Clusterpoint Receives €1 Million From BaltCap
BaltCap has invested in Clusterpoint to the tune of €1 million, TechCrunch reports. The Latvian company produces its own, designed from ground up database software product-- Clusterpoint data base management system (Clusterpoint DBMS) and related application software. Their software allows customers to simplify database design, and scale out big data in clusters without performance loss.
Startup Wise Guys: New Accelerator With Ties To The #BalticMafia
(Article edited to correct that Wiseguys does take 8% equity)
Hot and fresh out of an event in Riga is a new Tallinn based accelerator: Startup Wise Guys. The accelerator is built in the modified Y Combinator model with a similar setup to Startup Sauna in Finland. Getting accelerated involves a 13 week program, demo day in Tallinn and London, and €5000 of funding per founder for 8% of equity. To build some hype, Wise Guys is also offering €500 for any startup referral that makes it into the program (this is my get rich quick scheme-- you heard it here first). The application process is open from 9th of February until 11th of March and the program starts on 25th of April.
Latvian Mac Address Book, Cobook, Sees 20000 Downloads In First Week
Latvian-based Cobook is seeing a good deal of news hype and downloads in its first week of release. Yesterday on their blog they announced they've seen 20000 downloads of the application, which is essentially a better address book for OSX. The application sits in the menu bar, and opens a drop-down window when selected. A key feature seems to be the fast search and contact updating that happens through the same text box, where the app automatically updates new contact information to the correct location.
Pult, Trainingbook, Zonear Selected For Seedcamp London
Seedcamp London is kicking off this week, and with it they announced for this round they've received a record number of applications and are hosting a record number of teams. For those who aren't familiar with the program, Seedcamp is a European startup incubator that employs many of the same principles as Silicon Valley's famous Y Combinator startup incubator. Of the selected 22 companies, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia are each represented with one company who will compete to win the London event. Winners will receive a year long support with mentors, and Seedcamp will invest around €50000 for 8-10% in the winning companies.
Saying Something Over And Over Again Doesn't Make It So
Om Malik, the founder of GigaOm was speaking in Helsinki to a room of media representatives yesterday morning at the Aalto Venture Garage. His visit to Finland is part of a tour to come understand the companies and environment the local startups work in. Before Helsinki, he had visited Berlin and the LeWeb conference in Paris. I managed to talk to Malik about the way he sees these entrepreneurial hubs.
The big part of our discussion circled around the fact that people in Europe always look up to Silicon Valley and how they succeed in everything they do, while failing to see all the potential in front of their eyes. I have to say, while I knowledge the value Silicon Valley has on companies - I wonder how much possibility is wasted when following a given path without truly thinking of the possibilities closer to you. After all, Rovio didn't go to Silicon Valley to succeed - it all started with an innocent tweet by a Swedish athlete in the Nordics (going international I mean).
RentMama Your One Stop Online Car Rental Destination
RentMama is focused on helping you find the right car for your convenience. While assisting users with car rentals, RentMama looks for big and small rental companies who have your specified car available. And it isn't limited to cars in just one region-- the big idea is to save travelers the few extra hours they spend searching for best deals on Google to find the best car rental deals during their visit. RentMama achieves this by bringing all car rental companies under one banner. Users benefit by having to visit one place to find the best deals.
Amooz Gamifies Loyalty Cards And Check-Ins
Success often follows where service providers or vendors improve their consumers’ experience. By gamifying the process of interaction with their brands, merchants can reward customers with points that can be redeemed as bonuses. This processes already exists on smartphones, bit currently other products aren’t interactive enough. Amooz steps in by improving your experience at cafés, bars and restaurants.
The Latvian startup partners with restaurants, bars and cafés to help users receive credits on their smartphone. The procedure is pretty simple and focuses on making the user experience interactive and can be explained in a few steps:
In Depth Analysis Into The Daily Deals Market In The Baltics
Update (3.11.2011): We've updated the information regarding Estonia to better reflect the market situation. After analysing a 3rd party data source (Refresh.lv) we realised Zizu's figures were wrong. They are now portrayed correctly in the data below. Please note that we have not changed the overall market situation of the Baltics, even though it would change slightly due to the change in figures from Estonia. Samad Mukhamedov from Zizu Project contacted us and we've discussed this over e-mail. According to their figures, they are number 2 in the Baltics in September, but due to the sheer difference in figures between Cherry's and those of the research site Refresh.lv's we are unable to replicate this. However, we wanted to bring this up as to make the figures as transparent as possible.
