Metrify To Provide Scalable Insights & Actions For Games
One of the main drivers behind the hype of the Finnish startup ecosystem is Kristo Ovaska, who either founded or helped co-found Startup Sauna, Aalto Venture Garage, and Aalto Entrepreneurship Soceity among others. In the recent months he's been promoting his new startup, Metrify, and we decided to find out what it's all about.
I joined Metrify CEO Kristo Ovaska and CTO Osma Ahvenlampi for lunch, not really knowing what to expect. To be honest, the cynic in me wrote this startup off as only an excuse for Ovaska to run his own company, rather than watching more and more Startup Sauna teams shoot up around him. But I left convinced this is the real deal; Metrify is on a path to solve some really interesting business and technical challenges.
23 Video Offers New Video Analytics
Copenhagen-based 23 Video has been providing video sites with a simple service to host and manage everything, on a customer's own domain, for a simple $675 per month. Customers are allowed an unlimited number of videos and have complete control of the design of the player. The company has always offered analytics, but recently they stepped up their offering to provide greater insight for their customers to figure out exactly how their users are interacting with online videos.
Hakema Launches Appointment Booking Service, Integrated On Oikotie
Hakema just launched its new product that focuses on appointment bookings for real-estate sellers and buyers. It solves a time consuming problem; when people are searching for apartments online, buyers need to make appointments with sellers. Currently, finding a suitable time using phone or email is time-consuming and inconvenient. Also, sellers' efforts are wasted if there are no visitors in open houses. Hakema brings these two parties together and also collects information on potential buyers and runs a proper analysis of visits and customer interest. With its launch, the Hakema service is now live on Oikotie, a large online classifieds site in Finland.
Using the service is pretty straightforward and I found it well executed. As a buyer, you just need to browse what times are available for a private listing or an open house, then plug in your phone number, name, and email after clicking the time that works best for you. You immediately receive a confirmation text message, which the service uses to keep in touch with you in case the property is sold before your appointment, or if the listing price reduces. Buyers can also cancel by SMS, saving time for apartment sellers.
Burt expands to Norway, Focuses Development on Rich
Following the company's €2.2 million investment from Industrifonden and angel-investors last year, Sweden-based Burt is expanding to Norway, as part of their expansion program. The company produces tools to help advertisers and agencies improve the efficiency and effect of their online campaigns, which we covered last June. Their main product, Rich, distinguishes itself by focusing on the media industry and offering analytics that form a more complete overview of the environment in which their ads are being displayed. As a result ad-buyers can compare online performance of their ads with broadcast and print advertising and media agencies get a greater control over ads, their vital revenue source.
Comptel Acquires Advanced Analytics Startup Xtract For EUR 3.1 Million
Finland-based analytics provider Xtract has been acquired by software company Comptel for EUR 3.1 million. Xtract was founded in 2001 and specializes in advanced customer analytics solutions for companies operating in the mobile, retail and finance sectors.
From Garage48 to StartupSauna to Mini Seedcamp NY: The Story Of Campalyst
Campalyst is a new start-up that developed analytics to measure real return-on-investment from social media campaigns, starting with Facebook. It is a truly Baltic company started in Riga with the team members from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. After less than four months of existence, Campalyst has shown an impressive growth: they went from building a prototype in 48 hours to winning StartupSauna to being among the finalists of Mini Seedcamp New York. We talked with two of the founders, Dalia Lasaite and Jevgenijs Kazanins, to learn the full story of Campalyst and find out how things are going for the company right now.
Zokem Strikes Another Partnership, This Time Its Cint
Zokem continues with its expansion and moves into ensuring that it becomes the largest source of mobile market research globally. Recently the company announced its partnership with Cint, a firm focused on providing SaaS based solutions for market research industry. The partnership will help Zokem’s Mobile Life panels expand further into the Western markets by utilizing Cint’s Thumbspeak.
Zokem Builds Traction With Their New Business
Back in June we wrote about Zokem receiving a 2 million euro investment and the company pivoting towards a new area of business. A short while ago, I sat down with Hannu Verkasalo to talk about the progress they've achieved in the recent months after their pivot and to see whether it has been successful. In short - it has, and it has taken the company very rapidly in the new direction. There seems to be a lot of interest from market research companies in the data Zokem is able to gather to further understand consumer behaviour.
Zokem Receives A Whopping 2 Million Euros In Financing, Changes Direction
Zokem, a Finnish startup previously known to work with mobile location based mobile services (see our review here), has changed direction somewhat and closed a massive 2 million euro investment round from European venture capital investors, private investors as well as public funding. The new area Zokem will try to tackle is mobile analytics.
QAim And TNS Gallup Start Providing Metrics On Most Popular Mobile Sites In Finland
TNS Gallup, Finnish subsidiary of the biggest industry market research expert TNS Global, has teamed up with a mobile customer experience management startup QAim to provide Finland wide tracking of mobile website usage metrics.
CLARA Listens The Web Talking
CLARA is a Reykjavik, Iceland based young startup specializing in online business and marketing intelligence. The firm offers automatic monitoring and analysis tools for the web. With CLARA's solution firms can keep track of online discussions around their brands, products, and services on the web. CLARA's system brings data together from news, blogs, forums and comments, and other online content. The idea is to allow "listening" to the online discussion as it happens, and being able to see a clear summary to better understand the end customers.
Youcalc Visualizes Your Data With A Click (Video)
Over the years, as I have worked with several great designers, I have come to appreciate well designed info graphics more and more. At the same time, where I'm not that much of a designer myself but why I can help companies with their products' user experience is because I am one of the most impatient persons you'll ever meet when it comes to bad user interfaces - If I don't figure out right away what's happening with a given product, the interface is broken as far as I'm concerned. These two reasons added to the fact that I love big data go a long way explaining why I like Youcalc so much.
The company is not doing anything that revolutionary, but at the same time it just might be for those who use the product. In a nutshell, Youcalc is a Danish startup that let’s business people create and share custom reports and analytics on data from SaaS systems, in a very clear and easy manner I may add. And by business people I mean those impatient, busy people who can't concentrate to learn to use (let alone set up) a complex reporting tool even if their life depended on it because they are busy making that next sale. And that's what they should do, but that's also why they may need Youcalc. The company's mission is to create the world’s largest library of analytics apps by allowing business users to create and share those analytics apps. Here's Youcalc's presentation in ArcticEvening Copenhagen from a while back.
