Last Friday I announced the fastest growing company in Finland according to Deloitte and I decided to dig a little more into these companies in terms of finances. So the breakdown is as follows: Company rank on the Deloitte list (2008), company name, growth percentage (from 2003 to 2007), turnover in 2007 (000’s €), turnover in 2003 (000’s €).

1. Futurice, 2885%, 3313, 111.
2. Openbit, 2521%, (not reported), 391.
3. Nomovok Oy, 2367%, 2319, 59.
4. Endero Oy, 1775%, 10029, 312.
5. Directa Oy, 1734%, (not reported), 166.
6. Heeros Systems Oy, 1566%, 1233, (not reported).
7. Vilant Systems Oy, 1238%, 1258, 94.
8. Bluegiga Technologies Oy, 1192%, 4340, 336.
9. Reaktor Innovations Oy, 1102%, 9255, 770.
10. Nebula Oy, 1016%, 9310, 848.

If you look at this list, the companies in general are still very small by international standards. Growing your company over a 5 year period from under a 100k to a few million should be on everyone’s list and with a proper team executing it - very doable. I’m gonna get hammered here again, but I do believe that it’s not that difficult up to a certain point. The real difficulty begins when you think of these companies growing from the 5-to-10 million revenues into 100-200 million revenues. How is that done? Now that’s a bigger and tougher question.

I was unable to find any comparative figures for other Baltic countries nor the Nordics, but the first company from this geographical setting in the Central European list is Webmedia group from Estonia with a growth percentage of 770.

The week’s been way too busy and apologies for the lack of writing from me. However, I’ve been following the scene and been meeting people over lunch from the startup scene. I’ve heard a few interesting facts this week that I’d like to share with the readers here.

• NewsToScreen has been growing fast despite my earlier bashing. NewsToScreen is an aggregator of different feeds and activities that can be used to transmit information to large crowds. They now have 80 000 members and transmit 5-10% of Finnish online video and approximately 66% of Finnish commercial video. I also talked to their founder and CEO Marko Parkkinen about the usage of the product and he confirmed that they have slightly shifted the focus and are taking different approaches in capitalising it.
• RunToShop, the social shopping recommendation service, now has over 400 partners. We previously wrote about 150 partners in their network so the growth has been nice. Despite still having a long way to go to successfully integrate the service with these partners I’m glad to see companies also focusing on the commercialisation of their innovation.
• The Deloitte Fast 50/500 Finland list for 2008 is out. A familiar company is topping the list with a growth percentage of close to 3000% - Futurice. Futurice is a web and mobile production powerhouse located in Helsinki, Finland. Second on the list is OpenBit, a mobile payment provider we have covered previously as well.

I’ll do some more digging into the Deloitte’s list as there are a lot of interesting companies that need to be uncovered in terms of interviews.

The largest commercial television channel MTV3 has acquired Kuvaboxi, a photo sharing service developed by Futurice - according to M&M.

The photo sharing service evolved from a mobile photo sharing product called Mobshare developed in 2005. With Mobshare, you could upload your photos to an online service to share with your closed friends, avoiding your photos getting indexed by search engines and being available to the public. Mobshare could be used with a photo blogging service called Futublog, which has now been shutdown.

Kuvaboxi joined the MTV3 portal in March 2006 and since then has become one of the most popular photo sharing sites in Finland (not counting IRC-gallery and similar type of services). Currently Kuvaboxi has over 170 000 registered users and over 5,3 million photos. Following Kuvaboxi’s ride has been close at heart as I wrote my Master’s thesis back in 2005 to Futurice on how they should market and approach mass markets with their service.

I caught sight of Jyri’s tweet on a gathering of Finnish entrepreneurs in Mission, San Francisco this coming Monday. An event co-organised by DIGIBUSINESS and Sombiz (Social Media Business Network).

Companies taking part are TripSay, Ironstar, ConnectedDay, Ideakone, Apprix, Waraamo, Ramblas, XIHA Ltd and Futurice.

Read more about the event here.