Blaast Launches In Indonesia, Targets The Next Billion Users
We've received news that tomorrow Blaast is launching "the world's first cloud-based mobile platform" in Jakarta, Indonesia in cooperation with the mobile operator XL. The Helsinki-based company is throwing a press event and hackathon designed to catch the attention of the local press and the local developer community, who are encouraged to create apps for the entirely cloud-based platform. Finland's Foreign Minister, Alex Stubb, is also in Jakarta and will likely attend the launch.
Blaast has been operating in stealth mode for some time, but what's been public is that the company's cloud based platform will essentially allow 'dumber' feature phones to behave like smartphones by running the complicated background processes in the cloud. Android already incorporates some of this ideology, but Blaast has built its entire platform on this concept.
Cabforce Launches Officially At Nordic Travel Fair
Finland-based Cabforce launched officially at the Nordic Travel Fair last week. The service allows business and recreational travelers to book a taxi up to two hours in advance, and pre-pay with a credit card online. This saves the stress of being "taken for a ride" on a longer route in an unfamiliar city, and simplifies payment and language hassles with local drivers.
Tripl Social Travel Launches Publicly
At the end of last week, Tripl announced it is travelling out of private beta and is hoping to find people to connect with in the real world. We covered their $300,000 funding round last May, but if you don't remember their service, they're another Swedish startup in the social travel sphere. Tripl searches your and your friends' connections and check-ins from Facebook to help you meet the locals whenever you're in a strange city. And when you're just at home, I suppose Tripl is sort of like Couch Surfing. You get to meet with new people who come visit your city, except without some stranger staying the night.
Foodie.Fm To Launch Worldwide At Le Web
The beta of Foodie.fm is already running in Finland and the UK, but yesterday TechCrunch reported that Foodie.fm will be launching in all countries at LeWeb this year. The service provides recipes which you can save in the app, which in turn will give you a shopping list to use at the store. Foodie.fm also has a deal with the S Group in Finland, so it gives you the prices of items on your shopping list as well. In UK Foodie.fm product assortment is linked to Tesco.com through their API.
Slidefy To Share Conference Presentations
Slidefy is a new Finnish service that targets a niche need with their offering. In essence, it's a slide sharing solution, but targeted at conference organisers and the like. Slidefy will work in such a way that conference organisers collect attendees' e-mails before the event and send them a link to the material the speaker has provided in advance. Then, during the presentation, users can focus on the actual presentation and not jot down points the speaker makes.
Applifier Eases Game Discovery With Facebook App
Applifier has just announced that they have launched "Games On Applifier", essentially a Facebook app to help users discover and find new interesting games. Applifier is Facebook's largest cross promotion network with 55 million monthly active users (MAU). Previously, Applifier has enabled game publishers to promote their games through their banners, but this takes game discovery and recommendations to a completely new level.
Event Not To Be Missed: Mobile Dev Camp
For the third time ever Mobile Dev Camp will take place on Saturday 26th February in Helsinki, Finland. The event is a special treat for 200+ developers, business people and proud geeks who want to find out the next big thing on mobile. Mobile Dev Camp is known for launching new platforms and products before they are out in the mainstream. For example, at its first event in 2009 the organizers presented Android platform when it was not even out in Finland. Last year Rovio and Windows 7 were the highlights. Back then few people knew about Angry Birds and no Window 7 phones were around. This year Applifier and Samusung Bada will be at the center of attention. On top of that, the event includes a competition for developers to create a simple and fun application for different mobile platforms in 48 hours. Each platform has its own category and a great prize, like a new Wave mobile phone in Samsung's Bada category. Best part: the event is completely free, though you should probably register to let organizers know how many people to expect.
New 150M Euro Fund To Be Launched In Finland?
Tattletech has a story on a new 150 million euro fund to be launched in Finland during Q2 of 2011. According to the article, there are three individuals behind the initiative - 2 telco pioneers and a Finn working in the European Investment Bank. I got in touch with the people behind the article and they confirmed this, working in PR, but were unable to give out anymore information just yet.
Welcome To The All New ArcticStartup!