This post is a very comprehensive look into the daily deals, group buying market in the Baltics. We've also talked to the market leader, Cherry Media Group about the situation on the market and how they see it develop in the future. Despite being a fairly established trend in the world of e-commerce, the daily deals industry is far from saturated in the Baltics, but we're going to see consolidation among the players in the future. Cherry Media Group is the largest player in the market by far. According to calculations from the company themselves (that are available to the public, based on the deals the companies have sold), they have 49% market share in the Baltic market. Cherry Media Group operates in all three, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian, markets.
Sellfy Offers A Painless Way To Sell Your Digital Product
Artists, designers, developers and other creative individuals who are looking to sell their digital product online often lack the time and resources to set up an online store. Latvian startup Sellfy plans to make the selling process as painless as possible with its streamlined “drop & sell” application.
Business Collaboration Startup, TeamLab Takes Your Office To The Cloud
Managing work and teams at your workplace is quite a daunting task. Factors like communication, collaboration, and management rely heavily on the effectiveness of whatever system you use. Choosing the right office system is important, because the more efficient this system is the more productive your team can become. The Latvia based startup, TeamLab, comes with a similar agenda; to connect teams, improve efficiency at work and speed up the the management tasks.
DeskTime Can Tell Who's Been Naughty And Who's Been Nice
Every one of us lost some time at work browsing through social networks, reading news or checking out that cool website your friend recommended. Those distractions can eat up a lot of time and cause inefficiency - that's the premise DeskTime, a start-up from Latvia, was founded on. Their application measures how much time you or your employees spend on your computers at work and can provide accurate metrics on that time's productivity. Once the app is installed on the computer, it automatically tracks employee's total desktime and work time. Productivity is measured with the help of a modifiable list of programs and websites you spend time on. For instance: time spent on Photoshop would be registered as 'productive' and time spent on Twitter would be put into 'distracting' category.
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.
Reach.ly Connects Hotels With Travellers Through Twitter
Customers today have an increasing number of ways to interact with brands or physical venues. They can participate in online communities in social media, voice their feedback on Twitter, check-in almost anywhere and benefit from discounted coupons. There is also a growing number of companies that help traditional industries and physical venues interact with their customers. The latest example from this region is Reach.ly, a Latvian start-up that has just launched a service for hotels to reach out to potential customers through Twitter. Their idea is fairly simple: tweets about travel are one of the top themes on Twitter; by capturing specific tweets that feature a town of destination and delivering them in a real-time stream to hotels Reach.ly help hotel administration easily reach out to prospective customers.
Startup Sauna Participants Announced
The Helsinki based Aalto Venture Garage is putting together in international incubation/acceleration program for very early stage projects that should turn to startups later this summer. In total, 17 teams from the region were accepted into the program from around the Baltic Sea. 3 teams were from Russia, 2 from Latvia, 1 from Lithuania and Estonia as well as Sweden and the rest were from Finland (9).
Mini Seedcamp Stockholm, Companies Taking Part
A few weeks ago we put out a post promoting the Mini Seedcamp event in Stockholm taking place on May 4th. Yesterday, it was announced that a record number of companies had applied to the event and Seedcamp also listed 20 of the companies taking part in the event. Like in other cities, there is a mix of companies from a wider region and this time as well, a few companies from elsewhere in Europe are attending the event.
New Latvian Start-Up Manages Personal Finances
MyCash, a new start-up from Latvia, has launched a service that helps manage personal finances. Setting financial goals and budgets, receiving timely alerts on bills, finding savings and seeing your spending all in one secure place. Sounds familiar? No wonder - that's exactly what Mint does in US and Canada. Latvian MyCash is not as comprehensive a servivce as Mint, but it's clearly trying to get there. Unlike Mint that directly monitors your bank accounts, you'd have to put every spending and income manually into MyCash. The interface is not as smooth as Mint's but it does not have any obvious flows either: it's clean and simple. MyCash is only available in Latvia, in Latvian and Russian languages only.
Deal24 Is Estonian Groupon
Groupon has sparked up a lot of similar concepts, if not exactly the same, in many local markets as it has not been able to expand as fast as it should have to satisfy the market demand. In Estonia, Deal24 has taken advantage of this and has launched their own version with a similar concept. The service offers one deal a day and there are no limits to how many people have to purchase it for the offer to become valid.
Robert Scoble Interviews Finnish And Latvian Startups (Video)
Lots of activity taking place today. A few weeks ago 10 startups with the help of Aalto Venture Garage flew to Silicon Valley to network and raise awareness of the Nordic and Baltic startup ecosystem. That trip already bears fruit in the form of Robert Scoble interviewing some of the startups and the purpose of their trip.
