Gemalto, provider of end-to-end security solutions, has acquired a Finnish startup Valimo Wireless. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Some of Valimo’s investors included Altine Group, Risto Siilasmaa and SpringBank TechVentures.
Valimo has developed a two-channel, two-factor authentication based on Public Key Infrastructure, combining an over the air platform with a software client in the SIM to generate a legally binding electronic signature. What this jargon from the press release means is that Valimo enables mobile phone users to securely authenticate themselves, digitally sign documents and confirm legally binding transactions simply by entering a self-chosen passphrase or a PIN code. Voilà!
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The company behind Second Life, Linden Lab, has just announced it has bought Avatars United, a Stockholm Sweden online community for avatars (see our previous story here and here).
Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon tells that when they talk to the users who sign up but then decide not to stay, they say they left, in part, because they had a hard time finding people to hang out with. Either their friends weren’t there, or they have a hard time meeting new ones inworld, or sometimes both. Now Avatars United should fix this. I haven’t looked at Second Life in a while, but if its anything like it has been before, I think Linden Lab needs much more than just Avatars United to make it work.
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I managed to get a fresh load of stories regarding the Finnish startup scene yesterday. While the companies themselves have not made too much noise about these, they are valid to break to keep the system as transparent as possible. There are 3 investment deals and one acquisition offer that was did not go down.
To begin with, we have Muxlim. The world’s largest online network for Muslims. They have about 200 000 registered users at the moment. The story is that they have recently closed a round of financing from Europe, possibly UK. There is no word on the size of the round, nor who the investors are but this is what we’re hearing from the street.
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TechCrunch has heard that Nokia is looking to sell off Dopplr, a company they acquired less than a month ago. If this is indeed true, I wouldn’t want to be a Nokia shareholder. In essence, Nokia paid for recruiting Marko Ahtisaari, Dopplr CEO (former Nokia) as well as Matt Biddulph, Dopplr CTO. The reason I wouldn’t want to be a shareholder is that paying for these kind of recruitment fees isn’t the smartest path down the road to gather a winning team of professionals.
We also heard that there isn’t a lot of synergies regarding the product roadmaps of Ovi and Dopplr, as they were mainly after the team behind Dopplr. This again raises an interesting point, would you as an entrepreneur sell your company at any cost and whatever the future may look like for your beloved one?
Check, check… mike working, reporting from the Mindtrek conference from Tampere where some 800 people are networking, discussing internet and digital media at large. The day has been action packed and there has been a lot of different content to consume. Furthermore, the audience saw some top notch speakers at Mindtrek this year, especially Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström, who were keynote speakers continuing on the post they wrote for ArcticStartup earlier.
The day began with a keynote by Chris Messina. He talked about identity as a platform. Judging on the amount of comments from people on the aisles in the conference, Chris hit top on with his presentation. Although there were some illogicalities, which he admits, it’s always great to hear news from The Valley on the trends that are pumping there.
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Marko Ahtisaari, the CEO of Dopplr, has just posted a blog post on the Dopplr Blog that Nokia indeed has acquired the company. Furthermore, Nokia has confirmed this with their own press release. Last week we quoted on ArcticStartup a rumour originating from Techcrunch that Nokia has acquired them. This stirred up a lot of publicity and since no party confirmed the rumour and one of the co-founders stated the deal was fabricated – we were under mixed messages and were unable to decide which side is right.
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There are rumours circulating the web that Nokia is to acquire Dopplr. Rumours started when TechCrunch posted a post on this. Nokia apparently moved in for the scoop when Dopplr was looking for a round of financing. The supposed price Nokia paid is between 10 and 15 million euros.
Despite having its headquarters in London, the company is very much based in Finland. Inoa, one of the free registries to Finnish companies, state that the board members are Marko Ahtisaari, Matt Biddulph, Tyler Brule, Saul Klein and the board is directed by Lisa Sounio.
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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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Little known Finnish beta service called Emotionr has been sold to Zallas Technologies in the US. The price was not disclosed, but my guess is that we’re not talking about astronomical figures here based on the complexity of the free service. Furthermore, the service does not show significant amounts of traffic data in Compete.com statistics so the price for it might be a symbolic one.
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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!”
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Stardoll, the Swedish based paper doll community, has announced that it has acquired Piczo, a social networking site aimed at teenagers in a cash and shares takeover. Details of the merger are very limited, but according to a Times Online article Stardoll will become profitable with the takeover.