It's been quite sometime in the making, but it is finally time to launch the new site with some neat features that enable us to make ArcticStartup so much more it used to be. Let me explain what we've developed and why.
The new ArcticStartup has been designed to give more tools to the community. We wanted to reach out to the community and give you more ways to initiate discussions and share material (news, links, press releases, etc.) on our site. Our article sections is still there, but we wanted to add more ways for the community to discover new, interesting and most of all relevant content.
DataMarket Helps You Find Important Figures
Datamarket is a new Icelandic startup that has just launched their service - a website that gives people access to structured data from private and public data sources. At the moment, they have data only available from Iceland, but they are looking to expand to other countries and areas as well. They have 6 employees and the company was founded in June 2008. The service took 18 months of development before they were able to launch.
Signing Power By Signom
Last week, I got to see something really cool. The first time I heard this pitch I knew the problem it would solve and the immediate value it would create. The company we're talking about is Signom Ltd. It's a Finnish startup founded by Ossi Marko (disclaimer: he's an advertiser with ArcticStartup in OMLegal and ArcticStartup has signed an advertising agreement with Signom for later this year too). By background, he's a lawyer so he doesn't share the technical point of view that many tech-oriented entrepreneurs have nowadays.
FinderBase - Helping You Find Your Things
Partied too hard and lost your stuff? There's a cool new Finnish startup looking to help you out with your lost belongings - FinderBase.com. The was launched only a few days ago, on the First of May in Helsinki, Finland. The launch was handled in junction with the First of May celebrations, where most of the country goes out to celebrate in parks with their friends. Needless to say, a lot of stuff is lost.
GrowVC Looking To Disrupt Global VC Business
GrowVC has slowly been marketing their concept in various social media networks and today is the date they're finally coming out with the concept and explaining it to the public. Back in December I had a chat with Valto Loikkanen, one of the co-founders of the company, and he told me the concept has been in finetuning for the last two years or so. They've put in a lot of effort to make sure their companies are registered and managed in the right way so that they are ready to scale once things start taking off.
The concept GrowVC is looking to disrupt is the age old venture capital business model. Many have complained that while business models in the online and mobile world have been turned upside down, one model remains loyal to the way business is done and that's the model of investing money into startups. Furthermore, the need for capital has gone down dramatically making smaller private investors more potential investors in startups than larger venture capitalists.
Silverbakk Monitors Your Social Media Activity
Sweden has got its own social media monitoring tool, Silverbakk Briefing Room (we recently wrote about Icelandic Clara). Silverbakk measures influence, visibility and engagement in social media, probably the hottest topic at the moment besides real-time search and augmented reality. The company launched its product only three weeks ago promising an easy to use tool to start monitoring ones company, brand, event or competitors in just 60 seconds.
Filehill, New Marketplace For Digital Content - We Have Gift Cards!
Filehill is a new Swedish startup I ran into when first pitching their idea at TechCrunch Talk Nordic earlier this year. Filehill offers a platform especially designed to trade digital content such as reports, playlists and manuals. Besides from the music, of course. They've just released into open beta after a year and a half of development, and I was naturally curious to see what the new marketplace looks like.
Floobs Revises Business And Expands To Europe
I had a chat yesterday with Floobs' Kai Lemmetty, one of the co-founders about their company and how it has evolved over the last 6 months. I have no strings attached here financially or otherwise, but I was impressed the steps this company has taken since we first wrote about them back in October 2007. The new business is a lot more service oriented and the money does not flow in from technology as the idea was before.
Along with the new transformation of their business, they have opened up a new service called Floobs WebTV. This is the new service that they will officially launch on Monday and we managed to get a sneak preview on it. The service works in such a way that there are two major segments they are targeting with this; premium users and the mass market. Premium users in this case are football teams (I'm not talking about your sunday team, these guys are after the elite of the sport - more later) and the mass market includes those who can settle for fewer features and are happier with simpler services.
Balancion To Help You With Your Personal Finance
Balancion, is a new Finnish startup that will help you see the complete picture of your personal finance. At the moment, the service is in closed alpha and very little is known of it. Jussi Muurikainen, the CEO and founder of the company has posted a long message into Balancion's Facebook page to tell a little about the service.
