Campalyst Announces Seed Funding, New Integrations
Campalyst has raised a seed round of funding from Amsterdam-based venture capital firm HENQ. The size of the round was not disclosed. Campalyst creates return-on-investment analytics for social media marketing campaigns. About one year and a day ago, the company first came out of Garage48 with the idea of measuring conversions from Facebook pages, and has grown quickly to a become an full-service social media monitoring service. From Garage48, the company progressed though StartupSauna, and Seedcamp as it tacked on new features and new ROI analytics to measure.
EasyRider wins Garage48 Music
Garage48 Music took place in Tallinn last weekend. 20 ideas were pitched, and 14 gathered the necessary team behind them to take off. The majority of the ideas were focused on music and entertainment, and on the judges panel was Chris Douridas, a 2-time Grammy nominated music supervisor.
The winner, EasyRider, is a tool for festival and event organizers and promoters who deal with musicians. The service bills itself as, "The easiest and fastest way to create, manage, and share your band's technical riders.
Garage48 Focuses On Music Together With Tallinn Music Week
The Estonia based Garage48 is organising a music focused event in a couple of weeks in Tallinn together with the Tallinn Music Week. The event is held on the weekend between the 23rd and 25th of this month. Registration ends a week early on Sunday the 18th. The goal of the event is to make people focus on the potential of good services in the entertainment space.
Jüri Kaljundi, one of the people behind the successful events tells us "music and entertainment is our first try to do industry-specific events. We believe that the actual business problems are among the common people, non-tech crowds. Technology is just an enabler, so we want more people from other areas of life to come to the events to get their ideas executed. Focusing on real life problems is very important."
Co-founder of Campalyst Dalia Lasaite On Women In Entrepreneurship
As a woman in the startup community, Dalia Lasaite says she hasn't encountered any serious obstacles due to her gender, and even suggests the opposite: "Starting a company is always hard, whoever you are. But I find that women actually get more visibility and stand out easier as the tech community is made of men - so this is the advantage of being a woman entrepreneur."
Lasaite got into entrepreneurship in 2007, right after finishing her studies. After a bit of brainstorming co-founded the ride sharing website Geogoer, which seems to have closed down. At this time she was only working on the project part-time while simultaneously starting to work at an asset management company. But after playing around with that project for a while, the team got an investment from the Difference Engine accelerator, and Lasaite quit her corporate job.
Powered By The #EstonianMafia
ArcticEvening Tallinn was held yesterday in the great premises of Technopolis Ülemiste. Around 100 people gathered to the event to both network and listen to a top notch presentation by William Wolfram of DealDash on startup metrics. Technopolis Ülemiste had also sponsored some snacks and drinks at the venue, which naturally helped break the ice. Wolfram gave a very packed and high quality presentation on how DealDash sees and works with metrics. What made it all the better was the personal experience he was able to share in also where they went wrong.
We Are Giving Out Four Tickets To Arctic15 At ArcticEvening Tallinn
ArcticEvening Tallinn will be organised in just a few weeks. We've already registered about 3/4 of the tickets (overall availability is 120 tickets), but there are still some spots left for those who would want to attend. Now there's one more reason to attend - we will be giving out four free tickets to our Arctic15 event organised 17th and 18th of October. These tickets aren't the traditional one day tickets, but will actually get you into the exclusive first day of the conference. The tickets will be drawn between all those who attend the event (registration isn't enough). We will give more details on how this works by e-mail to those signed up.
Our event in Tallinn is themed around startup metrics and we have William Wolfram of DealDash share his experience how his company goes about metrics. If you want some sneak peak into how they think, listen to our audio interview with him on Unfair Advantage.
Garage48's 2011 Infographic
Garage48 from Estonia had a growing year of events and other activities to keep it busy. The non-profit organisation organised events in eight countries, on two continents. I participated in their Helsinki event almost a year ago. Here's our post on it with a couple of separate updates.
WeatherMe Makes Weather Forecasting More Localized
Weather news can be of immense value, but with my personal experience with weather applications, I find them a bit difficult to trust. Firstly they aren’t very accurate, and secondly they are more for general areas than specific locations. I guess my complaint is that you can’t really be in control of receiving notifications and alerts based on your specifications. WeatherMe is one weather forecast and alert service that keeps customization at its core.
The startup was launched at the Garage48 Tartu and promises to generate accurate weather model for the users. The service relies on providing users with notifications when the weather in their vicinity reaches a certain condition. These notifications are sent in a time frame of 2-24 hours in advance, giving you ample time to react to changes in the weather. As mentioned, most of us already rely on the existing weather forecasts, but those aren’t short term. With WeatherMe you have that option to be as specific as you want, and to be notified whenever you want.
