Grey Area, a small startup operating in stealth mode, is gearing up to change the cityscape for everybody. I get back to how they are going to do this later in the post, but the story of how this startup came to be is equally interesting.
I first met the guys back in OpenCoffee Helsinki what must be more than a year ago. I remember Mikko Hämäläinen telling me how they were exploring possibilities to set up a company with two of his friends, Andreas Karlsson and Teemu Tuulari, from Ericsson. All three had started at Ericsson in 2003-2004 and met when they were put in the small team with the task of developing an Ericsson network node.
Asmo Halinen, one of the original three Apaja founders, officially announced that he’s taking the over the CEO role at One Did It. One Did It is a Finnish startup specialized in eco-social networking.
Halinen has been busy after his announcement to leave Apaja. I still can’t make out what One Did Its business model is (previous blog post here), but there probably is one based on the rather long line of investors they have, which include a digital marketing agency Nitro FX, a govenment investment vehicle Veraventure, Kari Rannila, Vesa Puttonen and Esko Reininpoika Alanko.
In addition to acting as a CEO of One Did It, Halinen has also joined to Board of Direcotors or as an Advisory Board member (he does not specify which) to Grey Area Labs and Eat.fi. Both of these startups, Great Area Labs and Eat.fi, are good choices for Halinen. The guys at Grey Area Labs just quit their jobs at Ericsson and decided to start working on their passion, alternative reality games with a serious twist. Similarly, Eat.fi is only getting better. Just recently the leading Finnish restaurant site added an option to filter for vegetarian and children friendly restaurants in Helsinki. Eat.fi is a prime example of a web service done right and for example Dopplr should put in on their site as the first thing you see when you add a trip to Helsinki.
If this would not be enough, Halinen has also joined the Board of Directors at BrainAlliance, A Finnish PHP software house, along with Taneli Tikka, who is also very active on the Board level in Finnish startups.
Eat.fi, the Helsinki based restaurant review site, has shown strong traction in the last months, according to their blog. Although the figures aren’t that high compared to international web services, 10k uniques a week is relatively good – especialy if you look at the growth rate, they have doubled the uniques in a matter of 2 months.
The uniques have been increasing fairly steadily after they redesigned their site and made the service a lot more usable with new features. The biggest obstacles to overcome in my opinion is for them to create a truly scalable service that does not require them to manually insert all restaurants in each city. The service itself has also a lot of potential to grow in other terms for example, adding menus on to the site and enabling users to specifically rate individual foods – something not many restaurant review sites do.
Eat.fi has also attracted other kind of traction. Tina Aspiala, the founder of the company has taken Asmo Halinen of Apaja fame on board as an advisor. Asmo has also joined the ranks of Grey Area as an advisor.
Grey Area, a small startup operating in stealth mode, is gearing up to change the cityscape for everybody. I get back to how they are going to do this later in the post, but the story of how this startup came to be is equally interesting.
Asmo Halinen
Eat.fi, the Helsinki based restaurant review site, has shown strong traction in the last months, 
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