Burt expands to Norway, Focuses Development on Rich
Following the company's €2.2 million investment from Industrifonden and angel-investors last year, Sweden-based Burt is expanding to Norway, as part of their expansion program. The company produces tools to help advertisers and agencies improve the efficiency and effect of their online campaigns, which we covered last June. Their main product, Rich, distinguishes itself by focusing on the media industry and offering analytics that form a more complete overview of the environment in which their ads are being displayed. As a result ad-buyers can compare online performance of their ads with broadcast and print advertising and media agencies get a greater control over ads, their vital revenue source.
Hammerkit Nails €1.25 M In Funding
Hammerkit, the Finnish cloud technology provider, today received €1.25 million investment from the North West Fund, joining Veraventure and Tekes as investors. The company produces scalable digital solutions for the global PR and marketing industry, and will use the funding to open a sales and development center in Liverpool.
Could These 7 Simple Low-Cost Marketing Tips Save Your Bacon?
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Timo Jäppinen. He is the managing director of a marketing agency Drayton Bird Associates Finland.
You can’t do much about Europe – either it will fall apart or it won’t.
Here are three things you can bet money on, though.
First, the politicians won’t save you. They have no worries. And second, the only economy you should worry about is your own.
And there is one piece of good news. Those who start getting things right during a recession come out stronger than those who sit on their hands.
Golden Rules Of PR By Christina Forsgård
Tech start-ups come up with great ideas and build brilliant products but often lag behind marketing them. Main reason for that is usually lack of resources: entrepreneurs would rather spend their limited funds on developing a product than on marketing it. However, most agree that it’s important for your product to be known and talked about. We talked with one the main PR gurus in Finland Christina Forgård (founder and Chairman of the Board of Netprofile) who shed light on the world of PR and shattered some common myths and misconceptions.
World's Largest Stop-Motion Animation Filmed With A Nokia Phone
Nokia's been pretty good at pulling off stunts here and there with their devices. However, this one deserves a special mention. The film itself (embedded below) looks pretty normal and is a short story about a sailor. But only towards the end do you begin to understand the sheer size of the whole setup. Do take a minute or two to watch the making of video as well, it's embedded below the actual stop-motion animation itself. For the record, the phone used in the filming was a Nokia N8.
Lessons Learned: Launching Ditto
As a blogger, I have to give kudos to Jyri Engeström for the way he launched Ditto. You see, as a blogger we're contacted by many companies on their product launches and other activities. Some e-mail you once and almost call you back to ask why you haven't written about their company. Then there are people like Jyri who work to build up the relationship and explain in detail what the thinking behind the service is - over the period of couple of months before the launch. I had a chat with Jyri about the things that took place behind the scenes and how the run up to the launch went. This is one of the best company launches and I think it's worthwhile sharing with others.
Blyk Closes A Whopping 17M€ Investment
The Finnish mobile media startup, Blyk, has closed a very impressive 17 million euro investment lead by Nexit Ventures and other individual investors. Blyk started off its path in 2006 as an ad supported virtual mobile operator, which was later pivoted to focusing on the mobile advertising platform as a business of its own. Blyk's revenues in the recent years have averaged around 12 to 22 million euros with over a six hundred thousand euro profit in 2009.
Finnish Media Landscape Is Starting To Shift. About Time!
We recently argued that Schibsted will give Finnish media companies a run for their money in classifieds and market places. Now Schibsted Classified Media Finland's CEO, Jussi Lystimäki, tells us that Tori.fi just passed the one million unique visitor water mark last week. This comes from a firm who just opened their Finnish site in December.
Lystimäki further commented that they are adding tens of thousands of products a month. No doubt, this traffic has not been cheap, but it comes to show that that digital marketing is fulfilling its overdue promise and that ROI is superior compared to the traditional channels. If marketing's focus is moving online, it should also be the media's.
Finland is not protected from what has been happening in other markets for some time and it's high time for the Finnish companies to wake up to reality. I might be overly optimistic here, but perhaps they may even start innovating on their own and who knows, maybe we will see quality content emerge beyond classifieds. Never have Finns been as innovative and performed as well as when the crisis has been the deepest. And deep it is.
Nokia Plays With Bloggers And Opinion Leaders - Watch And Learn!
Nokia has sent out some of its new flagship phones, the N900s, to some of the tech and gadget bloggers around the world. Tracy and Matt's blog received one and have posted a great video on unboxing the phone and taking it into use as well as running through the basic functionalities of the phone. What makes this unboxing a bit more interesting is the fact that, to open the package - you have to plug in a USB cable and "hack" it.
