London's Tech City A Second Base For Local Startups
Editor's note: This is a sponsored post with our partner UK Trade & Investment
A number of companies from the Helsinki region have moved operations to London to take advantage of the networks and connections available around London's Tech City. Among them count Foodie.fm, who has built a presence in Tech City to help bring their grocery shopping solution to the UK market, as well as Kiosked, the platform that turns images, videos, and applications into interactive storefronts.
Kiosked Spearheads U.S. Expansion With New Partnership
Kiosked has now essentially spearheaded its expansion to U.S. e-commerce sellers through a new partnership with EYEMAGINE - a Magento 'Gold Solution' partner. Even though not everyone in Europe might be too familiar with the Magento e-commerce ecosystem, the impact of this partnership is a pretty big deal for Kiosked. Magento is the globally largest e-commerce platform with over 20% market-share in stores.
"We have been working closely with several Magento Solution Partners who build web-stores for brands. Via a Kiosked extension for Magento their customers can now seamlessly import their products into Kiosked. I am excited to see more and more brands turning their content smart with us", says Kiosked’s Partner Manager Jaakko Iso-Järvenpää who explained the details and background of the partnership to us.
Kiosked Searching For Fun and Experienced Mobile Developers
Editor's note: This is a sponsored job posting, but please help support ArcticStartup by passing this on to your friends looking for work in mobile development.
One of the larger ideas being built in Northern Europe is Espoo based Kiosked. Kiosked turns any online content into a storefront. For those of you who haven't seen ArcticStartup's past coverage (or news of their €4.5 million round led by Kaj Hed), their concept works like this.
Brands and publishers can turn their images and videos instantly into a webshop, allowing customers to go from impulse to purchase right in a page's content. It's subtle, it's powerful, and it could very well change how we interact with the web.
For example, watching an online video and like the song playing? With Kiosked you can purchase a digital download of the song instantly by hovering with your mouse over the video.
Kiosked Showing Funding Ties Through Partnership With Rovio
Rovio has launched a 48 hour competition to win signed and personalized prints of the new Angry Birds All Star Athletes posters featuring NBA All-Star player, Andrew Bynum and NHL All-Star player and Stanley Cup Champion, Anze Kopitar. The competition on the Angry Birds blog is only able to be won in the United States, making this news item uninteresting to the majority of our readers. But what is noteworthy is that the imagery on the blogs are tagged with Kiosked's technology, allowing anyone to hover over the photos and be led to an Amazon store, where they can purchase these posters or other Angry Birds gear.
This partnership shows the ties between the two Finnish companies. Last June, Kiosked raised €4.5 million in funding in a round led by Kaj Hed, the majority investor in Rovio who held a 69.7% stake in Rovio Entertainment a year ago.
Kiosked Offers Automatic Solution To Monetize Images
Helsinki-based Kiosked is currently piloting a solution where publishers can put a script on their website that allows Kiosked to scrape metadata and keyword information from their articles. Once it has done so, Kiosked can automatically put a webstore into the images uploaded to the articles. This helps customers make more impulse buying decisions, and gives publishers access to another revenue stream that's less annoying than adds. If it works as advertised, this is some 2013-level stuff.
Working At A Helsinki Startup From A Stanford MBA's Perspective
The last couple of weeks we've seen a lot more people from Stanford and Silicon Valley in Helsinki than usual, perhaps mostly due to the Accel REE conference, which I still need to write something up about. But last week I spoke with two MBA students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who are working on a short-term project at Kiosked, and I thought it might be interesting to get an outside-looking-in perspective of what they've experienced here.
Zach Singleton, one of the students originally from Oakland, says that he found out about Kiosked a year ago when he was reading tech blogs and was intrigued with Kiosked's potential for mobile monetization. "It's an innovative platform that changes how we shop and experience advertisements," he says.
Kiosked Develops Mobile App With Tekes Tempo
Kiosked is on a mission to turn any sort of visual or social elements into branded webshops, and with it they're on a mission to connect brands directly to consumers through any sort of media. Their service allows anyone to "kiosk" images and videos with products (or whatever content they like) by putting a flash or HTML5 wrapper around the image. When a user hovers over the content, they can find out more information about the product, or buy it right there in the image or video.