In the message Muurikainen outlines the basis on which the company was founded and what its goals are. The idea for the service has grown from his personal frustration to understand one's financial situation (income, expenses and the distribution there in). He, like I, use an excel sheet to keep count of your personal expenses and through that try to understand where your money is going and where you're getting it. It is usable in my opinion, but there are better network externalities in doing this online. Speaking from this perspective, I can say that this is a service I'm looking forwards to using.
Twingly Announces Project Shinobi
Twingly, the Swedish blog search engine, announced earlier this afternoon that as of October 1st they will be shifting into the next gear by launching "what will become the next great platform for social media".
Obviously they've not just been adding new flags to their partner list, but also busy cooking new stuff in the Twingly kitchen, or as to put it in their own words (The Announcement):
"With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use."
DailyPerfect Launches A Predictive News Service
DailyPerfect, an Estonian startup, has launched an interesting predictive news service. We wrote about DailyPerfect earlier with a quote: "it predicts users’ interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on the web." Now the time has come to validate whether that holds true.
I took a ride with their service and I have to say it got me saying, "ooh, nice" couple of times. The unexpectedness of the new valid content with content that I follow already was in perfect harmony.
Apaja Spins Off VirtuToy
Apaja, a Finnish Social Gaming company and the creator of Aapeli and Playray communities has launched a spinoff company by the name of VirtuToy. The news was reported by the Finnish Digitoday.
There are rumours circulating around the new company as to what it will be up to, but so far nothing has been confirmed. The CEO of the company, Ilpo Kuokkanen, is the former founder of Saunalahden Serveri, an ISP service that later went public at the end of the Finnish dotcom boom. Sources inside the company did not disclose any information, but they were told to be very busy at the moment. VirtuToy has a 2 man board at the moment and it consists of Ilpo Kuokkanen, the CEO and Ilkka Vesterinen, the Chairman of the Apaja board.
According to Kuokkanen, talks are in final stages with partners and financiers. Furthermore, he reveals that the service will be launched in September this year - not sure if fully, but partially at least.
The name VirtuToy can be rolled around with various concepts. One of the most obvious ones is a virtual toy - something of a fully digital tamagotchi.
Disclosure: I used to work with Apaja from 3/2006 to 10/2007.
Photo by Leo Reynolds (CC)
Fruugo Opens Public Beta, Hits Problems
Fruugo, the hyped major Finnish e-commerce startup, opened up a public Beta yesterday morning in Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands (release notes).
Fruugo's launch has been eagerly anticipated since the first rumors last year (our previous coverage). In Finnish and Nordic scale the firm is a huge endevor backed with millions of euros in finance.
All did not go very well, though. Quite soon after opening the service many who tried the service noticed severe problems, and eventually the site was brought down with a note "under maintenance" (screenshot). It seemed the site went online and offline multiple times during the first day. Janne Waltonen, Fruugo's VP Marketing and Communication, commented on Twitter that they were in fact expecting problems and did not want to make a big fuss of the launch exactly because of that.
Interview With Ramine Darabiha of MySites
I had a chat with Ramine of Mysites over the easter holidays and took our video guru Teppo with me. We shot a small video interview of where MySites is now headed and what they've been up to in the last months. There's quite a bit of interesting stuff that Ramine goes through in the videos, but I'll also sum them up here. Ramine also told us that they have secured another financing round from Germany, which he talks more about in the video.
Vigo Accelerator Only The First Part In Finnish Growth Ecosystem
I had the pleasure of meeting with Janne Känkänen from the Finnish Ministry of Employment and Economy, the operational primus motor behind the Vigo startup accelerator programme that the Finnish government has been putting together in the recent months. I for one am very suspicious of where the government wants to take the growth entrepreneurship as an ecosystem, but was very glad to find out that there has been plenty of productive progress happening behind the scenes.
The Vigo, startup accelerator, that we wrote about earlier (but did not know the name back then) is only one concrete realisation of this new programme and its results. Mr Känkänen also told us that growth entrepreneurship ecosystem has been understood to require special methods of assistance and the current economic climate has further sped up those requirements.