CLARA Listens The Web Talking
CLARA is a Reykjavik, Iceland based young startup specializing in online business and marketing intelligence. The firm offers automatic monitoring and analysis tools for the web. With CLARA's solution firms can keep track of online discussions around their brands, products, and services on the web. CLARA's system brings data together from news, blogs, forums and comments, and other online content. The idea is to allow "listening" to the online discussion as it happens, and being able to see a clear summary to better understand the end customers.
Via Venture Partners To Invest € 2.65 Million In PlusFourSix
Via Venture Partners, a Nordic venture fund, is to invest € 2.65 million in
Swedish mobile marketing company PlusFourSix. PlusFourSix offers the mobile telephone as a marketing tool, making it possible for clients to create a mobile initiative for their marketing, without having to invest in expensive infrastructure.
According to Niklas Stålberg, the new PlusFourSix CEO as of 1 August, the money is raised to speed the company's expansion in Sweden and across the Nordics.
Anders Lindqvist, Partner in Via Venture, has been appointed as Chairman of the Board and Mattias Danielsson has joined the Board of Directors. Mr. Lindqvist says that mobile marketing is one of the fastest growing media channels with an estimated annual global growth rate of over 40 percent. We agree with cautiously, as its much easier to loose brand equity with badly designed marketing than gain paying customers. Regardless, PlusFourSix is the leading supplier of mobile marketing technology and solutions in the Nordic region.
Post Your Events To ArcticIndex From Now On
I wanted to kickstart the week by giving a little heads up on our ArcticIndex and what we've been up to lately. Sometime back we added the jobs part to the website and even though it hasn't been under tremendous use - it has received a lot of attention.
Today - we're announcing an addition to the service, events. We decided to let go of our Yahoo Upcoming account and build it ourselves to ArcticIndex. Actually, the wonderful guys at Kisko Labs did it - do contact them if you're in need of development resources, they do a fantastic job. Anyways, one of the reasons was also that we really want to give all the necessary tools for the community to do this sort of activities without us being a gatekeeper in the middle.
Startups' Guide To Getting Visibility Among Bloggers
To kick off the week, I decided to write a short piece on how to get your company into the mind of bloggers and other niche media representants. This might very well work with larger media companies, but since I have experience mainly from ArcticStartup I can't guarantee how they work in the end. The reason for writing this is two fold - we want to help startups get their share of the visibility and also help ourselves get better quality material. Furthermore, this is no bible to the way the system works, but a view into it.
An introduction to the ecosystem
To start off with, we need to get everyone on the same line and understand how the ecosystem of bloggers and niche media people works. The main difference between traditional, larger media conglomerates, and bloggers is that much of it is non-commercial or very poorly capitalised. This of course determines the motives behind the writers and is a key point in trying to understand how the bloggers relate to their work. It's not really work, as in ArcticStartup, many of the writers are passionate and are willing to spend many hours of a perfectly sunny afternoon glued to their laptops weekend after weekend to keep writing those stories (thanks to the whole AS team for doing your share!).
Marketing 101 For iPhone Apps
Yesterday I wrote (or ranted) about the need to also market your iPhone apps instead of just throwing them into App Store and complaining people do not find them. This time I will elaborate more on the marketing tools. There is a multitude of ways you can market your app and one could write a book on that, so let's just cover the basics here (which should not be much news if you have thought about things at all).
Dumping An App To iPhone App Store Is Not Marketing
The iPhone craze is hot as ever, with over 50,000 developers reportedly registered, 800 million apps downloaded, and VC investments being made to pure-play iPhone firms. Some have commented that cream really rises to the top from the hundreds of new apps daily published in the App Store, but there have been even bigger amount of complaints that lots of great apps or games go unnoticed. A big fuss has also been the pricing competition, reducing prices to 0,99 or even below in order get visibility on the Top lists and drive downloads that way. In my opinion, lots of the aspiring developers should look in the mirror rather than criticize Apple or others for their poor performance.
As sexy a business as iPhone and for example games is, it does not mean that normal business rules would not apply -- you cannot just build a product, make it available to the world and expect a huge success. iPhone has been great in that it gives the developers direct access to consumers world-wide. But along with the access comes also a big bunch of responsibilities and headaches. You need to do marketing as well just as in any other business. And that is what most small developers are poor at.
