Posts tagged:

ambient sound investments

DailyPerfect – A Predictive Technology To Personalize The News

by Ville Vesterinen, January 8, 2009 — 7 Comments

dailyperfect

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

by Antti Vilpponen, September 9, 2008 — Leave a Comment

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

by Ville Vesterinen, May 19, 2008 — Leave a Comment

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.