Jaiku Co-founder Joins Aito Board - A Win For The Ecosystem
Petteri Koponen (see video below), co-founder of Jaiku and First Hop, joins Aito Technologies board. Koponen, who currently works at Google after Jaiku's acquisition by Google in October 2007 has a long experience from media and telecom from his years. Aito Technologies is a Finnish Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution provider for mobile operators and digital service providers.
Along with Koponen's nomination Aito Technologies announced also the nomination of Antti Viitanen to its board of directors.
Red Herring Global Top 100 Finalists Announced
During the weekend Red Herring, a global media company, announced 200 finalists of their annual Global Top 100 technology companies competition. The winners, top 100 out of 200, will be announced in January 14-16, 2009.
There are a few Nordic companies listed that were also on Red Herring's Top 100 European finalists this year, including Floobs, Muxlim and Aito Technologies. Some of the new comers to the global short list include Hammerkit and Ball-IT, which was listed also in 2007.
Congratulations to the finalists and watch out for the monkey business.
Aito Technologies To Work With Blyk
Blyk, the free Finnish born (but operates only in UK) mobile network for 16 to 24 year-olds funded by advertising, has signed a frame agreement with Aito Technologies, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution provider, for the delivery and implementation of its Business-Driven CEM software product, Aito, to UK market. This follows a successful 3-month pilot installation, which began in May.
Aito takes business intelligence from network traffic data and offers Blyk an easy-to-understand, in-depth analysis of service usage, member behavior patterns and trends.
The information that the software generates is given to key staff directly involved in business management – sales and marketing managers, member service teams, product managers – in a form which is easy to use and act on.
In essence, Aito is an easy-to-implement tool that’s a user-friendly method of making sure mobile subscribers are having a great network experience, at all times, whether making a voice call, sending a text or MMS, or, in the case of Blyk, receiving relevant mobile adverts with their services. The carrier-grade Aito will provide Blyk with a 360° view of the activities and overall experience of its entire subscriber base. .
CEO of Aito Technologies, Anssi Tauriainen, said, “Like Blyk, we know that mobile advertising is set to be one of the most important business models and revenue-generating network activities offered by operators in the future [...]"
Mobile advertising has been already coming from years and is still as annoying as ever. 
Yet, this is hardly Aito's fault and I admit not having tried Blyk services. That said, even if Blyk works like charm, I already pay fixed monthly sum for practically unlimited calls, SMS and data and can't really imagine the future any other way. For cash-strapped 16 to 24 year-olds teens who adore brands there seems to be something there though. Blyk users receive 6 sms/mms from the chosen brands per day in exchange for 217 txts and 43 minutes of voice calls each month.
For the segment the service seems to be working: Blyk has currently 200,000 member in the UK, which is the only market they are currently serving. Now Blyk is ready to slice and dice the market data into an easy-to-use format with Aito Technologies' help and are well equipped to follow their plans to go pan-European in 2009 potentially reaching 40 million young consumers.
The advertisers seems to be happy as well: Big brands like L'Oreal have seen tremendous results with average click through rates of 29% (ranges between 12 and 43%). Quite a lead from the average mobile advertising average CTR that hovers around 3-6%.
Finnish media Digitoday knows that in addition to Blyk, Aito Technologies has currently six commercial pilots running in Europe, including Finland. Digitoday also reports that Aito has around 700 potential customers, traditional and virtual mobile operators. Along with these, Aito is going after ring tone, community and added value service providers in the mobile space, which there are around 2000 to 3000.
Aito Technologies is owned by the employees as well as two reputable Nordic investement funds, Creandum and Conor. The company has currently 25 employees.
Red Herring publishes finalists for Europe 100 list, suspected tax frauds and financial obscurity in the background
Several Finnish companies have been included as finalists for the 2008 Europe 100 list of the of most promising ventures Red Herring is once again publishing. The companies are Aito Technologies, Floobs, Muxlim, nCore, Severa, Whatamap.com, Widisys, and Valimo Wireless. The winners will be declared at Red Herring Europe 2008 event in Malta on April 14-16th.
While the nomination gives good visibility to the companies, it's worth a note, though, before going boasting around that the reputation Red Herring has is not that good everywhere. There's a whole lot of suspected monkey business going on related to the company. According to rumors (see ValleyWag's posts for example), Red Herring’s CEO and Chairman, Alex Vieux, doesn't pay his bills (nor employees' salaries). In addition, he's got the U.S. tax officials of IRS on his back, suspected of having $2 million in unpaid payroll taxes according to ex-employees. Mr. Vieux has also been said to to have fled French and Swiss police also interested to investigate possible unpaid taxes. A good sign is neither that Red Herring has lost quite a many board members over the last couple of years.
Although not all the rumors may be true, it nevertheless seems the company is in trouble and it's unsure if it's able to turn its course. As a takeaway it's good to enjoy the publicity the nomination brings, but at the same time it's worthwhile to assess what kind of association to have with Red Herring in particular and keep one's ears open.
Creandum completes Aitos's round A financing
Alarm:clock euro pointed us to Aito Technologies getting another injection of VC capital, this time from Creandum to fuel its international growth.
I've heard from relatively reliable sources that Aito is definitely onto something big and good here. Initial demand for the product/software they are building is incredibly good. The software as far as I'm informed, is a tool to analyse network traffic and thus serve as an indicator for operators to streamline their services. For example, as funny as it sounds - not many operators know the percentage of successfully delivered MMS messages in their networks and as far as I know, Aito's software will help with these sort of problems.
Aito Technologies secures financing from Conor Venture Partners
Aito technologies secures financing from Conor Venture Partners. Conor Venture Partners have recently taken Mr Jari Mieskonen aboard to become a Managing Partner. Mr Mieskonen has also joined the Board of Directors in Aito with the investment. The amount invested is not disclosed, but it will help Aito in the product developement and market growth (Press release).