Updates From The Latest Garage48
Twenty-five teams came together at the latest Garage48 hackathon in Riga, where the focus this season was primarily on mobile apps. Of the 25 teams, 13 were able to prototype an app, and last Friday the teams presented a variety of interesting projects. The winner of Garage48 and the audience favorite was Mustache Ninja, who put together a location-based Pacman type game that uses the streets around you.
Qminder Becomes The Second Garage48 Startup To Join Seedcamp
Garage48 Tartu winner Qminder became part of the Seedcamp family last week after winning a Mini Seedcamp event in Prague. Qminder is the second team from the 48-hour hackathon to join the prestigious startup accelerator program in a short period of time.
Ordimo Is Your Fast Lane For Food Orders
Garage48 is about being quick, efficient and productive in the shortest possible time. You have a problem that needs a solution and all you have are a mere 48 hours or so to deliver a prototype. I think that is exactly the reason why many ideas springing from the event are about being quick and effective and “to wait” just seems a bit too alien for each. That’s exactly what Ordimo thought when it found the “wait” in waitress and thought about removing it altogether.
The startup launched at the Garage back in January is about providing a new take on self service for restaurants and bars. What Ordimo does is that it transforms your smartphone into a mobile waitress, where customers can order their items before they enter the restaurant. This translates to a quicker serving and more satisfied customers who don’t have to wait in line to place their orders.
Qminder Wins Garage48 Tartu
Last weekend, another 48-hour developing competition was held in Tartu. The Garage48 event saw lots of interesting projects being pitched, planned and completed. Yet again, looking at the summary of the projects - Garage48's attendants showed they have what it takes to become an entrepreneur. Not only are the ideas worthwhile executing, some of them managed to gain traction over the weekend already.
From Garage48 to StartupSauna to Mini Seedcamp NY: The Story Of Campalyst
Campalyst is a new start-up that developed analytics to measure real return-on-investment from social media campaigns, starting with Facebook. It is a truly Baltic company started in Riga with the team members from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. After less than four months of existence, Campalyst has shown an impressive growth: they went from building a prototype in 48 hours to winning StartupSauna to being among the finalists of Mini Seedcamp New York. We talked with two of the founders, Dalia Lasaite and Jevgenijs Kazanins, to learn the full story of Campalyst and find out how things are going for the company right now.
The Four Favorite Teams From Last Weekend's Garage48 Tallinn Event
While Garage48 is still a little under a month away from the African Safari, the event at Tallinn last weekend has had the curtains dropped. The event saw over 120 people working hard in 18 teams to give their ideas a touch of reality. Garage48 is a weekend type company development project, where people of different crafts get together to work on projects for the duration of 48 hours. After the weekend, teams present their results in front of an audience.
Garage48 Goes Africa Times 5!
We at ArcticStartup heart the Garage48 event for all the rush and enthusiasm that comes forth in the 48 hours of pure innovation. But the weather at the events here in the Nordics and Baltics was perhaps just a bit too cold and needed some equatorial treatment, which is exactly the treatment Garage48 will be getting. Garage48 has announced that they will be holding 5 events in Africa.
Planify: Plan, Share And Sell Your Travel Trips
Organizing a travel plan or a trip is a definite nightmare. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why we are always seeing one service after another attempt at tackling the problem. Planify is one more that emerged as the winner of the Garage48 Riga. The idea? It emerged from need as the Silver Hage, Co-founder of Planify made plans for his Tokyo trip and couldn’t find any tool useful enough. This led to the creation of Planify.
Blow'em Now Available For iOS Devices
Ever thought about getting even with someone, but never had the courage to do so? There's a little iPhone app now on the market that might help you in this. The game is called Blow'em and it was started as a Garage48 project in Helsinki, Finland in January. It offers users a great way to have fun with its Perverted Candle, Retarded Tomato, Deep Throat or the Angry Egg. The instructions are simple; point, select your weapon and shoot. That’s it, you don’t really need a user guide on this do you?
Garage48 This Weekend In Riga, Many More To Follow
Garage48 is one of those startup weekend type events, where people gather together for about 48 hours and develop something that could potentially be founded into a startup. The concept isn't all that old, but the people behind it have been active. This weekend Garage48 will take place in Riga and in the coming months, a lot of other cities will also see a Garage48 event take place. In April (15th-17th), Garage48 will take place in Tallinn, at the end of August in Tartu. Later in the year Garage48 will most likely be visiting Stockholm and Helsinki as well. Additionally, the team will have 5 events in Africa this year.
