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, 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 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.

Whatamap.com, the Finnish custom mobile maps provider, has launched a technology platform targeted towards directory businesses. The platform is called Whatamap Directory Assistance (WhatamapDA), and it is designed to help the directory businesses to enable business on custom maps and provide web-to-mobile tools for maps and other rich content. With the technology the directory businesses can offer consumers context-bound street and custom maps directly to the customers’ phones from call centers and web and SMS services.

The main value proposition of the technology is to enable the directory businesses to increase the revenue per customer. Whatamap.com claims consumers are ready to pay for “Rich Map Content”, but the problem is on the provider side in enabling and optimizing the content for all different phone models. With WhatamapDA the company promises to provide easy transformation of any map content to several different mobile formats, suitable for the vast majority of phones models (yes, they mention iPhone as well).

Whatamap.com explains WhatamapDA Platform is the basis of all of their products, so this is another way the company is trying to monetize their technology. The service is offered quite typically for a fixed monthly price or fixed price per user.

Our previous coverage on Whatamap.com.

The mystery Espoo based startup RunToShop that we’ve covered a few times before has set for launch in September. The core of the company is also coming out in their newly designed website - social shopping through personal recommendations and reviews. RunToShop states themselves as the place to find stuff people really love.

They are also actively looking for partners, shops, that want to increase their sales through social shopping. Apparently there will be no shopping mechanisms on the site as they are recommending partners to add a piece of javascript to their website to keep calculation of sales. RunToShop, or Run as they call it themselves, gets money from sales commissions. However, partners will have an option to add their products into the company database, probably for recommendations and reviews.

These are of course guessese, but I have heard from a trusted source that RunToShop is not launching in Finland in September. One easy giveaway is the language - it’s all in English and they speak English in …? You guessed it.