ACTA Signed By 22 EU Countries, Still A Fight To Be Ratified In EU Parliament
At a signing ceremony in Tokio, representatives from the European Union and 22 member states have signed the controversial ACTA treaty. Signatories include the UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden. The five remaining member states -- Cyprus, Germany, Estonia Netherlands and Slovakia, are also expected to sign soon.
ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a proposed international treaty that would establish standards for the enforcement of intellectual property rights to prevent digital and physical counterfeits. The treaty calls for the creation of an "ACTA committee" to make treaty amendments, for which public or judicial review are not required, according to Wikipedia. The panel would also operate outside of the scope of the World Trade Organizations or the United Nations.
Swedish App Developers Hit With A Double VAT
The ever vigilant Swedish tax authorities are reaching into the pockets of Swedish app developers with a 25% value added tax, regardless of where the final sale of the product takes place. Starting this month, apps sold in the EU through third party distributors, such as Facebook or Apple's App Store, will be taxed twice - once in Sweden and a second time at the point of sale. Swedish app developers are understandably unhappy, as the double taxation puts them under a severe competitive disadvantage in the apps market.
Nordic Venture Forum: M-Brain
Here's the third startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.
M-Brain (FI) - M-Brain is a value-added business intelligence firm operating in the media environment.
M-Brain focuses on media monitoring by delivering filtered, summarized and translated content from the Internet, both editorial and social media. They offer specific aggregated reports from more than 60 countries in 25 languages.
The company claims that it's success factor is its 'unique symbiotic combination of technology and human capital'. This stems at least partly from an in-house tech development that is funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Also, members of the R&D team continue to work part-time in the academic EU research projects bringing a wide range of knowledge to the table. M-Brain is also involved in many other EU project which are likely to bring in again new research, and many times also added funding from EU's budget. Along with a few private individual the company has investments from Veraventure.
M-Brain employs 56 in-house trained staff of which 34 work part-time. M-Brain differentiates itself from its competitors by a 'business model that is based both on human expertise and state-of-the-art search technology', where most of their competitors emphasize only one of the two.
The company does not say much about the search technology except that the quality 'results from scalability of human effort, achieved by replacing the mechanical part by technological means, themselves scalable. Query enrichment tools and interactive means of reorganizing the filtered material transform raw data into normalized information. The process and the representation are optimized with regard to human cognition and customer needs, enabling also broader survey of discourses related to an industry domain, resulting in products such as alerts, ananlyses and recognition of emergent relationships and trends' . The only bit I could find out the above I can really say I understood was that the company also employs refined data stream offered by Whitevector and Leiki's semantic filtering tools. That said, the company states that their R&D investments add up to 15% of turnover, which is a very healthy number.
How M-Brain aims to differ from the Google and other aggregators is by rewriting the content instead of only cutting and pasting or taking a bit of the article and pushing it forward in a feed. In the Nordics M-Brain needs to compete with the likes of Meltwater and Cision, but as soon as you enter for example the UK you can find bigger players such as Libraryhouse among others.
M-Brain might have a killer technology and I hope they do, since their editorial does not seem to offer terribly much value based on their blog (in Finnish) where they claim to 'observe the social media and offer perspective, opinions and experiences from the web'. The quality of the analysis throws a dark shadow of their claimed 'human expertise' which accounts for half of their product offering. For pure information aggregation this might not pose such a problem, but for those looking for in depth analysis I'd look long and hard how much bang I get for my buck.
Currently the company is looking for acquisitions from the old media that work in the media monitoring industry. This would allow M-Brain to integrate their technology to these players' organizations which are stuck in the old way of doing things, and thus pushing the efficiency and margins way up. This would also offer the company a way acquire new customers in a quick and efficient manner.
ENCA: An Acid Test For A Platform To Take Over Niche Markets
ENCA is a Finnish social network that helps people to collect and swap euro coins and other euro numismatics.
ENCA aims to be the ultimate language agnostic Social Network for coin collectors. It lets its users to swap euro coins in their own language. Say you're a Parisian coin collector who does not speak (or does not want to speak) any other language. In the future ENCA aims to translate your postings into all the 23 European languages currently spoken in the EU. Out of those 23 languages, currently the service can do only Finnish, French and English and the team is working on German and Spanish. All together ENCA has information on over 1200 coins in it's database at the moment.
One could argue that ENCA is a combination of Wikipedia, Ebay and Facobook in the world of coin collecting. It achieves to be informative in nature when acting as a Ebay like broker, but at the same time bringing in a Social Network like dimension.
ENCA is coded in PHP on symfony-framework and for database it uses MySQL.
The project was started in late 2006 by an enthusiastic Finnish coin collector, who got the idea when the euro was introduced as a common currency across the chosen EU countries. He played with the idea for years before settling for a social network around coin collecting. Once started he got quickly a strong group of business savvy people involved, namely Jarno Anttalainen (CEO at Syväjohtaminen / DeepLead Ltd.), Taneli Tikka (CEO at RunToShop, COO at Dopplr to name a few) and Ville Karkkolainen (CEO at Triventum). See more on the team here.
ENCA's business model is three fold:
- Premium services for users
- A percentage cut from the coins sold via ENCA (yet to set up).
- Targeted marketing
The market size for coin collecting is significant. There are about 2 million active euro coin collectors world wide and the value of euro-numismatic market is annually around 2 billion euro. Ebay already by itself has over one million euro items on sale each year with an estimated average price of 20 euro a piece.
Coin collecting market is promising, but the real upside is in multiplying the ENCA model and platform to another niche markets, say stamp collecting, books, wines etc. The same platform will bend easily into a any such Social Network platform by just changing the look to go with the respective niche.
ENCA's foundation is unusual and different from the way Finnish companies are normally born. As ENCA's founder did not have much money or assets to back up a major loan, nor did he want to resort to institutions such as Tekes with its high bureacratic hurdles, he needed to figure another way to raise the money. ENCA has altogether 34 investing partners and all of them fall in either Friends, Fools or Family category. One investment might not be more than one or two thousand euro, but all together they add up.
This is a financing model that's much used for example in Sweden and US and one would hope we'd see more of that in the Nordics and Baltics as well. This model enables one to do a proto of the service or product one wishes to bring to market. The proto makes the idea much more concrete and thus gives the service a lot bigger chance of getting the Business Angels or VC funds interested to further develop the product with the team.
ENCA is just out of Beta and one still needs to have an invitation from a member to join the social network. Regardless, the guys at ENCA were nice enough to give all our readers a possibility to sign up here. Happy coin collecting.
