Posts tagged:

launch

GrowVC Looking To Disrupt Global VC Business

by Antti Vilpponen, February 15, 2010 — 1 Comment

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.
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Silverbakk Monitors Your Social Media Activity

by Paula Marttila, November 5, 2009 — Leave a Comment

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.

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Filehill, New Marketplace For Digital Content – We Have Gift Cards!

by Paula Marttila, October 8, 2009 — 1 Comment

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.

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Floobs Revises Business And Expands To Europe

by Antti Vilpponen, August 28, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Floobs WebTV logoI 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.

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Balancion To Help You With Your Personal Finance

by Antti Vilpponen, July 27, 2009 — 9 Comments

balancionBalancion, 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.
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Twingly Announces Project Shinobi

by Paula Marttila, June 11, 2009 — Leave a Comment

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.” 

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DailyPerfect Launches A Predictive News Service

by Antti Vilpponen, June 8, 2009 — Leave a Comment

DailyPerfectDailyPerfect, 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.
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Apaja Spins Off VirtuToy

by Antti Vilpponen, May 26, 2009 — 1 Comment

VirtuToy - what's the concept?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

by Miikka Kukkosuo, May 8, 2009 — 3 Comments

fruugoFruugo, 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. 

Fruugo closed screenshotAll 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.

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Interview With Ramine Darabiha of MySites

by Antti Vilpponen, April 20, 2009 — 1 Comment

MysitesI 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.
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Vigo Accelerator Only The First Part In Finnish Growth Ecosystem

by Antti Vilpponen, April 16, 2009 — 1 Comment

New business hatchingI 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.
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Cloudo Opens Up For Limited Registration

by Antti Vilpponen, January 21, 2009 — 5 Comments

Cloudo logoCloudo, 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.

Cloudo Web OS

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

by Paula Marttila, January 15, 2009 — Leave a Comment

bloggy.seWhile 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.

I also think that Bloggy has it’s strength in having most of the smart functions built-in instead of a pail of apps one needs to fully manage a service. The whole thing with microblogging is that it’s a simple and quick way to communicate. Right now Bloggy is doing that.

 

An English version is on its way, but for those already curious of Bloggy, but uncertain of their Swedish skills, there is a Translate function on the streams. The rest of the service is pretty self-explanatory for those familiar with microblogging platforms.

 

You will most definitely hear more about Bloggy and Jonas. Jonas is also one of the attendees on the 24Hour Business Camp.

 

 

Written about Bloggy launch by Swedish bloggers and media:

Dagens Media

joinsimon.se

Nikke Index

 

MySites Redesigns And Re-Positions Themselves

by Antti Vilpponen, January 12, 2009 — 6 Comments

MysitesMySites, 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.

Mysites desktop
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.

Ramine working on an investment
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

by Miikka Kukkosuo, January 5, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Trust Solutions: GameJane

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.