Posts tagged:

community

ArcticIndex To Make The Community Tick

by Ville Vesterinen, October 9, 2009 — 8 Comments

ArcticIndexThere are roughly 350 startups and 200 individuals already listed in ArcticIndex. This is becoming an increasingly important destination and a resource for anyone looking for information on any startup that comes from the Northern Europe.

We have heard of cases where an investors have heard about a startup and subsequently contacted them (and sometimes even invested) when they have been able to look up a name from the ArcticIndex. Same goes for the media. We break stories on many new startups that the big media then picks up and writes about. Yes, you guessed it: ArcticIndex is where they go check out the facts on those startups.

If you have a startup and have not listed yours yet, do it now. And if you have yours listed, do update your information! Why? Because this is the information that gets printed and looked at as a fact. So if you have had subsequent financing rounds, new key employees, product releases, do yourself a favor and write it in the ArcticIndex, since this is what the readers, investors and the media will judge your startup by. This is also where we pick up new startups to write about.

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Venture Capital 2.0: Grow VC Launches Private Beta (We Have Invites)

by Miikka Kukkosuo, June 30, 2009 — 4 Comments
Venture Capital 2.0: Grow VC Launches Private Beta (We Have Invites)
Grow VC launches today an invitiation-only private beta of their “Venture Capital 2.0″ service. Grow VC aims to better enable early stage funding for mobile and web 2.0 startup companies by community-based approach. The investment size Grow VC is looking to facilitate ranges from USD $10,000 to $1M. Grow VC has been founded by Finnish serial entrepreneurs Jouko Ahvenainen and Valto Loikkanen.
The problem Grow VC is trying to solve is the traditional venture capital said being too locally-focused, and difficult and cumbersome to obtain for many new web and mobile startups needing smaller investments. The founders state that VC firms do nowadays not need or want to get involved with smaller investments, though web and mobile 2.0 startups do not need big funding in the early stage. Another problem Grow VC is looking to solve is the difficulty of attracting angel investors outside the entrepreneurs’  local network and on the other hand angels’ lack of a structure for global diversification of risk.
The plans for the service are big. Valto Loikkanen, Co-Founder and CEO, explains that they want to establish the first truly transparent, international, and community-based approach to early stage funding. The service allows entrepreneurs and investors to find and connect with each other globally. It also provides tools for facilitating the process, and information is shared transparently in the community, offering interactive approach to funding instead of the traditional one-sided VC process. The public launch of Grow VC will follow later in 2009, and is said to include “more innovative investment methods”, whatever it means.
The service seems like a quite normal web community in that entrepreneurs and investors create profiles of themselves and their businesses. Everyone’s profile will be open for community comments to allow for reputation building. During the private Beta one can join free with an invitation, but later on Grow VC will collect membership fees starting from USD $150, based on the size of the funding. Part of the private Beta is already a partner program, in which different local or regional incubators, event organisers, law firms, and similar service providers can make themselves known to the service community.
If you want to try out the service, we have 50 invitations for ArcticStartup readers: the code is AS50.

Grow VC logoGrow VC launches today an invitiation-only private beta of their “Venture Capital 2.0″ service. Grow VC aims to better enable early stage funding for mobile and web 2.0 startup companies by using a community-based approach. The size of investments Grow VC is looking to facilitate ranges from USD $10,000 to $1M. Grow VC has been founded by Finnish serial entrepreneurs Jouko Ahvenainen and Valto Loikkanen.

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Post Your Events To ArcticIndex From Now On

by Antti Vilpponen, June 1, 2009 — 7 Comments

ArcticIndexI wanted to kickstart the week by giving a little heads up on our ArcticIndex and what we’ve been up to lately. Sometime back we added the jobs part to the website and even though it hasn’t been under tremendous use – it has received a lot of attention.

Today – we’re announcing an addition to the service, events. We decided to let go of our Yahoo Upcoming account and build it ourselves to ArcticIndex. Actually, the wonderful guys at Kisko Labs did it – do contact them if you’re in need of development resources, they do a fantastic job. Anyways, one of the reasons was also that we really want to give all the necessary tools for the community to do this sort of activities without us being a gatekeeper in the middle.
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WOT wants to make browsing safer

by Ville Vesterinen, September 2, 2008 — Leave a Comment

WOT, or Web of Trust, is a so called ’safe surfing’ software that warns the users of  ill websites, namely scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites.

WOT wants to primarily see itself as a community website. The service gets it’s information from other trusted sources that gather related data as well as from its user community. WOT software can be downloaded for Firefox (as I did) and for IE.

The company boast some impressive figures. According to WOT’s CEO, Esa Suurio, it has 20 million rated website and broke 1 million user downloads during August 2008.

When asked about WOT’s business model, Suurio says that they are still working on the best way to monetize the service, but that 20 million rated websites is clearly an asset, which the company is ready to lincense to third parties. Suurio adds that WOT can also act as a marketing platform. For this particular use new concepts that fit WOT’s philophy and its community model are under way.





Before starting WOT Esa Suurio, a Finnish serial software entrepreneur, founded a local Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing house InfoManager and led the company for about ten years before a successful exit in August 2001 -just before the hardest downturn in the dot-com bubble years.