ASI Makes Its First Exit From Russia
Ambient Sound Investments, ASI, has made its first exit from Russia according to Quintura. ASI has sold its stake in SaaS-based inventory management software provider LogneX (Moy Sklad). Interestingly enough, LogneX was also ASI's first investment in Russia. ASI sold its stake to 1C, which is a Russian based ERP service provider.
New $60M Fund For European Startups Emerges In Britain
Big news coming out from Britain. Passion Capital, a new investment company has just announced that they've closed a $60 million fund from both private investors as well as the UK government. Private investors put in $20 million and the British government upped the ante with a $40 million. Passion Capital features three partners, Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero. The trio is among the most high profile angel investors in Europe.
Blaast Raises Funding, On Track For A Blowout Year
According to a blog post by GigaOM, Blaast has raised financing from some top tier investors. Blaast is a Finland based startup creating a cloud based mobile platform to change the way we think of user experience on mobile devices, says Joonas Hjelt the CEO of the company. We reached out to him to learn more about the situation as there is no official press release or announcement itself. According to the GigaOM article, investors include Ambient Sound Investments among others.
Nevermind Finland: Here's Estonia! [Part 1/3]
Two weeks ago, we decided to drive to the Baltics together with people from AaltoVG, to promote the Finnish startup scene, find great stories, and build stronger collaboration with the region. There is too little interaction between the Baltics. Each country stands as a standalone, tiny market, forced to internationalize to make a difference. We believe that if we can collaborate more with our nearby neighbors, great things will happen! This is my first article in a series of posts about the Baltics.
ArcticEvening Stockholm - 7th of September
ArcticEvening Stockholm is just around the corner! We have a very good lineup for Stockholm in order and honestly speaking, I hope we could have this panel in Tallinn and Helsinki as well.
Our theme for Stockholm will be Venture Capital and its state in the Nordics and Baltics.
Part of the questions will be provided by the moderator, but this time we'll try something new as well. Since we have the top venture capital companies of the region in our panel - we want to open up the possibility for the community to ask your questions as well. Therefore, do leave your questions in the comments of this post and we'll pick the best and most suitable ones.
DailyPerfect - A Predictive Technology To Personalize The News
A new Estonian startup, Daily Perfect, founded by Skype co-founder Ahti Heinla hopes to filter the noise from the web with their new innovation. They call it “predictive content personalization technology”, which should solve one of the most pressing issues for the Internet users that's threatening to explode in the near future, namely finding relevant content in the web and filter out garbage and content that is not relevant to the user. DailyPerfect is currently in closed-beta.
The founders tell us that the company will debut this technology on a news site that "predicts users' interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on the web."
ArcticStartup Contributor Toivo Tänavsuu of Tigerprises, An Estonian blog, reports that Asko Seeba ,DailyPerfect CEO, explains that "the technology will create telepathic effect, because having done an analysis on you, it knows what you want to read without you having to define it. Well, of course, if you want, you can define your topics of interest, like people do in Google Reader, for example. But it’s not a must, and that’s the uniqueness of DailyPerfect."
DailyPerfect is trying to do what for example Twitter, FriendFeed, Twine and RSS Readers have increasingly tried to do, which is to filter out only what is relevant content to the user from the wast amount of information that is daily created in the web. Where FriendFeed and Twitter, among others, are trying to do this by aggregating content from the people close to you or pulling interesting feeds from the people or sites that you're interested in, DailyPerfect functions based on semantic analysis and is likely to use advanced microformats-like method to filter the data.
The DailyPerfect project has its roots at Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) and at Curonia Research. ASI is naturally also an investor and the service is currently being developed at the ASI Incubator in Tallinn.
The team is led by Co-Founder and CEO Asko Seeba, the former Engineering Manager at Skype; and Co-Founder and CTO Ahti Heinla -- a partner at Ambient Sound Investments, and the former Lead Architect at Skype.
The witty guys at DailyPerfect have also figured out rather innovative way to filter out those who don't quite have what it takes to work at the company by using ROT 13 substitution cipher. The chars (ascii codes of them) are increased by the hitchhiker’s number 42, which let's you to encrypt their jobs section and be able to make sense of it (here).
Skype Founders Backing Inkspin1 Into Video Telephony
Toivo Tänavsuu has posted a blog post at The NextWeb site about a video telephoning solution being backed by Skype founders. The project is being run under the name of Inkspin1. The service itself is trying to bring free online telephony to the everyday life of people through television. Inkspin1 is currently being hatched in the Ambient Sound Investments incubator.
The goal of the project is to make the service as simple to use as possible. “Today, we have a solution for computer users. Yet, for an average home user, video calling is too difficult and thus they are not taking advantage of the opportunity. Our goal here is to make such calls equally easy for kids as well as parents. So that if people know how to turn on the TV and change channels, they would know how to make video calls,” Martin Villig, the leader of the project explains.
The product development is carried out in Estonia, but the software development is being worked on in Beijing, China.Villig says that the amount of coders needed for a job this wide are more plentiful in China than in Estonia. Also in China they are closer to the vendor manufacturers that are expected to partner with Inkspin1 to integrate the necessary devices to their televisions to enable Television Video Telephony. The unit in China is being run by a Finn, Jussi Nyfelt, who has been working for Nokia in China.
Inkspin1 is still very much at a design stage as Villig states that the service is expected to be up and running in one to two years. Inkspin1 is currently recruiting lots of different talents.
It's interesting to see ASI working hard on bringing a consumer service to the masses through better usability. The idea itself is nothing new, but then again it's all in the execution. I'm guessing there are tons of ideas like this waiting to be improved. Yet further proof that you don't always have to come up with a new idea to become an entrepreneur.
Skype founders fund Senseg
The investment groups Ambient Sound Investments or ASI for short (from Skype fame) and Seed Fund Vera make an equity investment in Senseg, a Finnish company developing a breakthrough touch interface technology. The sum of the investment remains undisclosed.
Senseg is one of the startups whose journey to Israel to meet Israeli investors we have been following. It only makes sense that Senseg comes out with the announcement right before they pitch to the local VCs on Wednesday, May the 21th to capture the full benefit of the announcement.
Senseg has developed a new technology to produce touch-like sensations. The technology has a wide range of applications, for example generating the feeling of virtual buttons on smooth surfaces such as mobile phones and other touch screens. Iphone with a keyboard you can actually feel, anyone?
Dr. Ville Mäkinen, Senseg's CEO, described the technology nothing short of revolutionary:
Senseg's technology is something completely different. It is a novel communications technology based on human sensation. [...] The technology has unrepresented potential. I can be licenced easily and used in hundreds of different ways and applications. Senseg's technology can therefore initiate a significant and fundamental change in how consumer gadgets are designed and used.
According to Moaffak Ahmed, Chairman of Senseg, the technology will be available for a select group of equipment manufacturers in the second half of 2008 and be officially launched when the first products are introduced to the market, which he expects to be in 2009.
Arctic Startup will follow Sensig and other Finnish startups throughout the week and report on how they manage to attract attension from the VC scene in Israel.
