Hammerkit Nails €1.25 M In Funding
Hammerkit, the Finnish cloud technology provider, today received €1.25 million investment from the North West Fund, joining Veraventure and Tekes as investors. The company produces scalable digital solutions for the global PR and marketing industry, and will use the funding to open a sales and development center in Liverpool.
Hammer it home, baby!
Hammerkit, the web design solution from Finland, is kicking some butt from the cloud. Their closed beta was unveiled a mere four months ago and now their service is open for everybody and running full speed. They claim to have about 1000 sites produced overall, almost 100 new users daily and nearly 8000 unique monthly hits. The company opened a new office in Liverpool in September and they recently started generating revenue.
Web Design Rebel Hammerkit Launches Closed Beta
Finnish web design solution provider Hammerkit has launched a closed beta of the new version of its cloud-based web design tool with revamped UI and features. The company's tool allows web designers to implement even complex websites on their own, without the need for help from programmers. Traditionally web designers have built mock-ups and wireframes, and then transferred these over to programmers to implement and weave in database connections etc. dynamic functionality. Hammerkit aims to revolutionize this old school fashion, allowing creativity without learning complex programming techniques - thus the company's tagline "a tool for the web punk generation."
Companies Look To Outsource Innovation And Ideas
This is a relatively interesting move and possibly a trend may follow if this picks up more momentum. A few days ago Hammerkit took to the web designers to try out their service and challenge the traditional web principles. In other words, they are trying to get a dialogue going between designers and that sort to leverage their knowledge and also market the possibilities Hammerkit has to offer them.
Hammerkit is a Finnish company based in the Techonopolis Ventures incubation pipeline. They are developing a framework for web development to leverage modules for faster web application production. With the dialogue with designers - they will be holding webcast sessions to futher untie possible knots in the co-operation and perception people may have towards their service.
This is a very wise move in my opinion for Hammerkit. I'd argue that they should be positioned more in the crowdsourcing space to tap into the knowledge of the web designers to better suit their product to their use. However, Hammerkit is not the only working in this front. A few weeks ago Nokia announced together with Technopolis a Nokia Technopolis Innovation Mill project to open up their patent registry to startups.
Plugg2009 Annouces Finalists for the Startup Pitching Competition
Plugg, the European one-day conference on celebrating of entrepreneurship and innovation announced today the 20 final nominees for the Startup Rally. Finalists also include three arctic startups: Burt and Senseboard from Sweden and Hammerkit from Finland. Plugg is taking place on March 12 in Brussels. If you're interested to see the most promising European web and mobile startups, TechCrunch is offering a 15% discount.
HammerKit(from the ArcticIndex): is a web application service platform that has been developed to make it easier and faster to build dynamic, data-driven web sites. The platform allows an entire web site or application to be designed, assembled, deployed and managed online from reusable components in minutes.
Burt helps marketing agencies to perform better in the new read-write web. They want take advertising and analytics past the cost-per-click methods and banners. Current product offering includes: Copybox - "a Photoshop for copywriters", basically a smart text editor, Mememachine - cloudcomputing for marketing data, and Rich - an analytics tool for campaigns.
Senseboard develops cool wearable technology on for hand gesture based computer interaction. Two hand bands or glovers enable a method for capturing, analyzing and interpreting hand and finger movements.
Total of 133 European companies registered to the competition and 20 were selected from these. ArcticStartup congratulates all the chosen startups and wishes extra luck for the arctic startups!
Red Herring Global Top 100 Finalists Announced
During the weekend Red Herring, a global media company, announced 200 finalists of their annual Global Top 100 technology companies competition. The winners, top 100 out of 200, will be announced in January 14-16, 2009.
There are a few Nordic companies listed that were also on Red Herring's Top 100 European finalists this year, including Floobs, Muxlim and Aito Technologies. Some of the new comers to the global short list include Hammerkit and Ball-IT, which was listed also in 2007.
Congratulations to the finalists and watch out for the monkey business.
HammerKit Raises A Financing Round
The Finnish web company HammerKit has raised a financing round last week according to Kauppalehti. The sum raised was not disclosed, but it was stated that one party involved in the round was the Finnish Governmental investment fund VeraVenture.
I was able to talk to some members of VeraVenture in LeWeb and they confirmed the investment. It was also VeraVenture's 100th investment in the duration of a few years. VeraVenture's investment strategy is such that it doubles the effect of an individual investor's so there would have had to be another investor that put in an extra X euro's into HammerKit.
HammerKit's board will be added with Gateway Technolabs Finland's founder Pentti Heikkinen along with the investment, so one guess could be that Gateway Technolabs Finland is the other investor. This cannot be confirmed as it has been stated that there is a shortage of able and experienced board members for startups.
MindTrek Finalists Have Been Chosen
MindTrek Startup Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The following companies made the cut (in alphabetical order):
Floobs
HammerKit
MahShelf
One Did It
RunToShop
Star Wreck Studios
TripSay
Zipipop
There will be eight finalist in total in the pitch competition and each startup will have 6 minute pitch to present to the high profile jury. Read more about the Startup Launchpad here.
Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!
The free bus ride for startups to the MindTrek and back from Helsinki on 8.-9.10.2008 will depart 8.10. Wednesday morning at 7.15am in fron of Kiasma (the bus has MindTrek sign on it).
The bus will head back to Helsinki on 9.10. Thursday at 4pm departing in front of Hotel Rosendahlin at Tampere. If you want to come along contact Hanne Lehtola at hanne.lehtola [at] culminatum.fi
Antti Akonniemi from Kisko Labs is also running an Ignite while we are driving up there. Antti wrote a short intro on what’s on offer for the ride up:
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? And what if your stage was an actual bus full of startup entrepreneurs? Fun of karaoke and excitement of Powerpoint combined. Sounds too much like the movie Speed? Introducing Ignite:Mobile. Join ArcticStartup’s bus trip to MindTrek and experience the first ever Ignite:Mobile.
There should still be plenty of room in the bus, so drop Hanne a mail and come along.
