Muxlim Debate A Great Reminder - Startups Far From Mainstream
Much of the Finnish startup scene has been debating the aftermaths of an article Helsingin Sanomat (largest Finnish daily) published on Sunday about the CEO and founder of Muxlim Inc, Mohamed El-Fatatry. The title of the article, directly translated, is Mohamed's Bubble. We've covered Muxlim in the past as well. In the article, Helsingin Sanomat journalist Esa Mäkinen, paints quite a dim picture of the entrepreneur and how he received hundreds of thousands of euro in government support and then shut down the site.
Muxlim Shuts Down, Promotes Biography
The Helsinki-based social network site aimed at the world's muslim community, Muxlim, has shut down and now points to DisruptionManifesto.com, a teaser page for founder Mohamed El-Fatatry's new biography authored by David Cord. I spoke on the phone with El-Fatatry who gave me this official statement on the shutdown of the social network: "The Muxlim vision will carry on in a new way moving forward, and all the details of the story will be published in the book: Mohamed 2.0 - Disruption Manifesto."
Interview With Mohamed El-Fatatry Of Muxlim (Part 2)
Yesterday we released the first part of the Muxlim Founder and CEO, Mohamed El-Fatatry interview. In the interview, El-Fatatry talks about the creation of their business and how they went on to grow it. In the second part of the interview El-Fatatry explains how they realised a completely new business area after discussions with Coca-Cola.
Interview With Mohamed El-Fatatry Of Muxlim (Part 1)
We haven't covered Muxlim at ArcticStartup in the way it deserves to be covered. So, what better way to do it than have a talk with the founder and CEO of the company, Mohamed El-Fatatry. El-Fatatry isn't your usual startup founder in Finland. He's of Egyptian background and went on to start the world's largest muslim-oriented site when still in school. Muxlim grew immensely fast in the early days they didn't really have any competition. One of the drivers of their growth can be attributed to excellent media coverage.
Investments And Acquisitions You Did Not Know About
I managed to get a fresh load of stories regarding the Finnish startup scene yesterday. While the companies themselves have not made too much noise about these, they are valid to break to keep the system as transparent as possible. There are 3 investment deals and one acquisition offer that was did not go down.
To begin with, we have Muxlim. The world's largest online network for Muslims. They have about 200 000 registered users at the moment. The story is that they have recently closed a round of financing from Europe, possibly UK. There is no word on the size of the round, nor who the investors are but this is what we're hearing from the street.
Sponsor: Few Steps and Tools for Monetizing Web Services
Soprano Brain Alliance is a fast growing Finnish software developing company, which is particularly specialized in open source web technologies such as PHP, Drupal and Zend Framework. Our clients include large Finnish media corporations, public sector organizations and a handful of start up companies. Company’s founder Jukka Hassinen has build the 35 person employing company in six years. Other key people are Taneli Tikka (Board member), Mikko Hämäläinen (COO), Eetu Hyppönen (Serial Creative Director) and Santeri Lindgren (CTO). Brain Alliance is a part of the NASDAQ OMX listed company Soprano Plc.
Over the years our company has worked with over 60 clients and over 100 projects. Even though we work mainly with medium and big companies, we also like to take part in fresh start-up projects. In fact our key people work with at least one. To mention few: IRC-Galleria, Muxlim, Dopplr, RunToShop, ENCA, Mauton, E8 Personal CRM.
Before It Was About Playing In A Band, Now It's About Being An Entrepreneur
Grand One 2009, a competition for the Finnish new media scene to showcase their year’s work, came and went. As we wrote earlier on, we got an invitation to partner with Grand One since they want to push the event forward every year and be on the pulse of all things digital, which is nothing short of admirable. This time being on the pulse meant to invite startups to the competition. This was the first time ever! If someone has missed (or ignored) the fact that startups have lately entred the mainstream hear in the Northern Europe and become the cool thing to do, now even they have to recognize the shift: When the marketing scene comes knocking on the door it means you have just hit the mainstreet.
Taneli Tikka Leaves Muxlim Board, Steps Down as RunToShop CEO
Taneli Tikka, Finnish serial web entrepreneur, has told in his personal blog that he will leave the online Muslim community Muxlim's Board of Directors, and hand over his seat to a "senior International figure in the online media world". The purpose of the new board member is to "help Muxlim become a world class online media" in order to attract advertisers according to Taneli.
Taneli also notes that he will end his CEO assignment at RunToShop 1st of April, as the company reaches the milestone of getting ready to launch their product for webstores that adds "social layer" of recommendations, reviews, and opinions. But Taneli is not done with RunToShop, instead he will join the company's Board, and continue putting in part-time effort guiding the firm. Taneli sounds confident RunToShop will have a successful 2009, assisted by the recently finished a new funding round in December.
Taneli states he is now looking for new challenges, either starting a new project or joining something existing, and invites all suggestions.
How Good is Your Startup's Visibility?
Blue White Partners, which Finnish and US based team helps Finnish hi-tech companies to go global might shed some light in it. Blue White investigated(pdf, in Finnish) over 1100 Finnish hi-tech companies’ visibility on the web. Average Blue White Web Score for Finnish companies was 39/100 where as global average is 50. The score is made by investigating content semantics, language, search engine rank and index, and presence in social media.
The top100 mostly consisted of big companies but there were even few startups like 8. Muxlim(95), 13. XIHA(93), 14. Kuneri(93), 15. TripSay(92). (On side note ArcticStartup got 94.)
There has been some discussion what is the actual importance of SEO or is it a complete fad. While methods ranging from white to shady black, I wouldn't argue that SEO is the most important thing to consider when building a startup or product, but you shouldn’t ignore it either. Consider making your product crawlable. Provide some information on the inner workings of your service. Every public page should be your landing page. Use Google tools, like Adwords to select keywords for your product.
We living in the online world tend to forget how much less offline people know about current developments of the web. Help them to find you.
What is your experience, how important is SEO? Does search engine traffic stick?
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Edit: Added top42 companies, by Blue White Partners (note: may be subject to change)
Red Herring Global Top 100 Finalists Announced
During the weekend Red Herring, a global media company, announced 200 finalists of their annual Global Top 100 technology companies competition. The winners, top 100 out of 200, will be announced in January 14-16, 2009.
There are a few Nordic companies listed that were also on Red Herring's Top 100 European finalists this year, including Floobs, Muxlim and Aito Technologies. Some of the new comers to the global short list include Hammerkit and Ball-IT, which was listed also in 2007.
Congratulations to the finalists and watch out for the monkey business.
TechCrunch is coming to Slush Helsinki
ArcticStartup is partnering with TechCrunch UK and Slush Helsinki in organizing a brunch for start-ups, entrepreneurs, investors and key industry players the day after the Slush event. Slush will take place on Monday 24th November and the brunch on Tuesday 25th.
Slush is an event for startups by startups in Helsinki, Finland. The event will showcase all the major Finnish Internet-era success stories from F-secure to Jaiku, from Habbo Hotel to MySQL, along with all the hottest Finnish startups.
TechCrunch Brunch @ Slush kicks off with discussions about entrepreneurship and startups in general with Mike Butcher, the editor of TechCrunch UK initiating and moderating the discussions, followed by plenty of networking over brunch.
The event is sponsored by Muxlim, a Finnish born Muslim online community with users from over 190 countries across the world. The site is the official Finland nominee to the World Summit Awards 2009, for the "e-Inclusion & Participation" category.
There is limited capacity for attendees at TechCrunch Brunch @ Slush, so TechCrunch is asking for a €20 cover charge to minimise no-shows. The brunch will take place at Cafe Ekberg, from 09:30am to 01:00pm. You can register for the TC brunch here, and for the Slush itself here. Hope to see you in the Slush on the 24th as well as at the brunch the day after!
Muxlim building Muslim virtual world
According to TechCrunch UK (blog post here) Muxlim, the Finnish born Muslim social network, is launching a virtual world especially Muslims in mind. This will be much like the other virtual worlds we are familiar with such as The Second Life apart from the Muslim specific features.
TechCrunch UK reports:
The idea is that something tailored to the Muslim world would be allowed through the IP-blocks of countries like United Arab Emirates which currently stops access to virtual worlds and online games considered unsuitable or offensive to Muslim culture. The virtual world is said to launch in 4-6 weeks[...]
The revenue model will be VIP accounts, virtual gifts, virtual furniture/clothes, themes/styles, profile applications, advertising, branded communities and physical merchandise like t-shirts.
Muxlim has been very active lately. In addition to the new virtual world, they are planning to open an office in the UK and a big UK launch event at the end of January 2009 to go along with that.
If you look at the TechCrunch UK comments it clearly shows that religion is much more sensitive topic in the UK than it is over here in the Nordics and Baltics. Very few, if any, of the comments actually deal with the product itself, but rather with the fact that the virtual world is for Muslims. Mike Butcher, the Editor of TechCruch UK, decided to shut down the comments since the blog post created so many racist comments. I have not seen such negative approach here in the Nordics or Baltics even though Muxlim has been in the headlines quite a bit. It seems that UK has much more to learn from us than just financial regulation.
Edit: Here's also Wired's take on the Muxlim virtual world.
One Week To SIME Helsinki
Just over one week to go to SIME Helsinki event held in Teatteri. The reason we are mentioning this is of course the fact that you will receive a discount of 20% with the code arcticstartup when registering for your ticket. SIME Helsinki is held on the 17th of September.
There's an interesting line up present, a few interesting keynotes from statups' perspective could be the one of Stefan Glaenzer, founder of Last.fm as well as Mohamed El-Fatatry, founder of Muxlim.
I'll be present there and will be doing some interviews as well as blogging about the event at ArcticStartup of course. Do let us know if you are coming, would be nice to meet up!
Muxlim goes commercials
Muxlim TV, a video sharing website of the Finnish based Muslim social media website that attracts visitors from over 190 countries, has produced a rather nifty commercial.
The video reminds me an awful lot about the commercials that Apple makes. I believe the guys at Muxlim tried to do exactly that, which is why it works so well. Great stuff!
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Red Herring publishes finalists for Europe 100 list, suspected tax frauds and financial obscurity in the background
Several Finnish companies have been included as finalists for the 2008 Europe 100 list of the of most promising ventures Red Herring is once again publishing. The companies are Aito Technologies, Floobs, Muxlim, nCore, Severa, Whatamap.com, Widisys, and Valimo Wireless. The winners will be declared at Red Herring Europe 2008 event in Malta on April 14-16th.
While the nomination gives good visibility to the companies, it's worth a note, though, before going boasting around that the reputation Red Herring has is not that good everywhere. There's a whole lot of suspected monkey business going on related to the company. According to rumors (see ValleyWag's posts for example), Red Herring’s CEO and Chairman, Alex Vieux, doesn't pay his bills (nor employees' salaries). In addition, he's got the U.S. tax officials of IRS on his back, suspected of having $2 million in unpaid payroll taxes according to ex-employees. Mr. Vieux has also been said to to have fled French and Swiss police also interested to investigate possible unpaid taxes. A good sign is neither that Red Herring has lost quite a many board members over the last couple of years.
Although not all the rumors may be true, it nevertheless seems the company is in trouble and it's unsure if it's able to turn its course. As a takeaway it's good to enjoy the publicity the nomination brings, but at the same time it's worthwhile to assess what kind of association to have with Red Herring in particular and keep one's ears open.
Educational seminars for entrepreneurs in Finnish
Laurea is arranging a series of seminars for entrepreneurs in Finnish. The first was actually held today, but the next one will be on 25th of March in Leppävaara. The speakers in the series of seminars are Joonas Turkama of CoreFinland and Mikko Silventola of Calcus Kustannus, Mohamed El Fatatry of Muxlim.com, Esko Alanko of Micromedia, Taneli Tikka of Wisdom Like Silence, Heidi Ekholm-Talas of BSG Marketing and finally but not least Eero Lehti from the The Federation of Finnish Enterprises.
Interesting line-up with interesting people! You can read more about the series of talks from here. As a short reminder, we (Arctic Startup and Open Coffee) will be hosting another event in April on entrepreneurship. The schedule and theme will be announced later.