Rather than a single solution, the company sees themselves as a platform on which others can build. Their new mobile app created with help from Tekes Tempo is one example of the products that can be built off of their soon-too-be released API toolkit. The app features campaigns from brands, who are crowdsouring the best photos and images of their product in action. The Kiosked app allows users to take and upload digital content, which can be automatically or manually Kiosked into these campaigns.
Kaj Hed's First Major Investment Outside Rovio Goes To Kiosked In A €4.5M Round
The other week we asked where were Helsinki's big startups, and today Kiosked responded with a new funding round. €4.5 million is a nice number for the "content activation platform," but what gives the funding more weight is that this is the first major public investment made by Kaj Hed since pumping money into and buying up 70% of Rovio. The funding round was also joined by private investors and Tekes, and Hed will join the Kiosked board as chairman.
Of the €4.5 million, a million euros comes from Tekes' Young Innovative Companies -program and the direct investments by investors is around €3 million. Kaj Hed's stake in the round is the largest by far.
On the funding round, Hed says, “Disrupting and re-shaping any industry is always interesting. Kiosked is the first to connect brands with their online business logic through their content and fans. It is going to create new paradigms that will change the way brands engage with consumers forever.”
Kiosked Adds Rewards For Sharing OnePiece Images And Videos
Kiosked is an in-content sales and marketing platform that turns any sort of content into a media platform, and provides tools for creative brands to activate their content. Explaining it terms like that sounds meaningless, so we'll use the Norwegian lifestyle-clothing brand, Onepiece, as an example. Kiosked announces today it is now enabling OnePiece fans to share images and videos from the clothing brand on their blogs and Facebook timelines, which gives users' friends the opportunity to find out more and purchase the clothing directly from the videos and images.
Nordic and Russian Finalists At CeBIT's CODE_n Innovation Contest
This year's CeBIT trade show will feature a brand new global innovation contest called CODE_n. Short for ’Code of the New’, the contest aims to seek out and promote the world’s most innovative startups involved in the development of new business models for the internet or mobile devices.
Six Nordic and four Russian startups have been selected into the Top 50 of this year's contest out of over 400 candidates. Each finalist gets a 15 square-meter presentation space at CeBIT and a chance to promote themselves at the world’s largest digital expo. A whopping 62% of the finalists are from Germany.
Second Batch Of Arctic15 Pitches (Video)
Here's another batch of Arctic15 presentations, including Mancx, the first place winner. Also in this group we've got presentations by Streamtainment, 300.mg, Fishare, and Kiosked. So clear off the rest of your schedule this afternoon, cancel that meeting, and re-live the Arctic15.
Kiosked Teams Up With Finland's Largest Web Community
Arctic15 finalist Kiosked is rapidly gaining ground with its in-content online sales platform. The startup has now partnered with Suomi24, Finland’s largest web community, to provide interactive online marketplaces (kiosks) to the community’s 2700 discussion forums and 1.3 million unique weekly visitors.
What The Arctic15 Finalists Released
Arctic15 was held almost a month ago and we decided to summarise what the 15 awesome finalists actually pitched and released on stage. This is a little bit of a promotion to our upcoming videos of all the pitches we're beginning to release soon on ArcticStartup from our event. So browse through the 15 finalists presented below in alphabetical order, presented in their own words.
WOT Partners With Kiosked For A Secure Online Shopping Experience
Security is a prerequisite in the real world and perhaps more so in the digital space. And with security online, comes WOT that has been ensuring a safe browsing experience for the millions of users online. WOT announced another major partnership earlier, this time with Kiosked.
Kiosked is an online service that transforms online content into a marketplace. The service provides consumers with access to more information as well as making both online and offline purchases easy. Kiosked was also one of the Arctic15 finalists this year.
Here They Are: Arctic15 Finalists
It's been a tough run up to the Arctic15 conference for startups competing for the chance to pitch on stage. The finalists have now been chosen by the secret jury and they are listed below. Close to 100 companies applied to the competition by the end of July and over the course of August 33 companies made the so called semi-finals and from those, 15 companies came out on top as finalists. The 15 finalists were chosen from video pitches the companies made. This is for two reasons. First, we wanted the companies to have good products and secondly, they would also have to be good in selling and explaining those products.
Kiosked Is Your Instant Point Of Purchase, Anywhere
Anything you see can be yours, that’s what Kiosked believes in. The startup revolves around the concept of Web Wide Shop and has developed a secure sales and marketing platform, transforming all content online into a marketplace.