Online Backup Service Kabooza Gets SEK 7 Million
Swedish online backup service Kabooza has gotten SEK 7 Million (EUR 0,65M; USD 0,84M) investment from Aggregate Media, a Swedish VC fund. The money will be used in marketing Kabooza's online backup service through various media. Aggregate Media invests in smaller and middle-sized companies in Sweden who have a big potential in the consumer market and benefit from getting a bigger marketing budget.
Kabooza offers unlimited storage for personal files and photos, providing a simple backup service, which automatically copies the defined files from the local computer to the firm's secure servers. Despite the unlimited storage there is a max limit of 25 GB upload per month per user (Update: this was apparently just a beta version limitation and has been removed). The users are able to access the files remotely over the Internet as well. In addition, the company offers a possibility to generate online photo albums directly in the same service. The albums look nice with ability to comment the pictures, though it is nothing special. The service is only available for Windows XP and Vista for now.
Kabooza offers the service with a subscription, starting from 1 year at USD 49.95 up until 5 years at USD 199.95. Not that costly for unlimited storage, but then again not having any free trial period, and asking straight to sign up for one full year might turn off potential customers (Update: there is a 100-day money back guarantee, though.). However, Kabooza may be aiming to sell the service directly via ISP's and other service providers, since in the registration process it is possible to enter an 'activation code', which can be gotten from 'resellers'.
Aggregate Media's operating pricinple sounds interesting: according to the website, the holding company has four different funds owned by around ten greater media companies. So, the media companies make investments into the startups, get equity share, and then the startups spend the investments on the media companies' media space. How sweet is that? [Of course, I might be missing some details...]
Traditional Press Uninterested, President Apologizes
Now what kind of a title for a post is that you may ask. It's a title that is trying to constructively criticise the traditional press about its methods. We're talking about Slush Helsinki of course.
The sad truth is that the traditional press was uninterested in covering anything from Slush, be it a short article online or a in a more material format. A quick query with Ampparit, a Finnish news aggregator site, results in 0 results about Slush. The irony of this is that the President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, has written an apology e-mail to Helene Auramo, one of the organisers, apologising that she was unable to attend (Helene wrote about this in Jaiku). The press did not bother to reply to any queries about coverage.
This is extremely sad, when Risto Siilasmaa, one of the most successful Finnish entrepreneurs said in his keynote about growth entrepreneurship the responsibility everyone has in times of crisis. He also nodded towards angel investors, as they need to believe more than anybody in these companies to invest in them - when it makes no economical sense whatsoever. Risto also talked about the responsibility of the media - these companies need visibility - ahem ahem, are we the only ones supporting this cause?
Slush Helsinki was an extremely successful event in many different ways. We managed to get the elite of the Finnish growth entrepreneurial scene under one roof for the first time in Finland and in a way that close to 400 people could listen and learn from these experts. This in itself is something that should interest many people, what do these experts have to say about pushing yourself beyond belief in a venture that only you believe in with endless passion - looking to make it big from the Arctic.
However, being able to organise such an event that created so many happy faces, so many positive thoughts about the future of the growth entrepreneurship and so many new deals during a time of huge, unimaginable financial crisis. I believe these sort of events are extremely important as they lay the foundation of hope for something that is crucial to the economy in terms of not only growth, but competition in the international markets when we, Finland especially, cannot count on the support of the more traditional industries such as forestry or machinery.
Then again, Slush Helsinki was not created with support of external financing nor official support from a member of government. It was created out of passion and belief that growth entrepreneurship does and will happen out of the Arctics. Maybe in a few years we can turn to the traditional press and tell them - we told you so.
Apologies for a long rant without any bigger news value (pun intended), but I believe this is an important issue that should be addressed and not only in Finland. We'll be releasing lots of video material in the coming days to spread the knowledge from the event.
Library House Lists 100 Hottest Mediatech Companies
Library House, a research house on startups and other fast growing ventures, has listed 100 of the hottest mediatech companies in Europe. The 100 companies were selected by analysing companies using Library House proprietary data and an expert advisory panel. Library House also states that these 100 companies are the ones that will most likely change the mediatech world (mediatech meaning media and technology).