ArcticStartup And AaltoVG Go Baltics!
This is an exciting week for the Nordic startup scene: each country has seen a boom in startup activity during the recent months, so we have decided to organize a road trip together with AaltoVG, in an effort to bring the community closer.
The idea is to meet with the actors of each country, find new and interesting startup stories, potential partners, and friends!
Nordic Tech Tour Kicked Off Presenting The Top Firms In The Region
The Nordic Tech Tour, organized by the independent not-for-profit organization The European Tech Tour has kicked off today. During two and a half days, the selected 30 promising early and later stage growth companies based in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, and the Baltic countries will gather together with the leading cross-border venture capital and global corporate firms.
During the event, the companies have twenty minutes to present their business plans to 70 international delegates, consisting of senior partners, VPs, and CEOs from the global venture capital and technology industry, as well as advisors and academics. The investment capital present at the Tour is said to be worth over €10 billion.
Latvian MoVoLo Wins The Tallinn Elevator Pitch Competition
Last week Tallinn was hot with startup and entrepreneur activity. Latvian travel search engine startup MoVoLo won the Elevator Pitch Competition organized by ArcticStartup and Tehnopol Estonia as part of the Third Annual Tallinn Conference by The International Technology Law Association and Enterprise Estonia. Also ArcticEvening Tallinn, among other startup events the same week, gathered a great crowd of entrepreneurs and likeminded people together.
BarCamp Baltics 2009 Gathering in Latvia in February
BarCamp Baltics 2009 will be held in Riga, Latvia, between 6th and 8th of February, 2009. That's the place to be if you're interested in Baltic and Russian ideas, views, and cooperation around mobile and web projects.
BarCamp is an international network of conferences organized around different themes, based on the idea that participants will generate the presentations and discussions for and in the events themselves. BarCamp Baltics brings together social networking and new media specialists, bloggers, podcasters, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and mobile Internet professionals and enthusiasts.
The event will feature 5 to 6 simultaneous sessions, including presentations, workshops, messages and discussions, 30 minutes long each. Between 75 to 95 presentations in total will be held during a day. Participants can choose any sessions to attend and also the topics they want to present, and there will be presentations both in English and in Russian. Around 500 to 600 participants from the Baltic States and CIS, Central and Western Europe, and Americas are expected to be present.
BarCamp Baltics aims to to stimulate the development of new IT and media projects in Baltic states and CIS, and enhance networking and provide connections for international commercial and non-commercial joint projects. BarCamp Baltics 2008 gathered together more than 500 people from 23 countries, and was supported by the biggest media in Latvia.
BarCamp's been arranged also in Helsinki, and there are a few other ones coming up: Odense in January and Århus in March, in Denmark, and in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May.
Microsoft Launches Tools For Startups - BizSpark
Last Friday, Microsoft launched a new program called Bizspark that offers startups of different ages and stages tools to take care of their software and hosting requirements. Technopolis Ventures, Veraventure, The Finnish Software Entrepeneurs Association and Venture Cup has partnered with Microsoft in Finland to accept participants into the program.
Startups must meet the following requirements to be accepted into the program:
- Be actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core of its current or intended business
- Be privately held
- Be in business for less than 3 years and
- Have less than 1 million USD annual turnover.
Despite being a Mac fanatic, I have to give it to Microsoft for pulling this off. They are sponsoring a wide range of products that suit many companies working in the internet space especially. Also, the packages being offered are tailored for companies in different stages of their growth and thus are also bundled together with their capability to pay for the software.
For more information, visit Microsoft Bizspark. You can also find your partners in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Baltics through this link.
Poohtech Enables Newsstand Bill Payment in Latvia
[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]
Estonian company Poohtech has launched a service called Cmart (.swf link) in Latvia that enables paying utility bills in 99 local Narvesen kiosks. Poohtech is an Estonian startup focusing on electronic ticketing and payment solutions. Toivo Annus, the former lead engineer of Skype, has reportedly invested in the firm. Poohtech has earlier provided electronic ticketing for in public transportation in Tallinn, Estonia.
The Cmart service enables Latvians to pay their bills at local newsstand chain Narvesen. The barcodes of bills from different service providers (including telecom, security, energy , etc.), are scanned in and paid on the spot.
The value statement Cmart makes is letting people to pay their bills on the go makes their life much easier. Toivo Tänavsuu comments at least in Estonia most of the people pay their bills online (similarly in Finland), and probably in Latvia also, but on the other hand the service could be very valuable for elderly people.
Poohtech is aiming for international markets with Cmart, and mention they would like to hear from potential partners.