Stardoll currently has around 20 million unique visitors a month visiting the site and an annual turnover of above 10 million euros. The idea behind the merger, according to Times Online, is to bring more value for the advertisers – both sites share similar demographics and many users on Stardoll link to Piczo. A good position to start off with. An educated guess, looking at various sources online, would be that Stardoll has about three times the registered members of Piczo – 30 million and 10 million respectively.
From this point of view, it makes complete sense for Stardoll to acquire Piczo and grow its properties online. With the acquisition, Stardoll will become the single most largest network online to target teenager girls (about 75% of Piczo’s users are teenage girls). What Stardoll is able to do with its network is tailor it further to the needs of the advertisers than other broader social network services like Facebook, for example, can. The reason is simple, the passion and niche goes a lot deeper in services such as Stardoll than it will in Facebook. With deeper integration into the service, Stardoll is able to charge higher premiums from the advertisers.
It’s hard to say if the downturn in the economy had something to do with this merger, but my bet is that it happened exactly because of that. In general, it is said that valuations go down when the economy plummets. My guess is that Piczo has become an attractive opportunity for that reason. Stardoll has been very successful and has also been growing organically very strongly – thus showing fewer effects of the slowing economy.
Furthermore it is great to see a Nordic company takeover its competitor from the Valley – there haven’t been too many of those around. However, it is hard to say how this merger will show to the users – if it will in any way other than similar kind of advertisement solutions. One thing is sure though, these sort of activities will create more interest towards entrepreneurship in general – exactly what we need more of here in the Nordics.
Kauppalehti reports that according financial data published into the government files, the price Sulake paid for the acquisition of IRC-Galleria a while back is 12,5 million euros. The company behind IRC-Galleria is Dynamoid, where the Finnish serial entrepreneur Taneli Tikka has also gathered some experience.
The price was 6,6 times their annual revenue which at that time was 1,89 million euros and 25 times their earnings of 500 000 euros.
Openbit, a Finnish Tampere based provider of on-device payment and DRM solutions for mobile applications, and Tanla Solutions, Indian telecommunications software and services provider have announced today that Tanla buys 85 % of Openbit for $US 15.81M / EUR 10.2M in cash. The valuation is therefore at EUR 12M, 23.5 times Openbit’s EBITDA (EUR 0.51M) from the fiscal year 2007.
The remaining 15% is still owned by the management and will be acquired by Tanla in two parts, 5% after the first year and 10% after the second. Openbit has been one of the fastest growing companies in Finland in terms of revenue growth, ranking third in the Deloitte’s Finnish Technology Fast 50 list of 2007.
Seems like a potentially very good match for both companies. Openbit should be able to expand their channels and partners faster in Asia and North America, and Tanla gets extensive foothold in Europe.
Congrats to Openbit for the work well done so far!
See Tanla’s press release (PDF) for more information.
We wrote about CompanyCube back in March, when they were doing business as normal. I checked my e-mail this morning to find a press release from Christoffer Landtman, the CEO of CompanyCube, to announce that they have been acquired by SteelTeam, a steel trading company. CompanyCube will become a subsidiary of SteelTeam in June.
With the acquisition CompanyCube has halted marketing and selling of their CRM and trading solutions. They continue to develop their steel trading solutions, but look for strategic partners to address other industry segments such as plastics, oil industry, wood, paper and the financial industry.
Christoffer and Jussi Alamäki, the current management team will move towards new challenges.
Congratulations from the whole Arctic Startup team to Christoffer and Jussi, a magnificent job!
The largest commercial television channel MTV3 has acquired Kuvaboxi, a photo sharing service developed by Futurice – according to M&M.
The photo sharing service evolved from a mobile photo sharing product called Mobshare developed in 2005. With Mobshare, you could upload your photos to an online service to share with your closed friends, avoiding your photos getting indexed by search engines and being available to the public. Mobshare could be used with a photo blogging service called Futublog, which has now been shutdown.
Kuvaboxi joined the MTV3 portal in March 2006 and since then has become one of the most popular photo sharing sites in Finland (not counting IRC-gallery and similar type of services). Currently Kuvaboxi has over 170 000 registered users and over 5,3 million photos. Following Kuvaboxi’s ride has been close at heart as I wrote my Master’s thesis back in 2005 to Futurice on how they should market and approach mass markets with their service.
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