A US based startup Groupon offers users deep discounts on products and services from local businesses, but you need a minimum number of users to sign-up into a deal before getting the discount. And you have only one day to do this. TechCrunch knows that Groupon is on track to generate $100 million in gross merchandise sales in 2010 of which they take a 30%-50% cut. That sounds like a real business.
Now Offerium has opened its doors in Finland. In short, Offerium is a localization of the Groupon concept. The founder of the company, Oskari Lehtonen, was running MyButler before founding Offerium. MyButler asked users what they are interested in and then negotiated two-for-the-price-of-one deals from the given advertisers for the users.
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The Finnish film industry is looking more and more lively nowadays. The international successes have not been that many in the past, compared to e.g. the Swedish movie industry focused on strong story telling, like the recent Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Saga. However, in the past few years the Finnish industry has been showing signs of much increased international ambitions. One of the most widest distributed Finnish films ever has been the animation Niko & The Way to the Stars, published in 2008.
The next big take seems now to be The Sampo, a feature length 3D stereoscopic animation film based on the Kalevala mythology by Northern Digital Film Company NDFC Helsinki, founded in 2006.
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TechCrunch reports that Spotify has signed an exclusive deal with the Finnish side of TeliaSonera. The two year deal will give TeliaSonera the exclusive rights to sell Spotify Premium in Finland. The announcement comes on the same day as TeliaSonera unveils its IPTV service that is complete with a certain selection of television channels, video rentals and Spotify Premium. Spotify signed a similar contract with the Swedish side of TeliaSonera last year and it seems that the deal was worthwhile as the Finnish side of TeliaSonera also went forward with the partnership.
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Many cleantech companies are large scale companies who aim to work with the utilities, who require millions in investments for R&D, production facilities, and rolling out their product. Quickly one forgets about the smaller players, and one of those smaller players is Tuulivoimala, who develops and markets wind and solar power solutions to private customers, and who are quite successful with their venture.
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Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.
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There’s much talk about the new Aalto University in Finland, which is what came out when Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and Helsinki University of Art and Design were molded into one school to rule them all. A lot of potential I’m sure, but wait, there’s more!
There’s a new kid in town. Many of our readers felt the waves from Aalto Entrepreneur Society last year. The student group headed by Kristo Ovaska hasn’t been resting on their laurels. Now they are coming with a new Y Combinator-esque university accelerator program, Aalto Bootcamp. It’s a five week program for students and researchers to get a feel for the joys of entrepreneurship and build a company. And yes, become a bona fide entrepreneur.
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TNS Gallup, Finnish subsidiary of the biggest industry market research expert TNS Global, has teamed up with a mobile customer experience management startup QAim to provide Finland wide tracking of mobile website usage metrics.
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We recently argued that Schibsted will give Finnish media companies a run for their money in classifieds and market places. Now Schibsted Classified Media Finland’s CEO, Jussi Lystimäki, tells us that Tori.fi just passed the one million unique visitor water mark last week. This comes from a firm who just opened their Finnish site in December.
Lystimäki further commented that they are adding tens of thousands of products a month. No doubt, this traffic has not been cheap, but it comes to show that that digital marketing is fulfilling its overdue promise and that ROI is superior compared to the traditional channels. If marketing’s focus is moving online, it should also be the media’s.
Finland is not protected from what has been happening in other markets for some time and it’s high time for the Finnish companies to wake up to reality. I might be overly optimistic here, but perhaps they may even start innovating on their own and who knows, maybe we will see quality content emerge beyond classifieds. Never have Finns been as innovative and performed as well as when the crisis has been the deepest. And deep it is.
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Scred, a house hold Finnish startup who we have used to seeing tracking debts and shared expenses is now shifting their focus towards more comprehensively managing money.
They start with managing money for different groups such as bands, indie film crews, event organisers and associations. The point is to offer a solution for communities which often don’t have good online financial applications and don’t know about accounting.
Along with the new focus the guy have also redesigned the site. Kudos to the team for learning the design tools as they went along. As Kristoffer from Scred told me “We ended up learning how to do design ourselves as we couldn’t find anyone sufficiently skilled and available to work with our bootstrapped approach”. Whether that was a good choice, I left to the user to decide herself.
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The debate on the tax code for entrepreneurs in Finland is becoming more surreal by the day. The origins of the debate lie in the tax code working group set up by the Finnish Parliament. This group, headed by Martti Hetemäki, is to devise a new tax code for areas such as capital gains, options and carried interest for VC funds. The biggest verbal and rhetorical battle is waged around the double taxing of dividends in non-listed companies.
Just as with any tax code, the more transparent and simple the tax code to understand, the better it incentivizes people to invest in a risky and uncertain future. The tax code should make it easier to see how the future plays out for businesses, not make it more difficult. All the scenarios the working group is considering are rather complex and won’t help the state of entrepreneurship in the country.
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According to the EU’s climate and energy package, Finland is expected to increase its share of renewable sources from the present 28 per cent to 38 per cent of energy production by 2020. Fulfilling this obligation require a significant increase in Finland’s use of wood-based energy, waste fuels, heat pumps, biogas and wind energy during next years.
This is no easy feat, especially given the rather modest Finnish feed in tariffs in the sector (premium tariffs and investment subsidies amont annually to roughly € 30 million). Nevertheless, the market can be potentially really really big and the need is dire. We’ve already seen some groundbreaking news surface this week in cleantech sector from the US. But make no mistake, Silicon Valley is not the only place where cleantech blossoms. Far from it. This week Wärtsilä came out with news that the world’s first solid oxide fuel cell unit, running on landfill gas, has successfully concluded the first phase of its validation programme.
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We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.
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Are Nordic countries particularly entrepreneurial? How do our societies perceive entrepreneurship as a career choice?
The perception already exists that the Nordic countries are among the most innovative in the world. The two most recent and comprehensive rankings supporting this belief came from the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Boston Consulting Group, both published in April 2009. The first of these studies ranked Japan as the most innovative country in the world, while in the second Singapore was at the top of the list. Nevertheless, Finland and Sweden ranked in the top ten for both reports, while Denmark and Norway also ranked impressively.
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Mobile Dev Camp is coming to Helsinki on February 27. The second time this event brings together all the mobile developers across the region to hear about the latest trends, meet the other mobile honchos and, well, to develop for mobile platforms.
The event was born from the realization that the hey days of mobile phone manufacturing where behind us here in Finland. Regardless, or maybe because of it, the country is full know how on mobile service development and people with skills to match.
The two themes of the evening of 27th are cross-platform development and mobile apps versus the mobile internet. A timely topics given the state of the web. This means key note presentations, workshops and a MobileDevCamp-Challenge competition. And a hell of a party if its anything like last year.
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The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.
The two online legs of an old media company are typically classifieds and editorially driven news sites. Alma’s classifieds segment, which includes such assets as the housing site Etuovi.com and jobs site Monster.fi, posted a loss of €0.7m with an €27m revenue. Sanoma doesn’t give out any information on its online classifieds.
On the online news side, Alma publishes Iltalehti.fi, the biggest website in Finland by unique visitors. Although the full year figures for the asset were not disclosed today, the Q1/09 report from April states a revenue of €1.2m, so the annual income is likely to be around the €5m mark. Given that Iltalehti.fi relies mainly on journalistic content, the site is – after full allocation of editorial costs – most likely loss-making or, if they’re lucky, posting a very small profit.
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