The dust has barely settled since we reported about Floob’s ending up in the deadpool on Jan 21st. Now the founding team, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, is at it again and this times its music gigs they are after.
The new startup is called GigsWiz and is founded by Lemmetty, Pekkanen and Juuso Vermasheinä who has a background in game retail business.
Lemmetty was responsible for product development and business development in the music industry at Floobs Ltd and had previously seen some of the problems in the industry and together with Pekkanen they had some ideas how to help the music industry build a better business. Vermasheinä had started the company already in the summer of 2009 but after meeting with Lemmetty and Pekkanen the three decided to start working together on a slightly different business plan. In addition to the core management team GigsWiz is building an advisory board including music industry specialists, crowdsourcing and ‘intention broadcasting experts’, which should hint on the area the company focuses on.
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I got a call from Kai Lemmetty, one of the co-founders of Floobs, that they are filing for bankruptcy either today or tomorrow. Not a very pleasant call to get by any means, as they’ve been one of the most passionate guys in the ecosystem and been doing a lot of good for the startup scene itself by helping out with organising and live streaming events. The simple reason behind the bankruptcy is that their sales did not ramp up quickly enough to support their current burn rate.
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There’s a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company – at least on the level that who’s on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve co-founder managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman. Nyman is a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
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ArcticEvening Tallinn sold out yesterday, but we decided to add another 50 tickets to the event. The evening will be a very interesting one with 3 entrepreneurs in different stages of their company explaining about the importance of marketing and how it is made successful for the company. You can read more about the event in our previous blog post, but just to sum it up we’ll have Martin Koppel from Fortumo, Petteri Koponen (former Jaiku Co-Founder) from Lifeline Ventures and Kai Lemmetty from Floobs.
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Early next month we will go to Tallinn, Estonia to hold our end-of-the-year ArcticEvening in co-operation with OpenCoffee Club Tallinn and Connect Estonia. The event will take place on 3. December and focus on startup marketing. We will hold a panel under the ‘What is marketing for startups and how to do it effectively’
Yet again, we have a solid lineup coming: An experienced serial entrepreneur that have a several exits under his belt and two young guns who are on their way to their fist big hits. See our list of panelist below and figure out who’s who.
The ticket sales are open and the price is the only right one, the tickets are free. Go get yours while they last! We will announce the venue in due course once we get them confirmed.
If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, we suggest you take a look at videos from previous events.
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I had a chat yesterday with Floobs’ Kai Lemmetty, one of the co-founders about their company and how it has evolved over the last 6 months. I have no strings attached here financially or otherwise, but I was impressed the steps this company has taken since we first wrote about them back in October 2007. The new business is a lot more service oriented and the money does not flow in from technology as the idea was before.
Along with the new transformation of their business, they have opened up a new service called Floobs WebTV. This is the new service that they will officially launch on Monday and we managed to get a sneak preview on it. The service works in such a way that there are two major segments they are targeting with this; premium users and the mass market. Premium users in this case are football teams (I’m not talking about your sunday team, these guys are after the elite of the sport – more later) and the mass market includes those who can settle for fewer features and are happier with simpler services.
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When we last time wrote about Floobs, a video streaming service, had just shifted its focus to niche audiences. Now they have build a business model to match that.
The company has made deals with the Spanish footbal teams of the highest order. For example Almeria Deportivo along with Real Betisin and Racing Santanderin are using Floobs to stream practice sessions and press announcemets. The rights for the games have of course sold for big bucks to major television channels, but everything that happens outside of those covered by the licenses are free game that Floobs wants to tap into. This means that content will be YouTube like clips that for example a football team can capture for their fans to see. Next markets Floobs is eyeing for football are Italy, Germany and France. Along with the international reach, Floobs serves also many other sports associations and teams in Finland.
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I’m writing this from The Next Web Conference at the lovely Westergasfabrik in the heart of Amsterderdam. It’s sunny and the there’s amazing people full of energy all around. This is exactly how events should be: providing an inspirational setting to bring the busy and smart individuals into the same place to bounce ideas from each other and lay those seeds for future projects. I’ve been here for a couple days now and still don’t know nor care much about the program or the content on stage. What matters to me is the people off stage. The content needs to be there to get people curious enough to come in mass, but once you hit the venue, the smartest of us ignore the talks and focus on the conversations in the halls. To mis-use the analogy for events that Adam Greenfield uses for cities: The Events Are Here For You To Use.