Montroller: Control All Things Controllable With Your Smartphone
One major issue with a smartphone lover is that of heading into a block with a particular device. Which is one major reason why some hardcore smartphone addicts are found switching from device to another or always looking for a way add an extra functionality to utilize the power of the device. There has to be something more substantial that we must be able to do with smartphones, like the iPhone, Android based devices or those from Nokia. That’s what folks at Montroller think.
Toggl Is A Testbed for Sprint48, A Garage48 Kind Of Service Development Method
Toggl is an Estonian online service that enables freelancers to jot down their hours for client projects. The service has more than 15 million hours logged so far. A premium version of the service was launched in 2008 and in 2010 the service reached break even. With about 9500 daily users and about 1600 of them paying, Toggl is onto a steady, but strong growth path. Toggls is also a testbed for a Garage48 type of service development initiative by Mooncascade called Sprint48. Mooncascade is an Estonian software development company, where as Sprint48 is a new kind of web development process where Mooncascade will try to create concrete results in mere 48 hours.
Last Weekend's Experience Called Garage48
Last weekend I took part in a 48-hour event called Garage48. Garage48 is an intensive hackathon where on the final day teams gather to pitch their results. While we've written about these and similar kinds of events before, I thought I should take part this time round to see what the atmosphere is "on the ground". I had to take a day's rest and think about the whole experience and what it means before writing about it.
Garage48 HKI - Live Updates Through The Weekend
Garage48 Helsinki will take place this weekend in the Aalto Venture Garage, where about a hundred enthusiasts will compete in a friendly manner to build the best business/product -combination in only 48 hours. We'll be bringing you updates through out the weekend and they will be added to this post. Garage48 has originated from Estonia and already two such events have been organised. The reason why Garage48 is worth following so widely, is the cross border effect it has - Estonians, Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians as well as some from the US and UK, all coming together for a weekend to build something great.
Garage48 Hits Helsinki This Weekend
Garage48 is an Estonian originated concept that is building up momentum nicely in the Nordics and Baltics. The event has been organised in Tallinn and Tartu previously and Helsinki will be its first international debut. Not a bad way to go abroad at all. Garage48 has had to make more tickets available a couple of times as people have been wanting to participate. The event will feature 51 Finns, 41 Estonians, 11 Latvians and a couple of individuals from the UK and USA participating in a 48 hour product development competition.
Garage48 Opens A Co-Working Space In Tallinn
Garage48 is a boot camp style iniative to build new web services in just 48 hours. The concept has been a roaring success in Estonia, where it was started last year. This week, Garage48 announced that they'll be opening a co-working space in Tallinn in December for all entrepreneurs to use. Not only is Garage48 opening a co-working space in Tallinn, they are also organising one of their boot camp style weekend events in Helsinki in January in co-operation with AaltoES. I talked to Ragnar Sass, one of the people behind the concept and what Garage48 HUB will be like when it opens.
Blurt.at Launches Blog Widget
Blurt.at is another of the Garage48 projects that were launched over the duration of 48 hours a few weeks back. They haven't stopped with their development and are moving full steam ahead with the idea. Blurt.at is a new way to create polls and comment on them. The project team behind the idea, according to Garage48 website, was Anu Viks, Sander Jahilo, Maret Kruve, Priit Salumaa, Asko Seeba, Meelis Kaldalu, Jaan Tallinn (as well as Ahti Heinla and Jaen Saul were helping out).
Nevermind Finland: Here's Estonia! [Part 1/3]
Two weeks ago, we decided to drive to the Baltics together with people from AaltoVG, to promote the Finnish startup scene, find great stories, and build stronger collaboration with the region. There is too little interaction between the Baltics. Each country stands as a standalone, tiny market, forced to internationalize to make a difference. We believe that if we can collaborate more with our nearby neighbors, great things will happen! This is my first article in a series of posts about the Baltics.
ArcticStartup And AaltoVG Go Baltics!
This is an exciting week for the Nordic startup scene: each country has seen a boom in startup activity during the recent months, so we have decided to organize a road trip together with AaltoVG, in an effort to bring the community closer.
The idea is to meet with the actors of each country, find new and interesting startup stories, potential partners, and friends!
Garage48 Launches 16 Startups
A week ago, Tallinn hosted one very interesting startup event, Garage 48. Garage48 is an event organised by Estonian Startup Leaders Club. The event's title hints at the concept. The event is organised over a 48 hour period during which the participants build and launch companies. A week ago, 16 startups were launched as a result of the 48 hour period.
