GigsWiz Does A Site Overhaul, Gets A Facelift
GigsWiz, a Finnish startup that empowers artists to assist their promoters in selling more concert tickets online, revamped its site layout, making it way more interactive than the previous design. Moreover, as the blog post on the announcement of the new design claims, GigsWiz will soon release a 'shell bomb behind the curtain'. While waiting for it to drop, it is worth taking a closer look at the new design.
GigsWiz Brings Its Ticketing Service To The US
GigsWiz, the Finnish startup that launched last year as what we all would call a fan and artist friendly ticketing service has sailed across the European continent into the US. The startup offers bands tools to manage and collect requests from fans, also providing them with an extensive analytics on what friends want to hear and where.
Making A Business Out Of A Surprisingly Broken Industry
GigsWiz isn't even a year old and already they have a very solid and impressive track record behind them. I talked to Joonas Pekkanen, the finance guy as their website puts it, about their newly released ticketing service that in all simplicity helps bands sell more tickets. Having had this talk, I finally realised how fundamentally broken the industry has been. One of the main concerns the promoters have had, according to Joonas, is that bands really aren't helping out in promoting their own gigs. Now think about that for a moment, you as an entrepreneur (which artists are, but most probably don't think like it) aren't helping out people to sell your own services that your produce - how crazy is that?
Sponsored: GigsWiz Is Empowering Bands And Their Fans In Concert Ticket Promotion
This post is sponsored by the Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association as part of their competition on ArcticStartup. Feel free to participate in the competition for your chance to win a free promotional article.
Live music seems to be one of the few remaining viable business models available for bands. Paul Resnikoff recently provided a quick list of top 13 lessons learned in digital music. Not only is the recorded music industry slowly but surely diminishing, it has never been a very lucrative business for most bands. There are simply too many middle-men. In the recorded music industry the average artists is estimated to earn only $23,40 for every $1000 worth of music sold.
MindTrek Launchpad Competition: Creating the next Black Swan?
Applifier is indeed on fire - they came out as the winners of the main prize (20 010€) of the MindTrek’s Launchpad competition. Press jury’s award worth 4000€ was given to Hitlantis and Intoloop took home 1000€ prize from the audience vote. General opinion among MindTrek audience and judges was that all pitches were of higher quality than in previous years.
Applifier
Jussi Laakkonen from Applifier entered the competition with a very strong case. Their cross-promotion platform helps Facebook games attract more users faster and cheaper. Applifier’s rapid expansion has awed a lot of onlookers: their userbase grew from zero to 55 million in less than 10 months (updated) 100 days and Jussi confidently claimed that the company has not stopped growing yet. The pitch was full of energy, can-do attitude and quite a bit of arrogance, all of which are definitely encouraged in any entrepreneur. Though in an earlier interview with ArcticStartup Jussi politely avoided disclosing how much revenue they are making, he made it clear that it is quite substantial. There is some scepticism around Applifier’s business model as it is easy to copy and replicate so should a different company enter the market with cheaper prices Applifier would be in trouble. Nevertheless, congratulations for winning the main prize - it sure is a sweet reward for the company’s mind-boggling success.
Mindtrek Finalists Competing For 20 010€ Announced
Mindtrek is one of the notable technology and startup oriented conferences taking place in the Nordics that startups should pay attention to. Why? For one, they are giving away 20 010 € worth of prize money to most attractive startups that match their Launchpad criteria. This year's finalists, that will be pitching at the event, have been announced. They are listed in alphabetical order below.
Last Week's Top Discussions
Just like last week, here's a look into the most talked about and shared discussion topics from our Discussions -area. We're noticing more and more people signing up and activating their old ArcticIndex accounts, so make sure you won't be left out of the conversation. Sign in here, or register an account if you haven't done so.
Latvian MoVoLo Wins The Tallinn Elevator Pitch Competition
Last week Tallinn was hot with startup and entrepreneur activity. Latvian travel search engine startup MoVoLo won the Elevator Pitch Competition organized by ArcticStartup and Tehnopol Estonia as part of the Third Annual Tallinn Conference by The International Technology Law Association and Enterprise Estonia. Also ArcticEvening Tallinn, among other startup events the same week, gathered a great crowd of entrepreneurs and likeminded people together.
GigsWiz Launches A Service For Measuring The Demand For Live Concerts
Gigswiz, a Finnish startup founded by Juuso Vermasheinä with the ex-Floobs duo Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, has just launched in Beta. The service aims to enable bands and artists to better tell where they have fans who'd be willing to come and see them play. The team hasn't wasted any time as the beta launch came just months after they started to work on the idea in this February.
The service is an analytics platform for the live music industry and it should help bands, their agents and local promoters make better informed decisions on where bands should arrange concerts and tours. GigsWiz gathers fan requests through widgets that sit on the bands’ web sites and is looking to combine it with real-time consumption data from online music services. The actual widget can sit on the band's web pages, MySpace pages and Facebook pages.
Fits.me, Lumo Research And GigsWiz Make Plugg.eu Finalists
Three Nordic and Baltic companies have made it to the group of finalists in the Plugg.eu Startups Rally 2010. In total, 116 applications were left to the competition and of these the 20 made it to the final. Plugg.eu is a very entrepreneurship focused conference organised in Brussels, Belgium and we're happy to one of their media partners promoting the event. The three companies making it into the final are Estonian Fits.me the two Finnish startups Lumo Research and GigsWiz.
