Eat.fi Acquired By MTV Media
Eat.fi, the Finnish restaurant search and review site, was acquired by MTV Media on Monday. MTV, one of the largest media corporations in Finland, plans to combine Eat.fi with its own food related site, Makuja, in hopes of building the leading online food and restaurant service in Finland.
Rumor has it that Eat.fi was in acquisition talks with an unnamed Finnish media company already in 2009, but the deal reportedly fell through due to differences in Eat.fi's valuation. No figures were disclosed on yesterday’s deal.
Eat.fi Partners With Offerium To Offer Cheaper Meals
The Finnish restaurant site Eat.fi has partnered with Offerium, a Finnish Groupon-kind flash sales site, to offer diners cheaper meals. People looking for places to go out for dinner/lunch on Eat.fi will be now able to spot those restaurants with offers with a little "deal"-icon next to their name. I haven't bought yet anything on Offerium, but putting the restaurant deals into a need based context fits in perfectly and I'm guessing will result in more people finding Offerium as well.
What Does Facebook's New API Mean For Eat.fi And How Foursquare Could Help
Eat.fi is hands down one the best designed Finnish webservices, if not the best. I love it and use it weekly, but can't keep thinking it could be so much more.
Facebook just yesterday released its new API in its developer conference f8. This is really big news for everybody. Much bigger than we can yet grasp. With their new really(!) big vision, Facebook will now compete with Google in being the one who parses the web together for the rest of us. Google does it with hyperlinks. Facebook will try to do better job with the meta data from our social relationships. That aside for a moment, let's look at what this announcement could mean for Eat.fi in the short term.
Just as with Yelp, who was Facebook's partner at the f8 launch and have integrated their service to Facebook API, Eat.fi could gain similar benefits by simply integrating its service with the Facebook API. This would surely channel more traffic to Eat.fi as it would let people see who else likes the same restaurants (or even meals) that they do and let the users share the restaurant reviews more easily to their activity feed on their Facebook profile. The Facebook integration would help Eat.fi to get more traffic, but I believe they could do much more.
Investments And Acquisitions You Did Not Know About
I managed to get a fresh load of stories regarding the Finnish startup scene yesterday. While the companies themselves have not made too much noise about these, they are valid to break to keep the system as transparent as possible. There are 3 investment deals and one acquisition offer that was did not go down.
To begin with, we have Muxlim. The world's largest online network for Muslims. They have about 200 000 registered users at the moment. The story is that they have recently closed a round of financing from Europe, possibly UK. There is no word on the size of the round, nor who the investors are but this is what we're hearing from the street.
Eat.fi Finally Rolls Out Its Business Model
Eat.fi, a Finnish website that focuses on restaurant search and reviews, finally rolls out its business model after building the high quality site and community for three years. The company, quite predictably, has chosen to let the restaurant owners advertise their lunch time specials and other offers.
Even though you could argue that is has taken way too long for the founder Tina Aspiala to monetize the site, it might have been worth the wait. Eat.fi is one of the only Finnish sites that I use regularly when checking out new restaurants and especially while making lunch and dinner meetings. To get an idea of the popularity of the site, Eat.fi iPhone app topped the Finnish App Store and boasts currently about 12,000 downloads (and 2,000 Ovi Store downloads).
Before It Was About Playing In A Band, Now It's About Being An Entrepreneur
Grand One 2009, a competition for the Finnish new media scene to showcase their year’s work, came and went. As we wrote earlier on, we got an invitation to partner with Grand One since they want to push the event forward every year and be on the pulse of all things digital, which is nothing short of admirable. This time being on the pulse meant to invite startups to the competition. This was the first time ever! If someone has missed (or ignored) the fact that startups have lately entred the mainstream hear in the Northern Europe and become the cool thing to do, now even they have to recognize the shift: When the marketing scene comes knocking on the door it means you have just hit the mainstreet.
Asmo Halinen Officially Announcing The Move To One Did It
Asmo Halinen, one of the original three Apaja founders, officially announced that he's taking the over the CEO role at One Did It. One Did It is a Finnish startup specialized in eco-social networking.
Halinen has been busy after his announcement to leave Apaja. I still can't make out what One Did Its business model is (previous blog post here), but there probably is one based on the rather long line of investors they have, which include a digital marketing agency Nitro FX, a govenment investment vehicle Veraventure, Kari Rannila, Vesa Puttonen and Esko Reininpoika Alanko.
In addition to acting as a CEO of One Did It, Halinen has also joined to Board of Direcotors or as an Advisory Board member (he does not specify which) to Grey Area Labs and Eat.fi. Both of these startups, Great Area Labs and Eat.fi, are good choices for Halinen. The guys at Grey Area Labs just quit their jobs at Ericsson and decided to start working on their passion, alternative reality games with a serious twist. Similarly, Eat.fi is only getting better. Just recently the leading Finnish restaurant site added an option to filter for vegetarian and children friendly restaurants in Helsinki. Eat.fi is a prime example of a web service done right and for example Dopplr should put in on their site as the first thing you see when you add a trip to Helsinki.
If this would not be enough, Halinen has also joined the Board of Directors at BrainAlliance, A Finnish PHP software house, along with Taneli Tikka, who is also very active on the Board level in Finnish startups.
Eat.fi Shows Strong Traction in Visitors
Eat.fi, the Helsinki based restaurant review site, has shown strong traction in the last months, according to their blog. Although the figures aren't that high compared to international web services, 10k uniques a week is relatively good - especialy if you look at the growth rate, they have doubled the uniques in a matter of 2 months.
