June 30, 2009 - Leave a comment

The Pirate Persian Bay The news that The Pirate Bay (TBP) is to be acquired by Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) for MSEK 60 (App USD 7.7 million) spread all over the media this morning. The purchase includes the domain name and related web sites, including www.thepiratebay.org, and amounts to consisting of at least MSEK 30 in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 30 in the form of newly issued shares in GGF. The transaction is scheduled to be closed in August 2009.

The deal was shortly after the announcement confirmed by TPB, whereby Peter Sunde, the spokesperson of TPB, turned off his phone having too many people calling. According to him the 20 million users of TPB shouldn't we worried. It is merely time to pass TPB on to secure it's further development and future. To quote: "Don't worry, be happy!"