Cloudo Opens Up For Limited Registration
Cloudo, the Swedish based Web OS focused company, has opened up it's service to users for registration. They told this in their latest newsletter.
Cloudo is a web based OS service still in its very early stages. I was able to sign in, but there were quite a few glitches still to be ironed out. This could be also related to the fact that they are getting a lot signups that are slowing down the servers.
From a business perspective it still makes me wonder whom Cloudo is targeting with its service. Cloudo's competitor, Mysites, has stated it will be targeting students and gamers. There is quite a bit of potential for services that Cloudo and Mysites are creating, however, I believe whom they are targeting have to be more clearly defined. For example, neither of these services state the third world as their target market, an area I believe is greatly undervalued by this kind of services yet they are the ones most in need of services like this. High license fees of OS's is something that individuals in Africa and other developing parts of the world cannot cope with.
Signup for the beta and give it a try yourself.
Microblogging hotter than ever – Bloggy.se launches public beta
While Twitter is hitting a new heat wave, Friendfeed just won the Crunchie Award for the Best New Startup 2008, and dear Jaiku keeps struggling with its maintenance issues, and just announced going open source!, what better time than to bring a new player into the field - Bloggy.se.
Bloggy is a Swedish microblogging service in Swedish, and a one-man show by Jonas Lejon. It all started for eight months ago as a free time project alongside with full time job and a newborn baby. (And then I haven't even mentioned a bunch of other web services Jonas has in his portfolio.) He had been a frequent user of both Jaiku, Twitter and Pownce (recently closed down) but wasn’t too pleased with any of them. He also wanted to bring microblogging to the non-tech savvy crowds, so he picked out the goodies from the other services and molded them into Bloggy.se.
On September 25th last year the first closed beta invitations were given to the Swedish Jaiku community and the reactions were immediate. Speculations on whether Bloggy was going to take over Jaiku were raised. (In Swedish)
The service was well received, as some of the first comments by couple of heavy Jaiku users can tell:
(Translated from Swedish)
- "Thought I was going to call it an early night but happened to stumble in here. Having a crush...:) " @mymlansofia
- “Testing Bloggy.se. Extremely impressed by Jonas Lejon.” @tedvalentin
- ”Bloggy.se is the first serious candidate to threaten Jaiku within "the Bubble" (Jaiku user group) (OMG, what am I saying? I, who can't live without Jaiku)”. @morris
Jonas has been a true crowd surfer since the start, and he continuously keeps asking their advice on both logo design and future features. Bloggy uses Get Satisfaction as the customer service and support tool.
Today, four months later, Bloggy has over one thousand users and growing. The Swedish industry bloggers have listed Bloggy as one of the highlights of the year, and even called it the microblog service of the year. (Both articles in Swedish)
So, what is under the Bloggy hood?
A Bloggy user gets an easy-to-follow user interface with threaded posts and comments, customized profile design, lifestreaming by adding feeds and all standard update (mobile, SMS, MMS) and notification (Jabber/Gtalk, email) features. Bloggy has support for updating both Twitter and Jaiku statuses. At the moment Bloggy is the only microblogging service in Sweden offering outgoing SMS updates (only on incoming SMS). Posts has standardized length of 140 characters, but like Jaiku the comment length is unlimited, a feature that encourages conversations. Bloggy users find new friends and topics on the main page that shows the public feed with current new members and a tag cloud with popular words.
It also offers the "I like/heart" feature, as part of the service itself, as does Friendfeed. There are now rumors about the similar feature on Facebook. Bloggy has support for geolocation services such as FireEagle and Geode, and there is naturally an API for developers.
According to Jonas himself the users have been especially happy about the automatically updated and threaded posts and comments (Ajax implementation). Jonas himself is most proud of the quick response times of the service, alongside the fact that Bloggy already contains almost all the functionality of the other microblogging platforms.
Unique to Bloggy is all the different file upload formats it supports (.JPG, .PNG, .GIF, AVI, MPG, 3GP, .MP3), all up to 20Mb. The user can also upload images via MMS (Friendfeed has Mail2FF).