Oindex.fi statistics for Eat.fi
The uniques have been increasing fairly steadily after they redesigned their site and made the service a lot more usable with new features. The biggest obstacles to overcome in my opinion is for them to create a truly scalable service that does not require them to manually insert all restaurants in each city. The service itself has also a lot of potential to grow in other terms for example, adding menus on to the site and enabling users to specifically rate individual foods - something not many restaurant review sites do.
Eat.fi has also attracted other kind of traction. Tina Aspiala, the founder of the company has taken Asmo Halinen of Apaja fame on board as an advisor. Asmo has also joined the ranks of Grey Area as an advisor.
Twitter Moving Towards Jaiku?
The latest storm from the world of Nordic microblogging got me thinking a lot about Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, the microblogging in general and the Open Stack that's trying to open up the silos, not just in microblogging, but the social web in large. We are looking into reaching the point where, just as Jyri Engeström put it, "[n]o single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform"
Now Many have realized that Twitter, which was competing head on with Jaiku and has won that race for now, should allow the service to develop towards what Jaiku did right when it launched, namely enable conversations. I believe those two services are different and perhaps should remain so and just talk to each other via open standards such as XMPP or an XMPP equivalent. Therefore I am not advocating Twitter becoming more Jaiku-like. Twitter should have its own future trajectory. What I am very strongly advocating is for the heavy users of FriendFeed and Twitter to start using Jaiku, the one service that does what services and apps using Twitter API are increasingly trying to do. TweeTree being the most recent example of that. Do I have a vested intrested in this? You can bet on it! I strongly believe Jaiku is a better service to engage in meaningful conversations and I am in Jaiku, but many people I would like to converse with are not.
Below Chris Messina below outlines his vision on where he sees activity streams going. He notes that activity streams need a "[l]ocation and context attached to or as attributes of social objects that are being created" and not just a lonely tweet which is not connected to anything. As Chris mentions in the video below [8min 27 sec into it], this is where Jaiku started from. Now we just need to get Google to realize the value it has in Jaiku and let Jyri & Co. to develop Jaiku further by incorporating filtering (by actor, action, social object, place, time, etc.), fast feed fetching, opening it up for the world to use and develop and voilá. Compare this to the #hashtags, which is about the only thing you can use to put your Tweet into a relevant context. This is really nothing but a poor hack compared to what Jaiku already can do for the conversations.
Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.
Since we are not yet living in a world where all the silos are broken and all the services can talk to each other, I think the Silicon Valley digerati should pull their heads from the California sand, see beyond their Valley bubble and give (yet again) Jaiku collectively a try to realize its value instead of complaining how the Twitter-cum-Jaiku attempts don't work. Yes it's closed, but the invitations are unlimited and I'm sure most of the microblogging heavy users already have an account. If not, I will personally send an invitation to anyone asking for one (you can email me at ville [at] arcticstartup.com). Twitter has the critical mass, but Jaiku still kicks its ass any day as a service to have meaningful conversations in. Since Twitter is not going to become Jaiku any time soon we all should give Jaiku another try. Struggling with two services is a drag, but things are changing fast, and once the users are there, Jaiku and Twitter can complement each other until the two services can openly talk to each other - or until a better option emerges.
Jaiku needs its critical mass and it needs to grow to become truly relevant to link people globally. I am advocating people to move there not only because I or some other people are there, but for the purposes of having conversations, it is a far better service than Twitter or FriendFeed. We should see and use the two services as the different services that they are, just as Eat.fi's founder @Spongefile commented here:
Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.
So how about it Scoble? While we wait for the silos to come down, shall I send you a Jaiku invite?
Eat.fi Down For Launch Of New Site
Eat.fi, the Finnish based webservice for restaurant reviews is currently down for the launch of their new site. Tina Aspiala announced today on Jaiku the downtime of the service for a few days. We've previously covered eat.fi in July about the new service they had been testing back then.
We haven't heard any new big features coming out with the service so I'm looking forwards to a fairly clean, bug-free release in a few days as they've had about 2 months to fine tune it. You're able to see the new site through beta.eat.fi (username: eat / password: better). Please do not add any data there, as the database is not in sync to the new site.
Eat.fi about to get revamped
Eat.fi, a Finnish website that let's its users rate restaurants and bars and show which ones are open at a given time, is about to get a serious face lift. The folks at Eat.fi emphasize that the new site is in Beta and unlike Google's Betas this Beta is really just to test out the functionality, thus all the reviews should still be written to the old site or they will disappear when the new site goes live.
The new site is build on Google maps and the new mashup has really improved the user experience. The site is easier to use and more intuitive from the get go. The functionality has also improved significantly. The website has a new bar on the right hand side of the screen which is quite handy showing the top rated restaurants which are open at a given moment. The 'top rated' bar of course changes based on your query, thus filtering out for example all the other venues except 'Asian food' if that's what you're after.
The smart folks at Eat.fi figured out they could use Jaiku's active user base to get feedback for their Beta (here). This is an ingenious and many times very effective way to get feedback for your web service due to the vocal yet colorful user base at Jaiku, thus giving you passionate opinions across the board from professional designers and user experience geeks to your average Joe.
The new Beta site and activity at Eat.fi leaves me wondering if or rather when they are taking the concept abroad. It turns out that the same Jaiku thread partly answers that one as well:
[...]
Looks really interesting. Like to see this worldwide. A category of food/reastaurant that is really important to many is Vegetarian (though I'm a raging carnivore myself)
