Muxlim Debate A Great Reminder - Startups Far From Mainstream
Much of the Finnish startup scene has been debating the aftermaths of an article Helsingin Sanomat (largest Finnish daily) published on Sunday about the CEO and founder of Muxlim Inc, Mohamed El-Fatatry. The title of the article, directly translated, is Mohamed's Bubble. We've covered Muxlim in the past as well. In the article, Helsingin Sanomat journalist Esa Mäkinen, paints quite a dim picture of the entrepreneur and how he received hundreds of thousands of euro in government support and then shut down the site.
Leiki To Tailor Articles For Helsingin Sanomat Subscribers
Leiki has announced it has entered into a partnership with Helsingin Sanomat (the largest daily newspaper in Finland) to personalise articles on the front page of its digital version. The digital version is the premium, paid version of the newspaper, that can be found online.
Finland Preparing A 1984 Type Foreign Acquisition Law
This has got to be the stupidest law preparation I've heard in a while. Today's Helsingin Sanomat writes (in Finnish unfortunately) about a law that is under preparation in the Ministry of Employment and the Economy. The law in essence gives the government the possibility to deny the sale of a corporation overseas, ie. an acquisition, if it endangers Finland's "national interest".
Finland's Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Justice as well as the Finnish Competition Authority have said that the law is too broad. If the law goes through, it can infringe basic rights and the freedom of trade and industry. In my opinion, this is law would be a huge step towards a 1984 type totalitarianism.
TripSay Partners With Helsingin Sanomat
TripSay announced a couple of days ago their partnership with Helsingin Sanomat, the largest daily newspaper in Finland, on their hotel search. Helsingin Sanomat is using TripSay's hotel search as part of their travel pages targeted at Finns.
The service is a co-branded partnership where the community is run by Helsingin Sanomat, the hotel search by TripSat and the actual hotel listing and data by Booking.com. Read more about the partnership on TripSay blog.
Twingly - the European blog search engine
With our expanding focus to other Nordic countries, we'd like to start the round by taking a look at a Swedish startup, whose founders I had a chance to meet last year in Paris' LeWeb3 - they're called Twingly.
Twingly is a blog search engine, similar to Technorati, but they claim it to be spam free. One of the ways this is achieved is a social rating to the blog posts in a similar fashion to Digg - the more popular the blog post, the higher it will rank in search results.
Twingly was launched in February 2007 and according to their history, Svd.se and DN.se, two of the largest Swedish newspapers began using their service Blogstream to link back to blogs writing about their articles. Since then, they have made deals with more than 40 European partners to begin using their Blogstream to link back to blogs. Finland's largest daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, is also using this feature at the bottom of their articles.
With a focus on creating cash flow and adding more partners to their business - there has been a slight underfocus on product development. Twingly's product line is composed of the Blogstream and a screensaver that visually displays the state of the blogosphere.
They aren't giving out too many statistics on where they are with regards to blogs pinging their service, but they are open in other ways. For example, they have opened up their Tech Plan to the public so that people can vote on what features and tools ought to be added in the future - crowdsourcing at its finest!
With regards to finances, I'm guessing Twingly is making a profit as their deals with the regular media houses aren't poorly priced. They also have 9 people to support with the tech, so the costs shouldn't be that high. Nevertheless, I'd hate to see them lose the entrepreneurial thrive if they do make a nice profit - they have a lot of potential around this idea as Technorati isn't all that common in Europe.
