Blyk, the free Finnish born (but operates only in UK) mobile network for 16 to 24 year-olds funded by advertising, has signed a frame agreement with Aito Technologies, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution provider, for the delivery and implementation of its Business-Driven CEM software product, Aito, to UK market. This follows a successful 3-month pilot installation, which began in May.

Aito takes business intelligence from network traffic data and offers Blyk an easy-to-understand, in-depth analysis of service usage, member behavior patterns and trends.

The information that the software generates is given to key staff directly involved in business management – sales and marketing managers, member service teams, product managers – in a form which is easy to use and act on.

In essence, Aito is an easy-to-implement tool that’s a user-friendly method of making sure mobile subscribers are having a great network experience, at all times, whether making a voice call, sending a text or MMS, or, in the case of Blyk, receiving relevant mobile adverts with their services. The carrier-grade Aito will provide Blyk with a 360° view of the activities and overall experience of its entire subscriber base. .

CEO of Aito Technologies, Anssi Tauriainen, said, “Like Blyk, we know that mobile advertising is set to be one of the most important business models and revenue-generating network activities offered by operators in the future [...]“

Mobile advertising has been already coming from years and is still as annoying as ever. Yet, this is hardly Aito’s fault and I admit not having tried Blyk services. That said, even if Blyk works like charm, I already pay fixed monthly sum for practically unlimited calls, SMS and data and can’t really imagine the future any other way. For cash-strapped 16 to 24 year-olds teens who adore brands there seems to be something there though. Blyk users receive 6 sms/mms from the chosen brands per day in exchange for 217 txts and 43 minutes of voice calls each month.

For the segment the service seems to be working: Blyk has currently 200,000 member in the UK, which is the only market they are currently serving. Now Blyk is ready to slice and dice the market data into an easy-to-use format with Aito Technologies’ help and are well equipped to follow their plans to go pan-European in 2009 potentially reaching 40 million young consumers.

The advertisers seems to be happy as well: Big brands like L’Oreal have seen tremendous results with average click through rates of 29% (ranges between 12 and 43%). Quite a lead from the average mobile advertising average CTR that hovers around 3-6%.

Finnish media Digitoday knows that in addition to Blyk, Aito Technologies has currently six commercial pilots running in Europe, including Finland. Digitoday also reports that Aito has around 700 potential customers, traditional and virtual mobile operators. Along with these, Aito is going after ring tone, community and added value service providers in the mobile space, which there are around 2000 to 3000.

Aito Technologies is owned by the employees as well as two reputable Nordic investement funds, Creandum and Conor. The company has currently 25 employees.

Spotify, a Swedish startup offering a lightweight software application enabling on demand streaming of music, has opened up its service for public.

Earlier on we wrote about rumor that Spotify had raised €15m round from various investors. Last week I received a confirmation that Creandum and Northzone Ventures has invested undisclosed sum to the Swedish startup (more bout this here).

It’s no wonder the startup is investors’ latest darling as it just recently signed significant licensing deals with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo.

The service launched on October 7th 2008 in UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Throughout the remainder of this year and into 2009 Spotify will be rolled out to further markets.

Spotify offers three different subscription models: Free, Day Pass and Premium accounts. Day pass cost you just under one pound sterling for 24 hours whereas the Premium account costs you 9.99 pound sterling a month. Free account is advertising funded, but if you have received your free account via an invitation already earlier on as I did, chances are you don’t need to deal with any advertising yet. Advertisers that have signed up to be included from the launch include Ford, T-Mobile and Xbox.

Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.

In comparison, the service is better than any other music service I have seen so far. Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists. It will also recommend music you might like based on what you’ve listened so far. To my delight it also seems to do the recommendation very accurately to match my taste. Martin Varsavsky used a fitting analogies for the service.

[...] Spotify is like iTunes but with on-demand. It’s like Joost, but for music!  It´s like Pandora without the need to vote and with your ability to listen to music anytime you want.  It´s like Last FM without the community.

The only downside was that some of the current users saw many of the songs on their playlists disappear as Spotify cleaned their playlist to reflect the current copyright agreements that they have been able to push through. Regardless, I think this is a minor disappointment and the users will possible see many of the songs reappear as Spotify tries to get more record labels behind them.

You can also post and vote on your favorite playlist Digg-style at Spotylist. Spotylist also allows you to find new playlists that others have posted via simple links. I already found two good ones just from the blog comments.

The fact that another service has already build its own offering on Spotify’s core product is a solid example that there is something very special about this service. Forget Last.fm, go Spotify!

TechCrunch UK just reported (here) that Spotify, a Swedish startup offering a lightweight software application enabling on demand streaming of music, is rumoured to have raised €15m round (massive €71.6m pre-money valuation) from a Scandinavian VC fund Northzone Ventures.

As TechCrunch UK commented “Northzone themselves have declined to comment, but Creandum, another of Sweden’s top VCs, is also understood to have taken part in the funding round.”

ArcticStartup met Creandum at Seedcamp in London and a partner at Creandum told us that he is very excited about Spotify when we asked what are the most interesting Swedish startups at the moment. On the face of it this would support the rumor, even though we can’t confirm it either.

I did an extensive interview with Daniel Blomquist from the Venture Capital firm Creandum. Daniel is an associate at Creandum and profiles innovative companies that have the potential to become market leaders in niche markets. He shares great insight on Nordic companies and gives some first hand tips on venture financing.

Many thanks to Daniel at this moment!

What’s the big idea behind Creandum, what’s the philosphy so to speak?
Creandum was founded based on two important strategic principles. Firstly, from a market perspective, we identified a market opportunity due to the lack of professional venture capital investors in Nordic early-stage technology companies. We have seen through extensive analysis of the Nordic venture capital market that significant value has been created in companies that are less than 5-6 years old, which means that one has to invest early to be part of these successes. Secondly, from a resource perspective, we noticed that in many successful US early-stage venture capital firms, the investors often had entrepreneurial and technology backgrounds. This was rarely the case in Europe or the Nordic region. That’s why everyone at Creandum has an entrepreneurial background being involved in building and growing start-ups. Some have also worked as business angels before joining Creandum.
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Alarm:clock euro pointed us to Aito Technologies getting another injection of VC capital, this time from Creandum to fuel its international growth.

I’ve heard from relatively reliable sources that Aito is definitely onto something big and good here. Initial demand for the product/software they are building is incredibly good. The software as far as I’m informed, is a tool to analyse network traffic and thus serve as an indicator for operators to streamline their services. For example, as funny as it sounds - not many operators know the percentage of successfully delivered MMS messages in their networks and as far as I know, Aito’s software will help with these sort of problems.