Kuneri, a startup based in Oulu, Finland, has launched a new service called Pikkoo [pik-koo] in closed beta. Pikkoo is a social community allowing free downloading, creating, and sharing mobile screensavers and wallpapers [UGC]. Kuneri was also just selected as one of the nine companies (six North American and only two European) to join 2008 Forum Nokia Innovation Series program. That’s a great achiement, and as part of the program Kuneri will receive business and marketing support.

The service is designed to support Flash Lite screensavers, but the funky thing is that Pikkoo can also create an animated gif file for phones not supporting Flash Lite, so practically the service works with all available phones.

The service looks good, and creating your own screensaver is really easy and fun. Using any of the numerous provided templates I was able to create a pretty nice looking one within minutes. You can also upload own images. All graphics objects can be twisted, resized, and rotated. You can also add various effects to the objects like movement and blinks. It’s also possible to put in a clock, battery level, or network strength indicator. After you’ve happy with the design, you can choose to publish the screensaver in the service, or keep it private. Also Facebookand MySpace apps for marketing and publishing the screensavers are coming up.

There are a few drawbacks in the current version though. First of all, not all the icons in the editor interface are that intuitive, and it takes some time and trials before you realize all things that you can do. The website menu system is also slightly unpolished. The biggest weakness I see at the moment is that you’re not able to download the screensaver directly to your phone from web, instead you have to download it to your PC and then send it to phone with your tools of choice. That’s not going to work with mass market, even I didn’t bother to do it the first night I tried out the service. A related issue is that the file is named after the unique “Pikkoo code” instead of the given screensaver name, which makes it hard to find from the PC - another thing sure to confuse the average Joe. Kuneri is hopefully adding some kind of SMS link push shortly. However, for Series 60 devices Kuneri will offer soon a downloadable Pikkoo client, which allows easy finding, downloading, and installing of screensavers on-device. That really makes using the screensavers easy. Kuneri is also thinking to make a Java-based client for S40 and other handsets.

Once you get the screensaver installed on the actual device, it looks just great. However, on S60 without the Pikkoo client, when the backlight turns off and you press a key after that, the screensaver’s gone right away. With the Pikkoo client the screensaver stays on until you purpose close it, so there’s more value to it. There are also several fancy things you can do with Flash Lite screensavers, including network connection, so we’ll be most likely hearing about very interesting concepts from Kuneri.

The company has been working on, and more known of, their technology tools for creating and distributing Flash Lite applications (e.g. SWFPack launched also recently), but Pikkoo is their step into consumer services. CEO Ugur Kaner hints that they’ve been building the technology base bit by bit, but now they are ready to launch Pikkoo as the first step of their big vision. Kuneri is currently looking for partners who could provide branded content and traffic into the service, getting a new unique marketing channel in return. Ugur commented the revenue model for Pikkoo isn’t that clear yet, and needs to be still worked out.

If you’re eager to try it out, we’re giving out 15 invites to Pikkoo to first 15 who post here a comment asking for one.

Estonian Fortumo and Finnish Kuneri have won a free pass to Nordic Mobile Media Conference in Tallinn, Estonia on December 3-4th. Both companies will also get an exhibition stand in the event.

Fortumo (coverage) enables quick and free creation and monetization of web-based mobile services maintenance, while Kuneri (coverage) provides a variety of Flash Lite tools and services, latest release being Pikkoo.

Congrats to the winners!

[Registeration to the conference]

Last week Kuneri won the Best SpeedNet Pitch award at Symbian Smartphone Show 2008 in London. The CEO Ugur Kaner pitched Kuneri and their next, biggest product Pikkoo to a jury consisting of representatives from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Navteq, Orange, and Symbian. Pikkoo should be launching in a closed Beta soon, stay tuned for invitations.

But that wasn’t enough, Kuneri was also selected to represent Finland at Mobile Summit 2008 in Stockholm this week by Mobility @ Otaniemi and got the opportunity to pitch at the VC Panel event. Digital event marketing and media agency Ramblas Digital got the other speaker slot for the main stage.

Congrats both Kuneri and Ramblas!

Kuneri, Finnish Flash Lite specialist founded in 2006 and based in city of Oulu, announced yesterday the launching of public beta release of their newest product SWFPack. SWFPack is a unique online mobile development tool for Flash Lite developers.

Flash Lite is the emerging mobile technology of Adobe, already having quite good device coverage, with estimated reach of one billion devices in 2009. Content distribution for the platform has been challenging since now, as the Flash Lite content needs to be packaged as installers for distribution. Packaging has been hard to do on Windows, and simply impossible on other operating systems. SWFPack thus solves a significant problem.

SWFPack is available without cost for all Flash Lite developers. The first release allows Flash Lite content to be deployed on Symbian devices in SIS format. Kuneri promises support for Series 40 devices in NFL and Windows Mobile devices in CAB formats in the next releases. Kuneri aims to make SWFPack a standard tool, and will keep on adding features to it.

The CEO Ugur Kaner comments in the press release Kuneri has a vision to simplify development of mobile applications, enabling developers to focus on the content quality and better user experience. Ugur continues that “SWFPack is the first milestone on our roadmap and will be followed by a series of other innovations”. Ugur revealed to ArcticStartup a while ago some of the future plans the company has for monetizing its services, and we can say they have indeed interesting ideas coming up.

Kuneri, Oulu based company founded in 2006, has won EMEA Regional Award in the Forum Nokia 2008 Code Camp Competition with their Easy Vote application. The contest was aimed at inspiring building Web Runtime (WRT) widgets and Flash applications.

The winner Easy Vote is a mobile Flash Lite application enabling users to vote by mobile phone call, text message, or Web service via rich user interface. Kuneri focuses on creating applications and tools for Flash Lite development mainly on the Symbian S60 platform. The firm also offers KuneriLite, an application development toolkit for Symbian/S60 stated to extend Flash Lite capabilities and allow creating applications without any Symbian knowledge.

Kuneri’s blog post.