The Tekes Bureaucracy: Is It Overstated?
Editor's Note: This series of posts is sponsored by Tekes and produced in co-operation with ArcticStartup to share experiences from startups about their funding experiences.
From offhand comments in forum comments, hackathons, and local tech events, I'm sure many first-time Finnish entrepreneurs have some pre-formed negative-leaning opinion about how the Tekes bureaucracy works. Without getting into a discussion on how society should support entrepreneurship, realistically there has to be some sort of balance between bureaucracy and free government money. With too much bureaucracy, the system can kill entrepreneurs time and crush innovation. But if the system is too loose, you then have "entrepreneurs" buying fishing boats for their summer cabin.
Where is Tekes on this scale and how should you mangage it? To get to the bottom of the bureaucracy, we talked to Joonas Pekkanen, who's been part of a few Tekes projects. He's currently the CFO of Flockified, who are gearing up to release a full-fledged version of their group buying service. Their teaser page proudly states, "WE'RE BUILDING THE BEST DAMN GROUP PLANNING AND GROUP DECISION MAKING TOOL EVER," which we'll cover more on later in the post, but first, here's our interview with him:
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?
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.
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.
Ex-Floobs Team Goes After Music Business With GigsWiz
The dust has barely settled since we reported about Floob's ending up in the deadpool on Jan 21st. Now the founding team, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, is at it again and this times its music gigs they are after.
The new startup is called GigsWiz and is founded by Lemmetty, Pekkanen and Juuso Vermasheinä who has a background in game retail business.
Lemmetty was responsible for product development and business development in the music industry at Floobs Ltd and had previously seen some of the problems in the industry and together with Pekkanen they had some ideas how to help the music industry build a better business. Vermasheinä had started the company already in the summer of 2009 but after meeting with Lemmetty and Pekkanen the three decided to start working together on a slightly different business plan. In addition to the core management team GigsWiz is building an advisory board including music industry specialists, crowdsourcing and 'intention broadcasting experts', which should hint on the area the company focuses on.
Floobs Files For Bankruptcy
I got a call from Kai Lemmetty, one of the co-founders of Floobs, that they are filing for bankruptcy either today or tomorrow. Not a very pleasant call to get by any means, as they've been one of the most passionate guys in the ecosystem and been doing a lot of good for the startup scene itself by helping out with organising and live streaming events. The simple reason behind the bankruptcy is that their sales did not ramp up quickly enough to support their current burn rate.
Floobs Goes After Niche Audiences
Floobs, a Finnish video streaming service, has shifted its focus to niche audiences by starting to work with local community sports associations. The service covered many sports already from the get-go, but now they have made a conscious choice to put all their weight behind the local-community-sports strategy.
The guys behind the service, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, had played around with the idea already for a while when trying to figure out how the beat the video streaming giants like Qik, Kyte.tv and Flixwagon in their own game. Now the duo has decided to go with something very Finnish: Sports!
Finland is notoriously sports-crazy: Sports has traditionally been the primary way (and many times the only way) to build success stories in the international arena. A tradition that dates back to the post-war years. Traditional or not, what a better way to beat the US video streaming giants than going where they can't reach. Similarly by working with the amateur associations they can tap into a market that is not interesting enough for the national TV stations. Floobs has already signed many contracts with local sports associations. They have signed up football and floorball association, and planning to expand to table tennis- , skating- and horse riding associations.
The community organizers and local associations are also happy since they now have a forum for those events and games that are too small for the traditional media. They can also take the videos with them to Facebook and to MySpace with a Floobs widget.
A great way to turn what was initially a disadvantage (not located in the eye of the storm in Silicon Valley) to an advantage (going local in your own market).
Floobs contesting in MIPTV's Content 360
Floobs is taking part as the only Finnish company in the MIPTV's Content 360 pitching competition in Cannes this year.
More precisely, Floobs is one of the three finalists in the "Advanced Mobile Interaction with TV Content" -series, where the two other contestants are Coded Vision, Twenty Six Leeds (UK) and BBC TV Talk, Wyndham-Leigh (UK).
Kai and Joonas let me know via e-mail that they will be sharing some comments from Cannes later on after their presentation.
Floobs video interview
I did a video interview of Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen from Floobs some time in February. I never had time to edit and go through the video, but I finally managed to do so in the Easter holidays. During the editing of the video, I noticed that the add-on microphone was slightly faulty and it only recorded the left channel - therefore the sound quality is quite bad, apologies for that. Nevertheless, I decided its better to release the video late than never - so here it is:
