Posts tagged:

marko parkkinen

NewsToScreen Files For Bankruptcy

by Antti Vilpponen, July 2, 2009 — 3 Comments

NewsToScreen, the service by Finnish marketing men that aimed to charge consumers for watching ads, has filed for bankruptcy according to Kauppalehti. We covered the company just little over a year ago in March. Later last year I talked to the CEO Marko Parkkinen back then and he quoted them having 80 000 users. Apparently not everyone was paying the 29€ annual fee as it would have brought in revenue of over 2 million euros.

The company had a very respectable board including Marko Parkkinen a reknown marketing man in Finland, Seppo Sairanen known for making his wealth from the private banking corporation FIM (and having invested into Fruugo). Other members of the board include Lauri Hulkko and Ilkka Seppälä. One thing that does surprise me is the resignation of Parkkinen as the CEO just 15 days before filing for bankruptcy. He had resigned the position on the 15th of June 2009 and the company had filed for bankruptcy on the 30th of June, 2009.

While it is never good to see startups going belly up, you have to admit and give it to people for trying. However, despite encouraging entrepreneurs – this is one idea that I never saw taking off, even in my wildest dreams. I remember talking to Parkkinen about the future of NewsToScreen and he was optimistic about the new course they had been taking with licensing the service to large corporations as a tool for communication. Needless to say, marketing without understanding the fundamentals of business does not work very well.

A Few Quick Facts For The Weekend From Finland

by Antti Vilpponen, October 24, 2008 — Leave a Comment

The week’s been way too busy and apologies for the lack of writing from me. However, I’ve been following the scene and been meeting people over lunch from the startup scene. I’ve heard a few interesting facts this week that I’d like to share with the readers here.

  • NewsToScreen has been growing fast despite my earlier bashing. NewsToScreen is an aggregator of different feeds and activities that can be used to transmit information to large crowds. They now have 80 000 members and transmit 5-10% of Finnish online video and approximately 66% of Finnish commercial video. I also talked to their founder and CEO Marko Parkkinen about the usage of the product and he confirmed that they have slightly shifted the focus and are taking different approaches in capitalising it.
  • RunToShop, the social shopping recommendation service, now has over 400 partners. We previously wrote about 150 partners in their network so the growth has been nice. Despite still having a long way to go to successfully integrate the service with these partners I’m glad to see companies also focusing on the commercialisation of their innovation.
  • The Deloitte Fast 50/500 Finland list for 2008 is out. A familiar company is topping the list with a growth percentage of close to 3000% – Futurice. Futurice is a web and mobile production powerhouse located in Helsinki, Finland. Second on the list is OpenBit, a mobile payment provider we have covered previously as well.

I’ll do some more digging into the Deloitte’s list as there are a lot of interesting companies that need to be uncovered in terms of interviews.