To our joy, we can find 3 Nordic companies in the top 10 list; Blyk (Finland), Sulake (Finland) and Stardoll (Sweden). Other companies in the top 10 were Flirtomatic (UK), MOO (UK), Where Are You Now? (UK), Dailymotion (France), King.com (UK), Playfish (UK) and Plastic Logic (UK). It's interesting to see that there is a healthy spread of gaming and entertainment companies in the top 10 as well as to note the absence of any media companies per se.
Other Nordic companies in the list were CCP (Iceland), Spotify (Sweden, Luxembourg), Betware (Iceland) and Xtract (Finland). The fact that most of the companies are from the UK or Central European countries pretty much states the overlooking of the Baltic market in total (I believe they are part of Europe, at least the last time I looked). Then again, this is exactly one of the reasons why I set about with ArcticStartup a little over a year ago - to give more insight to the Baltic and Nordic startup industries. Seems like we still have plenty of work to do.
Aito Technologies To Work With Blyk
Blyk, the free Finnish born (but operates only in UK) mobile network for 16 to 24 year-olds funded by advertising, has signed a frame agreement with Aito Technologies, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution provider, for the delivery and implementation of its Business-Driven CEM software product, Aito, to UK market. This follows a successful 3-month pilot installation, which began in May.
Aito takes business intelligence from network traffic data and offers Blyk an easy-to-understand, in-depth analysis of service usage, member behavior patterns and trends.
The information that the software generates is given to key staff directly involved in business management – sales and marketing managers, member service teams, product managers – in a form which is easy to use and act on.
In essence, Aito is an easy-to-implement tool that’s a user-friendly method of making sure mobile subscribers are having a great network experience, at all times, whether making a voice call, sending a text or MMS, or, in the case of Blyk, receiving relevant mobile adverts with their services. The carrier-grade Aito will provide Blyk with a 360° view of the activities and overall experience of its entire subscriber base. .
CEO of Aito Technologies, Anssi Tauriainen, said, “Like Blyk, we know that mobile advertising is set to be one of the most important business models and revenue-generating network activities offered by operators in the future [...]"
Mobile advertising has been already coming from years and is still as annoying as ever. 
Yet, this is hardly Aito's fault and I admit not having tried Blyk services. That said, even if Blyk works like charm, I already pay fixed monthly sum for practically unlimited calls, SMS and data and can't really imagine the future any other way. For cash-strapped 16 to 24 year-olds teens who adore brands there seems to be something there though. Blyk users receive 6 sms/mms from the chosen brands per day in exchange for 217 txts and 43 minutes of voice calls each month.
For the segment the service seems to be working: Blyk has currently 200,000 member in the UK, which is the only market they are currently serving. Now Blyk is ready to slice and dice the market data into an easy-to-use format with Aito Technologies' help and are well equipped to follow their plans to go pan-European in 2009 potentially reaching 40 million young consumers.
The advertisers seems to be happy as well: Big brands like L'Oreal have seen tremendous results with average click through rates of 29% (ranges between 12 and 43%). Quite a lead from the average mobile advertising average CTR that hovers around 3-6%.
Finnish media Digitoday knows that in addition to Blyk, Aito Technologies has currently six commercial pilots running in Europe, including Finland. Digitoday also reports that Aito has around 700 potential customers, traditional and virtual mobile operators. Along with these, Aito is going after ring tone, community and added value service providers in the mobile space, which there are around 2000 to 3000.
Aito Technologies is owned by the employees as well as two reputable Nordic investement funds, Creandum and Conor. The company has currently 25 employees.
Kaskado Delivers Mobile Coupons
Kaskado, founded in 2007, takes a Swedish approach to mobile coupons and marketing promotions. Kaskado's Kaskado Deals mobile service is a mobile Java application which fetches location-based promotions over-the-air and displays them to users (well at the moment you need to pick your city from the list yourself).
The mobile application is rather simple, but looks good. It's easy to select a city, and downloading the offers doesn't take much time. The UI is clear and displays all offers nicely. At the moment it was unclear to me, though, what exactly 'activating' an offer means, as it didn't seem to have any other effect than a new green box on the screen.
Kaskado apparently makes money from a monthly fee on each offer, and by taking some percentage fee of the used coupons. If 'activating' an offer in the client means Kaskado interprets that as a billable event, it sounds rather problematic implementation. I'm not sure about that, though.
Kaskado has recently signed up the biggest coffee chain in the Scandinavia, Wayne’s coffee. Wayne's Coffee has introduced Kaskado's mobile offers to its 30 000 customers in Sweden. The customers can get offers and discounts in most of the chain's cafes all over Sweden.
