Qaiku.com - YAJC (Yet Another Jaiku Clone)
Eero Holmila, CEO of Rohea showed me Qaiku.com a few weeks back when it was still in closed beta. Now it seems to have opened up to open beta and is accepting registrations. With services such as Qaiku, Twitbear, Bloggy and others being created it shows that the vacuum created by Jaiku's downtime has created a new market for microblogging. The downside for the community of course is that the whole market is now very fragmented and thus the value in each new service is lower to the individual from the network point of view.
Nevertheless, let's have a look at Qaiku.com - it's one of the best clones of Jaiku out there, I must say. It's still got some issues however. For example, you have to know Finnish to change the language at the front page to English, it's hidden there in the drop down menu. Once you sign after registration it's very similar to the Jaiku user interface. In addition to taking the best of Jaiku, there are small new improvements which in my opinion are very welcome. One of these is the possibility to see different statistics on the right hand side, along with favorite items, friends and channels, all in one place.
Furthermore, there are small tabs below the "new qaiku" -box, qaikus, stream, channels, friends, radar and favorites. Qaikus shows your new qaikus in one place where as the stream shows all qaikus and comments in one stream. Channels and friends tabs list your channels and friends, respectively. Radar is the twitter like feature where someone mentions you with @username, it will be shown on that page.
Even though the development of Qaiku is still in its very early stages, it is showing some nice results already. Qaiku lists a development list on its front page and I'm glad APIs are in the top spot. One of the reasons Twitter was able become so successful was its open attitude towards third party developers - a ton of new value added applications were built around Twitter, all increasing its usage.
The big question mark is though, will it pick up and will the tired Jaiku herds want to migrate once more to a new service now that Twitter has finally taken a relatively strong foothold in the Nordics. Remains to be seen, I haven't managed to adopt it just yet.
Rohea Acquires Mikseri.net and Kuvake.net
Rohea Oy, company run by Eero Holmila, Tomi Saarinen and Tero Heikkinen, has acquired two famous Finnish entertainment sites Mikseri.net and Kuvake.net. Mikseri.net is the most famous Finnish music site for unlabelled artists and some popular musicians have sprung up from the service to top the radio charts. Mikseri.net has more than 100 000 songs in its database. Kuvake.net has around 150 000 registered users and is a social network for young adults revolving around photos and personal communication.
Rohea acquired the sites in a 51% buyout of Reflekto Oy's shares. Reflekto Oy was founded by Arto Aaltonen who has also put his touch on other successful web properties such as the now Swedish owned and run Stardoll. Aaltonen will continue to be a share holder in Reflekto Oy and a member of its board.
Rohea has definitely taken massive leaps in becoming an interesting player in the Finnish web property market. In the past, Finnish media companies have bought out popular web destinations such as Telkku.com, an online Finnish television guide, and Blogilista.fi, a local blog directory for Finnish citizen journalists. It will be interesting to follow what the ambitions for Rohea are in developing the sites, be it a long term roadmap for development or an interesting target for a larger acquisition.
