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.
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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.
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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.
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]
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