Wayne's Coffee, China, Apple And All Things Powerkiss
Powerkiss have not released much news this year. Apart from a feature in VentureBeat in June and a mention in connection with The Europas competition, we have not heard much about the company. Just this month, however, they've been pushing out news stories like crazy. First we hear that they've partnered with Wayne's Coffee in Sweden and Finland. The coffeeshop chain's guests can now (in limited locations) ask for a Powerkiss wireless ring from the counter, plug it into their phone, put onto the Powerkiss-enabled table and recharge it during their stay. Next we hear that Powerkiss is the official wire-free provider for Santa in China. That's right: Santa Clause foundation has been hosting showrooms in China to promote Santa and other Finnish exports and Powerkiss has been one of those products. Last but not least, Powerkiss' wireless charger has been officially approved as an Apple accessory. Charging an iPhone/iPod next to you soon! Apart from all the glitz, the case of Powerkiss poses some interesting questions.
New Features At ArcticIndex
ArcticIndex, our database and a network of Nordic and Baltic startups, service providers and investors, has been growing steadily with new members. We have also added some new features together with Kisko Labs that have been asked for every now and then. Here's a little run down on what we've released and some plans where we intend to go with the service.
Some new additions to the service include:
- Availability to set a location for your company - this means you can choose a Nordic or a Baltic country from the drop down list to mark the home turf your company. This will come in handy in the future as we bring in more localised services to ArcticIndex.
- Possibility to filter out companies and people based on their nationality - this feature has been asked for quite a bit and we agree, it is only the beginning in adding better ways to drill down to the database with keywords of filters of your choice. However, now when you go to either the companies page or people page, you are able to filter the nationalities with the tool on the left hand side.
- Company specific URLs - this will help those smaller companies get more visibility through Google and other search engines. Unfortunately we can't write about every startup there is, but that is no barrier for good online visibility. Just enter your company name as it should be in the field provided and the service will render the company page URL so that it matches your company name. A small step towards better SEO.
- Company specific ArcticStartup blog posts - we matched the companies in the database together with the blog posts in ArcticStartup through tags. This means that, for example on Spotify's page you will now be able to see the latest ArcticStartup blog posts regarding Spotify. This will make the content more relevant for everyone and useful.
We have a roadmap of new features that are going to be implemented in the near future, but what are the things you'd like to see in the service - where would you like us to take it? We're going to be releasing embeddable boxes (like the one you see about Spotify and Kisko Labs below this post) to everyone in a bit, so other startup bloggers can also share the love. We've also been playing with the idea of bringing in tools for startups to take better control over their own page and start using it as a marketing platform, or a recruiting service. But now's your chance - give us your input, where would you like us to take the service and what are the features you'd like to see implemented?
Easier Mobile Development with Mobile Sorcery's MoSync
Mobile Sorcery, a Swedish startup founded in 2004, provides cross-platform mobile development tools. The company's product is called MoSync, which allows developers to write single source code and then launch their applications on a wide range of mobile devices with different platforms, like Symbian, J2ME and Windows Mobile. Mobile Sorcery has gotten SEK 1.5M (around EUR 150k or USD 211k) funding from Swedish early stage VC STING Capital last year.
The key business benefits of MoSynch are reducing porting costs and time to market. For developers MoSync offers access to many existing C/C++ libraries even when targeting J2ME and other platforms and existing device profiles of hundreds of handsets. There are some clear feature weaknesses at the moment, though, which seem to be on the list for MoSync's next release: touchscreen support and SMS sending support.
It's a tough market out there. The existing players in the mobile industry have already porting frameworks and tools in use, and there are quite a many similar competitors as well. Less established companies or those entering the market currently might find Mobile Sorcery's offering quite interesting, though, as it can enable you to focus on building the actual product or service instead of worrying about the device fragmentation. MoSynch is available at no cost for non-commercial use, commercial users will have to contact the company for getting a license.
Valve Recruiting Game Developers, Expanding To US
The Internet Agency Valve has been all quiet about its plans, but there is something going on about its operations abroad. The agency is a famous flash house in Finland, that has hogged numerous awards from many different competitions. It seems like they have something going on in the US at the moment, more specifically San Francisco.
Valve is recruiting game developers and game designers with the work being located either in Helsinki, Finland or San Francisco, US. A guess is that they are looking towards some sort of Flash based social game as they emphasize the need for "good up-to-date understanding of social networks and web-trends".
I've heard from an industry insider that the person pulling together team is a former Sulake employee. Sulake is the house behind the world famous Habbo Hotel. An educated guess is that Valve is planning something similar, with a different target market perhaps?