The service differs from Twitter, Friendfeed and Jaiku in two ways: The user can't choose to be private, only public profiles are supported. It is also possible for anyone to leave a comment without being a registered user.
When now launching (In Swedish) in public beta, Jonas has added more features into Bloggy. It is now possible to update your status using Hello.txt and ping.fm, services that make life easier for those who want to update all their social networks at once. If you rather hang out on GTalk/Jabber all day, you no longer need to leave it to update your Bloggy status, there's support for it, too.
Is there a future for Bloggy?
Microblogging and social networks, as we have come to know, are all about where one's friends are, but with Bloggy filled with lots of functionality, channels on the way and continuous improvement of the user experience, I think "There is likely plenty of room in the niche and custom communities precisely because Twitter is purely public" as Rob Diana on louisgray.com so well argues. Why? For example, I've already noticed the use of #svpt (Swedes on Twitter) hash tag on Twitter just to track other Swedes and Swedish conversations. It's a jungle out there and the need to hang out with your own people and alikes is very strong.
MySites Redesigns And Re-Positions Themselves
MySites, a Finnish service that was featured in and sponsored the first ArcticEvening almost a year ago, has redesigned and repositioned itself in the market. Mysites was previously known as a place to store all your files. Some even thought, after showcasing the service in the ArcticEvening, that they are going head on with Facebook and Myspace. The new slogan, which clarifies the mission of the company significantly, is "the world's first social operating system".
The advantages of repositioning themselves are significant, although it remains to be seen just how much there is demand for a service of this sort. Referring to existing concepts is rational and does not require the possible user too much thought to see the value in the service. Better yet, the service has redesigned its website to support this goal and in doing so, has dropped the cartoonish look it still had some time ago.
Once you arrive at the website, it does not hit you with a ton of information like it did before. What's even more enjoyable is the view after the sign in to the service - the design is calm and soothing as a Buddhist temple. I think Ramine's team has done an excellent job with the redesign and repositioning. Now it's all up to the marketing and sales on how to build traction and cashflow, something that the service still lacks as its 100% free. Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine the ways in which this sort of a service can be commercialised.
Furthermore, I noticed a Facebook status update from Ramine that might be telling something of their plans for 2009. Ramine working on an investment can only mean so many things. We're still to find out more about the details, but hopefully we'll be hearing some news in the coming weeks.
Mobile Skill Gaming Service GameJane Launched in Finland
Swedish startup Trust Solutions has launched its mobile skill gaming service GameJane (see previous coverage) in Finland.
The new web page is neat, demonstrating upfront what the service is about. It also nicely brings forward the player community activity, showing "today's top players" and their winnigs, latest logins, and latest game played in the community (with the option to watch instant online replay).
The mobile application also works smoothly. With your first login you're given 500 credits so you can try out the head-to-head play (and get hooked). You can always practice against the computer AI for free, but since all games are two-player real time head-to-head games, it's quite limited fun. One credit is always equal to one Euro cent (0,01 Euro). By winning games you win more credits (GameJane does business by taking a small cut from the bet). The games are actually quite fun to play even though they're somewhat simple, and it's easy and addicting to pick a match against live opponents.
You can buy more credits by credit card on the web page, or premium SMS texting a short code. The billing fees have been directly transferred to the consumer, though, so it's not that encouraging to get 50 credits with 1 EUR SMS payment. Anyway, the catch is, if you're good enough, you can cash out the credits you've collected. GameJane allows withdrawals minimum of 20 EUR each and maximum of 100 EUR per month. The consumer also pays the (varying) withdrawal transaction fees.
In the negative side of things, there's still sometimes "empty lobby syndrome" affecting the service - there have been times when no other player has been online, and you won't then stay long either. There are a few annoyances in the UI as well. First of all, why do I have to enter my login details every time starting the application? In this kind of service, of course, with real money involved, it may be you want to protect your account from others. But since phone is a personal device, at least the user name should be automatically remembered. One other thing is that there is an annoying beep used as part of the UI every now and then with certain text boxes or events (think about the old PC system beeps...).
