The week’s been way too busy and apologies for the lack of writing from me. However, I’ve been following the scene and been meeting people over lunch from the startup scene. I’ve heard a few interesting facts this week that I’d like to share with the readers here.

• NewsToScreen has been growing fast despite my earlier bashing. NewsToScreen is an aggregator of different feeds and activities that can be used to transmit information to large crowds. They now have 80 000 members and transmit 5-10% of Finnish online video and approximately 66% of Finnish commercial video. I also talked to their founder and CEO Marko Parkkinen about the usage of the product and he confirmed that they have slightly shifted the focus and are taking different approaches in capitalising it.
• RunToShop, the social shopping recommendation service, now has over 400 partners. We previously wrote about 150 partners in their network so the growth has been nice. Despite still having a long way to go to successfully integrate the service with these partners I’m glad to see companies also focusing on the commercialisation of their innovation.
• The Deloitte Fast 50/500 Finland list for 2008 is out. A familiar company is topping the list with a growth percentage of close to 3000% - Futurice. Futurice is a web and mobile production powerhouse located in Helsinki, Finland. Second on the list is OpenBit, a mobile payment provider we have covered previously as well.

I’ll do some more digging into the Deloitte’s list as there are a lot of interesting companies that need to be uncovered in terms of interviews.

Openbit, a Finnish Tampere based provider of on-device payment and DRM solutions for mobile applications, and Tanla Solutions, Indian telecommunications software and services provider have announced today that Tanla buys 85 % of Openbit for $US 15.81M / EUR 10.2M in cash. The valuation is therefore at EUR 12M, 23.5 times Openbit’s EBITDA (EUR 0.51M) from the fiscal year 2007.

The remaining 15% is still owned by the management and will be acquired by Tanla in two parts, 5% after the first year and 10% after the second. Openbit has been one of the fastest growing companies in Finland in terms of revenue growth, ranking third in the Deloitte’s Finnish Technology Fast 50 list of 2007.

Seems like a potentially very good match for both companies. Openbit should be able to expand their channels and partners faster in Asia and North America, and Tanla gets extensive foothold in Europe.
Congrats to Openbit for the work well done so far!

See Tanla’s press release (PDF) for more information.

Iprbox Oy, founded in 2006, offers a variety of different intellectual property rights services to help companies better utilize IPR as part of their business and internationalization operations, as well as maximizing the value of IPR.
Potential customers include inventors, researchers, research institutes, business incubators, high-growth companies, and licensing partners.

According to the company it’s the first time a single company can offer all IPR services required for commercial success. It has introduced IPR360°® service concept for helping firms to integrate IPR with core business operations. Iprbox offering includes defining IPR strategies and processes, screening markets and competitors, helping with registering patents and trademarks, and controlling and liquidating licenses. The company also offers an IPR marketplace bringing together IP owners and potential purchasers, and offers help in different kinds of new venture spin-offs.

While Iprbox claims that IPRs are “the single most important investment for high-growth companies, as intellectual capital represents around 80 percent of their value”, it naturally depends greatly on the business whether intellectual capital should or could be protected. Furthermore, the management of the fastest growing Finnish companies consider the most valuable intellectual capital to be the people (quite precisely in my opinion). For perspective, though, one has to also notice 7 of those top 10 companies are in the business of software, as opposed to selling physical products where it’s possible to sometimes build virtual monopolies around the technology (while software patents of course don’t qualify ‘as such’). Nevertheless, IPR strategy is an important part of business as well, and the IPR landscape should be investigated and risks identified beforehand when entering new markets.

Open Source service company Nomovok is the number one in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list of 2007. The list ranks firms based on the revenue growth over the past five years (having at least 5 years of operations is thus one of the prerequisites). The revenue growth of Novomok over the past 5 years has been impressively over 2300 %. Only a bit behind comes Bluetooth technology provider Bluegiga Technologies. Third is Openbit, provider of mobile DRM solutions, with 1636 percent growth.

Last year’s first Sulake and third Digium have slightly dropped, although still in top 10. The 2006 number two Cidercone was just recently acquired by OMX-listed Ixonos.

Deloitte’s Tuomo Salmi, partner, Services, describes that according to the accompanying qualitative study the most critical factors affecting success have been concentrating on the core business, committing the personnel, and leadership-related factors, as seen by the management of the companies. Having and being able to keep skillful and entrepreneur-minded people was deemed even more important than customer accounts.

Deloitte Technology Fast 50 competition in Finland is arranged in cooperation with Kauppalehti, The Finnish Venture Capital Association, The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association, and Tekes. Top companies will automatically participate in EMEA Fast 500 competition. Last year Sulake positioned 12th in the EMEA Fast list with 8095 % growth, while Cidercone was 65th with growth of 2086 %.

This might implicate that this year’s top Finnish growth companies may not position anywhere in top 50 in EMEA. More arrogant and audacious growth entrepreneurs needed?