Jalbum Ab, Sweden based community for online photosharing, announced yesterday that they have closed a second round of investment with Nordic Venture Partners. This new deal brings the total raised capital up to 23 million SEK (approx $3.2M). In addition, the company’s board of directors named serial entrepreneur Andreas Sjölund as the new Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Sjölund is formerly known as co-creator of Skype and one of the first employees of KaZaA. Founder and former CEO David Ekholm will stay with the company and continue as a CTO.

Jalbum offers a mix of photo album software and social photo sharing. What separates Jalbum from other services like Flickr is that they have executable cross-platform client. Client enables the user to do basic photo editing, organizing and uploading photos. With the tool you can also design own or use some user created pre-existing skins for your album. Another appealing aspect is that you can publish your album where ever you like, not only on Jalbum.net.

Even though the downloadable clients have been regarded as somewhat painful practice, apparently it has worked for Jalbum. The client is now downloaded over two thousand times a day and over 24 million albums have been published with the software.

Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, offers Finnish companies possibility to take part in the UCLA Global Access Program once again this year. In the program MBA students of UCLA will make an international business plan for the companies as their final thesis, focusing on analysis and action plan for entering specific international markets. The program was ranked last year as the best of its kind in the US, and the bar for both participating companies and students is high. There have been yearly around 10 Finnish companies participating in GAP, including e.g. one of the fastest grown firms Openbit and Cidercone.

Eurostars is an European funding and support program specifically dedicated to creating competitive SMEs that will be leaders in their own sector. The program tries to ignite international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding for growth companies. The program is initiated by EUREKA, pan-European intergovernmental network founded to enhance competitiveness of European businesses. Eurostars offers 400 million euros of R&D funding to SME companies over a six year period. Tekes funds the Finnish participants with 5M euros per year. The next deadline for electronic submission of applications is November 21st 2008. See instructions from Tekes.

Gaming and interactive media companies can also apply for funding of 10,000-100,000 euros for producing product demos and prototypes in the Media 2007 program. The program is aimed at companies developing on and off-line interactive works. Eligible are interactive works for the computer, internet, mobile phone, games console (including handheld), and digital television, that present a substantial degree interactivity, narrative, and innovation. Companies that submit an application must have completed a previous interactive work, or an animation of at least 24 minutes, and prove that the work has been commercially distributed between January 1st 2006 and the date of submission of their application. The next deadline for applying is November 17th.

TechCrunch reports more difficult times ahead for companies looking for funding in Silicon Valley. Overall, the number of M&As have gone down, as well as IPOs and the total value of disclosed M&A deals. When in US, they report on quarterly figures, we have to settle for annual figures (which are increasingly late as well) here in Finland. Then again, our market domestically is in very early stages (the average size of a venture capital investment in 2006 was a mere 680 000 euros).

While I don’t believe the effects of the downturn have hit Europe yet, I believe they are on their way. Any comments from the field would be appreciated on this topic, like always :)

There were some very good April Fool’s jokes to be found all around the internet yesterday.

Here’s a few ones we found.

• Virgle - Virgin and Google, a 100 year plan to take over Mars.
• Google Docs - Build your own airplane.
• Arctic Startup - to be honest, not really funded just yet. It was simply too tempting not to post it after I got the idea. However, it wasn’t all that outrageous as Vierityspalkki fell for it as well as som commenters(sorry!). Is there a blog in Finland that has received proper funding yet?
• Google’s Future Search - search the web of tomorrow.

Which ones did you find?

Being the founder of the blog, I’m very very glad to announce that we have secured funding from two Finnish venture capitalists. The money will be used to hire a full time blogger and expand the services overseas to other Scandinavian countries. We are still in talks of publishing the two private investors in the near future.

We’re thrilled of course, needless to say. However, we won’t be selling this blog so the focus will be kept critical and analytical in the future as well. The blog was started in 2007 with a suspicion that I will have time to continue writing it. Soon it gathered momentum and I had sort of an obligation from the fans and companies to continue on the track I’ve chosen. With this funding I see that our efforts have not been in vain.

A huge thanks to all the readers and companies involved - I’m starting of the day with a bottle of champagne :)