Interview With Kalle Koutajoki Of Foodie On Developing For Symbian
In our series with Nokia we continue to discuss possibilities of developing for Symbian. This time we interview Kalle Koutajoki of Foodie.fm about their application and why they decided to go ahead with development on Symbian. Foodie provides an online service around recipes and shopping. Their application is able to give you a shopping list based on the recipe and also helps you see where the products are in the actual store and order the goods to your home door. Let's go ahead with the interview!
46elks Connect Apps To Voice And SMS
Making your app interact with voice and SMS often requires learning new software and buying hardware. 46elks is a Swedish start-up that offers a cloud-based platform that easily connects apps with telephony technologies. Founded in January this year, they have just released second alpha version of their product. The newest addition to the release enables apps to interact with phone calls as well as send and receive text messages. Developers can try it out for free with an invite, which you can get by registering on their website. Priority is given to developer communities from Europe to get feedback from their early users.
Swedish Pixamid Beats Color In Photo Sharing
The company that brought us Color, the photo sharing app for the iPhone, received $41 million in funding some time ago and we questioned if this was another sign of a tech bubble emerging. Color is essentially a photo sharing app that apparently got its launch all wrong. There's another photo sharing app coming from Sweden called Pixamid that seems to work in a somewhat similar way to Color, but the approach is completely different and I could easily argue that it will most likely beat Color at its own game. Pixamid leverages the users' existing accounts and builds on top of these - enabling smarter photo sharing. Pixamid is available for free in the App Store.
Sulake Fires 28 And Signals Plans For Facebook
Back in October we wrote about the negotiations Sulake was having with its employees about reducing the work force. The plan back then was to reduce the workforce by 20%, which would have meant something along the lines of 40 people. They ended up sacking 28 people, to cut costs, and thus stayed well below the initial plan of 20%. Juhani Lassila, their Communication Exec stated in the Finnish M&M article that the current restructuring and cuts have dramatically improved their profitability.
While 28 people were fired, I've heard from close sources that others have left the company of their own will and the environment isn't all that lively inside the company. This of course is completely natural when a startup that has grown to a multinational gaming house has its first real employee negotiations and ends up cutting its workforce by this much.
Spotify Adds Support S60 Devices - A New Growth Strategy In The Making?
Spotify announced yesterday that is has added support for Symbian smartphones. Symbian is used by Nokia, SonyEricsson and Samsung. This has been a long awaited release as Symbian is still the most widespread phone OS around, thus dramatically increasing the potential for new Spotify users. While being a nice update and all, there might be something else in the makes regarding these application platforms. While many companies port their software to multiple platforms, not many are able to take advantage of them to the extent Spotify does. Earlier this month Spotify announced that it has signed a deal with 3 UK to distribute HTC phones with Spotify premium included. This may be the route Spotify is more eagerly going to take in the near future regarding other operators in Europe as well.
Biznesport launches PM and calendar service
Christoffer Nordström of Biznesport directed our attention to their newly launched project management and calendar service. The focus is on internationalisation as the service has been developed for the Finnish market from all the way back in 2003.
The service features many common functionalities such as discussions, filesharing, timetables, image commenting, mobile browsing and so on. Many of which are familiar from the 37 Signals' Basecamp application widely used around the world.
There are three different price groups to choose from; Basic, Professional and Premium. Basic membership costs 9 euros a month, Professional 39 euros and Premium membership 69 euros a month. There are also additional modules that make the pricing slightly more difficult to grasp as you can choose from Project module and Calendar module to be added to the package at 25 euros initial cost. Something that I'd really like to see included in the packages as they are usually taken for granted in the world of project management.
The service seems relatively good and usable at first, especially the use of e-mail through the service to collect all mails to one place might come in handy as might the ability to surf the service through a mobile handset. However, there is very little innovation in my opinion to make it stand out from the already crowded market. Furthermore, there are many open source alternatives to companies who look for cost savings and know a little more about installing these alternatives.
Biznesports internationalisation plans are yet to be seen, but we will definitely keep an eye on this company in the future as well.
Vailoma changes name to TripSay, introduces embeddable application for partner sites
The travel information organizer Vailoma has changed their name to TripSay. Also the website has been polished up. TripSay's service aims to ease up the process required to plan new trips and vacations, by providing easy access to relevant and complete destination content, which is both updated by users and aggregated from around the web.
The company has also created a new embeddable application called the Destination Module, which is designed to share TripSay's content with travel agencies and other partners enabling them to get dynamic destination content from the web and travelers onto their site without any effort. The application can be checked out on Kaleva Travel's web site (the site's in Finnish, but scroll down a bit and you'll see the app), which has the first implementation of the application. TripSay has also plans to open up an API to allow tailored services, though no indication of the release schedule is given yet.
TripSay plans to monetize their service by targeted advertisements, along with commissions from bookings done via its site. Hopefully the new name is more descriptive to international users and helps to spread the word.
[via Startupbin , TripSay blog]