Another aspect, which may hinder the virality and mass market adoption is that the first thing when starting the application it asks you to connect to the internet. It may sound trivial to all techie guys and more advanced mobile users as it's a connected service (also, the client is only 60kb, and seems the whole UI is loaded over-the-air). But believe me, that is something that will drop off significant amount of users in the mass market. It would be much better to let the user go to a menu first, and maybe demonstrate somehow what the whole service is about before asking to connect. This somewhat similar as with internet services where you want to get hook deep enough before you ask the user to commit (e.g. create an account). Another disadvantage is that due to the heavy use of network, a) you need to be on data plan, otherwise you'll probably lose your winnings pretty soon; and b) the phone battery is consumed faster than with standalone games.
Nevertheless, the service is rather enjoyable, and it will be interesting to see how Trust Solutions is able to expand the user base.
Tori Innovations Comes Out Of Stealth
Tori Innovations has come out of stealth mode and announced they have developed an internet-based social media service aimed to enhance firms' innovation processes. Tori Innovations aims to lower the costs of their customers by allowing the firms to enhance their internal communications and bring the end users' and stakeholders' opinions faster and more efficiently into the R&D processes.
With Tori Innovation's product it's possible to collect feedback and ideas from widely dispersed communities of users, stakeholders, and employees, information the collection of which is something not previously possible on a large scale. This is achieved by placing widgets on the sites to allow people to create ideas and post them to the firm. The ideas coming outside the firm can then be collected on the company's site, and then refined, reorganized, and processed for decision making.
Tori Innovation's technology is based on spinoff from research of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Tori Innovations has a pilot project in the works with a high profile Finnish customer, which will be announced shortly. Then we hopefully get more details and can review the actual product as well.
Spotify Opened For Public
Spotify, a Swedish startup offering a lightweight software application enabling on demand streaming of music, has opened up its service for public.
Earlier on we wrote about rumor that Spotify had raised €15m round from various investors. Last week I received a confirmation that Creandum and Northzone Ventures has invested undisclosed sum to the Swedish startup (more bout this here).
It's no wonder the startup is investors' latest darling as it just recently signed significant licensing deals with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo.
The service launched on October 7th 2008 in UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Throughout the remainder of this year and into 2009 Spotify will be rolled out to further markets.
Spotify offers three different subscription models: Free, Day Pass and Premium accounts. Day pass cost you just under one pound sterling for 24 hours whereas the Premium account costs you 9.99 pound sterling a month. Free account is advertising funded, but if you have received your free account via an invitation already earlier on as I did, chances are you don't need to deal with any advertising yet. Advertisers that have signed up to be included from the launch include Ford, T-Mobile and Xbox.
Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.
In comparison, the service is better than any other music service I have seen so far. Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists. It will also recommend music you might like based on what you've listened so far. To my delight it also seems to do the recommendation very accurately to match my taste. Martin Varsavsky used a fitting analogies for the service.
[...] Spotify is like iTunes but with on-demand. It’s like Joost, but for music! It´s like Pandora without the need to vote and with your ability to listen to music anytime you want. It´s like Last FM without the community.
The only downside was that some of the current users saw many of the songs on their playlists disappear as Spotify cleaned their playlist to reflect the current copyright agreements that they have been able to push through. Regardless, I think this is a minor disappointment and the users will possible see many of the songs reappear as Spotify tries to get more record labels behind them.
You can also post and vote on your favorite playlist Digg-style at Spotylist. Spotylist also allows you to find new playlists that others have posted via simple links. I already found two good ones just from the blog comments.
The fact that another service has already build its own offering on Spotify's core product is a solid example that there is something very special about this service. Forget Last.fm, go Spotify!
Twingly Blogstream launched by the largest Norwegian media site VG.no
Twingly announced recently the largest website in Norway VG Nett with over 2.5 million unique visitors each week launched Twingly Blogstream on their site. VG Nett hopes to enrichen the articles on their site by showing links to good blog posts related to the topic of the article. They also wish to give more attention to "clever bloggers out there". Twingly now has the top two largest Norwegian newspapers as partners, VG.no and Dagbladet.no.
Our previous coverage on Twingly.
