Update: PremiumFanPage Now Handles Direct Translations Of Twitter Feed And Facebook Pages
ArcticStartup covered PremiumFanPage back in January when it was launched at the CES ‘11. The venture is the brainchild of Jani Penttinen, CEO and founder of XIHA Life and is based on XIHA’s multilingual social media platform. This means your content on numerous social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, blogs can amalgamate at one single fan site via a platform that offers real time translation.
Xiha Launches Developer Program
We just wrote about Xiha closing a $1m seed round as well as adding Jyri Engeström (Ex-Jaiku/Google) to their board. If that's not enough now the multilingual, cross-cultural social network comes out with its own developer program. A developer program is nothing revolutionary in itself, but shows that Xiha aims to innovate right on the heels of the fatter cats like Facebook by giving developers access to their APIs and facilitating embedding new products into XIHA Life.
XIHA developers will receive premium support, including customizing API calls to their needs and help with the integration to maximize the success of their app. Once the integration has been finished, XIHA promises to actively promote the new applications.
Are Web Conferences A Waste Of Time?
There has been lively discussions of whether the many web conferences are really the most effective use of time for a startup. Similarly many people see the value in these conferences very differently, for example people from the United States tend to spend most if not all their time networking in the lobbies and hallways, at least more so than the Europeans are used to. We, the Europeans, on the other hand, tend to pay equal attention to the speakers at the stage.
At ArcticStartup we believe that meeting friends and strangers, as many as possible, is the best way to spend your time in these conferences. But that's just us. Thus, we wanted to know what other startups think and decided to ask a group of Finnish startups, who travelled to the LeWeb with us, what they think. Here are some perspectives:
XIHA Raises Chinese VC Funding
XIHA is a Finnish startup developing XIHA Life, a multilingual social media platform and an online community targeted at people living outside their home country, and the multilingual people around the world. XIHA invites users of any language, but adjusts the user experience to each user so that they only see automatically the content they understand. Despite the current economic climate, XIHA has raised a significant amount of risk capital from a Chinese VC.
Jani comments it's hard to find risk capital in Finland to support global growth. According to Jani the Finnish VC's thought the risk was too big. Out of the international VC's Jani thought Chinese were the best, as they have both money and vision.
The amount of investment was not disclosed. However, the amount is rather significant, as the founder and CTO Jani Penttinen says with it the company will open offices in the US, Switzerland, and China, and will hire ten more people, developers and business roles, to achieve 24h global operations. Another ten will be hired later depending on the economical climate. There is also more money coming if certain growth targets will be hit. XIHA has strong Chinese roots due to Jani working in the country, and Jani's spouse Sun Xiaowen being Chinese. "Xiha" means 'fun' or 'happy' in Mandarin Chinese, and also 'Hip-Hop' in Cantonese.
As of now, XIHA is still losing money, but the goal is to get to profitability by the end of the year. So far the main income source has been downloadable games, but XIHA is planning to expand to other digital products as well. Below is a quick interview with Jani Penttinen from Slush Helsinki.