That’s how we at ArcticStartup see events, that’s why we take time to travel to events all around Europe and that’s why we go lengths to organize and make sure ArcticEvenings work for the people who take the time to spent the evenings with us.
Here’s some events just around corner what are likely to be worth your time and effort.
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During the weekend Red Herring, a global media company, announced 200 finalists of their annual Global Top 100 technology companies competition. The winners, top 100 out of 200, will be announced in January 14-16, 2009.
There are a few Nordic companies listed that were also on Red Herring’s Top 100 European finalists this year, including Floobs, Muxlim and Aito Technologies. Some of the new comers to the global short list include Hammerkit and Ball-IT, which was listed also in 2007.
Congratulations to the finalists and watch out for the monkey business.
There has been lively discussions of whether the many web conferences are really the most effective use of time for a startup. Similarly many people see the value in these conferences very differently, for example people from the United States tend to spend most if not all their time networking in the lobbies and hallways, at least more so than the Europeans are used to. We, the Europeans, on the other hand, tend to pay equal attention to the speakers at the stage.
At ArcticStartup we believe that meeting friends and strangers, as many as possible, is the best way to spend your time in these conferences. But that’s just us. Thus, we wanted to know what other startups think and decided to ask a group of Finnish startups, who travelled to the LeWeb with us, what they think. Here are some perspectives:
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You can follow Slush live at ArcticStartup via Floobs’ live streams. Remember, do give us insight in terms of who you’d like us to interview in the comments of our previous post about Slush. The event will kick off at 9 am EET and the video streams are courtesy of Floobs.
Slush track 1 – Entrepreneur 2.0
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Slush track 2 – Software Developer’s Gathering
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Will be great to meet all of you at Slush!
Floobs, a Finnish video streaming service, has shifted its focus to niche audiences by starting to work with local community sports associations. The service covered many sports already from the get-go, but now they have made a conscious choice to put all their weight behind the local-community-sports strategy.
The guys behind the service, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, had played around with the idea already for a while when trying to figure out how the beat the video streaming giants like Qik, Kyte.tv and Flixwagon in their own game. Now the duo has decided to go with something very Finnish: Sports!
Finland is notoriously sports-crazy: Sports has traditionally been the primary way (and many times the only way) to build success stories in the international arena. A tradition that dates back to the post-war years. Traditional or not, what a better way to beat the US video streaming giants than going where they can’t reach. Similarly by working with the amateur associations they can tap into a market that is not interesting enough for the national TV stations. Floobs has already signed many contracts with local sports associations. They have signed up football and floorball association, and planning to expand to table tennis- , skating- and horse riding associations.
The community organizers and local associations are also happy since they now have a forum for those events and games that are too small for the traditional media. They can also take the videos with them to Facebook and to MySpace with a Floobs widget.
A great way to turn what was initially a disadvantage (not located in the eye of the storm in Silicon Valley) to an advantage (going local in your own market).
MindTrek Startup Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The following companies made the cut (in alphabetical order):
Floobs
HammerKit
MahShelf
One Did It
RunToShop
Star Wreck Studios
TripSay
Zipipop
There will be eight finalist in total in the pitch competition and each startup will have 6 minute pitch to present to the high profile jury. Read more about the Startup Launchpad here.
Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!
The free bus ride for startups to the MindTrek and back from Helsinki on 8.-9.10.2008 will depart 8.10. Wednesday morning at 7.15am in fron of Kiasma (the bus has MindTrek sign on it).
The bus will head back to Helsinki on 9.10. Thursday at 4pm departing in front of Hotel Rosendahlin at Tampere. If you want to come along contact Hanne Lehtola at hanne.lehtola [at] culminatum.fi
Antti Akonniemi from Kisko Labs is also running an Ignite while we are driving up there. Antti wrote a short intro on what’s on offer for the ride up:
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? And what if your stage was an actual bus full of startup entrepreneurs? Fun of karaoke and excitement of Powerpoint combined. Sounds too much like the movie Speed? Introducing Ignite:Mobile. Join ArcticStartup’s bus trip to MindTrek and experience the first ever Ignite:Mobile.
There should still be plenty of room in the bus, so drop Hanne a mail and come along.
Three Finnish Jaiku fans have created a service called 
I first heard from 
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
