MySites Gathers Interest While IRC-Gallery Shows Lower Usage
Ramine Darabiha, the founder and CEO, of MySites blogged about their service growth statistics. He's finally managed to get the growth curve to remind the commonly used hockey stick figure. In August 2009 they reached just a little under 2,5 million hits to their services and this has nicely grown through Q4 of 2009 to about over 6 million hits in December 2009. In January 2010, while the month is not over, they have managed to receive over 25 million hits to their services.
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.
XIHA Life Partners With BlueTeach To Enable Online Teaching
XIHA Life has partnered with a French company called BlueTeach to enable online teaching at their multi-cultural and multi-national social network. XIHA Life is a Finnish startup that has moved to Switzerland (Update: They're still registered in Finland). They have steadily grown their user base and Jani Penttinen, Co-founder of the company has tweeted that they recently passed the 600 000 registration mark.
With the help of BlueTeach's in-browser application, teachers are able to go through a variety of material together with their students. BlueTeach is also able to monetize the teaching situation as teachers are able to ask for a price for the session or teach for free. Looking at the offering BlueTeach has, I have to state that it is a pretty neat package put together. The service is also easy to use and you are able to use it to record your lessons and have them online for later use.
MySites And Dazzboard Team Up
Two Finnish startups, MySites (see our previous story here) and Dazzboard (see our previous story here) announced recently that they will partner up: MySites which has completely rebranded itself as 'social cloud storage' is now offering Dazzboard users (as well as everybody else) unlimited amount of data storage for free.
We talked to both, MySites and Dazzboard CEOs, to get to the bottom of what is happening with the services and what the co-operation is all about.
MySites, for its part, is going head on againts services like Dropbox or even Mobile.me, which are cloud storage services primarily for consumer use. Ramine Darabiha, MySites CEO, emphasized that "MySites is going for the social angle. Not just a file service, but the best way to share files while you're on Facebook and on Twitter." Darabiha adds that "MySites is aiming to be the most Facebook friendly cloud storage service by integrating with many Facebook features such as friends and commenting to name a few".
Interview With Ramine Darabiha of MySites
I 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.
MySites Redesigns And Re-Positions Themselves
MySites, 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.
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.
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.
MySites Going After Familiarity
Here's a video where Ramine Darabiha, the CEO of MySites, is interviewed by Mashable, whose summer tour MySites sponsored. MySites is a Finnish startup that provides a web desktop that lets you store up to 10 GB of photos, music, videos, and other files that you can easily share
I was critical of MySites on my earlier post and MySites has been very active working on the site since. In the video below Ramine points out that MySites is not going after the most savviest of tech geeks, but aims for students and gamers only somewhat familiar with technology who many times use for example Microsoft's products. This in mind MySites has for example made the desktop icons double clickable just as you would open a file on your desktop.
So instead of going for the ultimate user experience as we know it MySites is going for the familiarity and build the user experience around that. An interesting and brave strategy to not aim for improving the experience, but rather to make it resemble what people have used to using. Even though I still do think MySites has ways to go with the service you can't blame them for not trying.
MySites launches
MySites, a Finnish startup based in Tampere that provides a single location to save, manage and share content online, has finally launched after delaying their launch for a little over a month to iron out the last bugs.
Even before their formal launch MySites had been active in the sponsoring front having already sponsored ArcticStartup Events, student union parties and gaming events. For the launch MySites did not slow down a bit and went on to sponsor Mashable's US Summer Tour 2008.
On average MySites has been more active in sponsoring events and websites than we have accustomed to see from a Nordic startup that has just launched . Despite their attempts to get a lot of awareness for the service they have still quite a ways to go with improving the service itself.
The user experience is confusing at best. MySites user interface is not nearly as intuitive as it would need to be and since their service intends to combine many different functions under one roof this should be even a greater concern as the level of complexity tends to creep up anyway compared to one-purpose-only services.
Similarly, the layout could be a lot more unified from the get-go. There's at least three kinds of different animation on the front page, not to talk about the rather foggy video clip from what should be inspiring user interviews. Maybe this is intentional, but for me it only makes the service harder to figure out.
It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out how to navigate around the site including the times the service froze and I had to reopen the page to continue. Nevertheless if the user interface would be easier to navigate I could see myself using MySites to share movies with my friends which can't be emailed around due to their sheer size. The 10GB that I get for free by signing up could also be used to share and store other large files among a group of friends or colleagues. Thus for the moment I could see the service moving towards a cloud of stuff that I could share with a group of people. If it only wouldn't be so hard to use.
MySites targeting niche audiences
MySites, a Finnish startup providing a single location to save, manage and share content online, has decided to focus their marketing efforts selectively in two niche audiences. This is an interesting marketing strategy for a startup since it might make it possible for a startup to reach a critical user base without an acceptance from a wider community for what is still a rather generic service.
MySites has decided to go after gamers and university students. MySites CEO, Ramine Darabiha, tells us that gamers and students are the kinds of users who respond the best to MySites as they tend to prefer sharing pictures and music. Many users also seem to use MySites as an "private online hard disk", to access for example their school documents.
MySites had a strong presence at Lan79, a large European gaming LAN party. Ramine told us that this way they made important contacts there with key players in the online gaming industry, such as the largest online gaming news sites, event organizers , as well as several top teams.
This allowed MySites to gather attention for their own CounterStrike Source tournament that took place on the 9th of May when MySites organized a large one-night tournament for CounterStrike Source. The teams were competing for a total cash prize of 1000€. Coverage of this tournament was spread across 8 prominent online gaming news sites, namely Vakarm, Cadred, Team-aAa, eFever, Actu-Lan, London Mint, Team-Coolermaster, Inside Source. Additionally, Ramine told us that there was a live web tv stream of every match, which hosted up to 1000 spectators.
MySites has also been focusing their promotion on students, targeting student unions of universities of Oulu and Tampere. The company has been presenting the service to the heads of the student unions in order to get the most active members of the student body involved in promoting their services.
According to Ramine, as a result of these efforts, MySites is known by and has contacts in many of the top gaming teams and the staff of online gaming sites as well as uniniversity student unions. This in an interesting grass roots approach that reminds me of the the way Facebook spread in the early 2005 among university students before it hit the mainstream.
MySites is clearly facing the same IPR issues as any other site regarding the sharing movies and music online. Thus, it seems to be mainly a convenient way to store data into the cloud for one's own personal use since it can hardly steel a significant share of the personal photo sharing business from Facebook, Flickr and the likes. In this respect the strategy of targeting niche audiences with specific needs might prove to be a wise approach.
Disclosure: MySites is sponsoring Arctic Startup Events
Open Coffee Club Helsinki with Arctic Startup
We've been quiet too long, but we've got something good for you coming up! Next week's Thursday we'll be organising an event together with Ville from Open Coffee Club Helsinki in Dubrovnik.
We will have 4 companies on stage giving you talks about entrepreneurship and how they came up with what they are doing. The companies, some of which have also been covered on Arctic Startup, are Vailoma.com, Floobs, Whatamap and Mysites.com.
Mysites.com is also sponsoring the event. Mysites.com is a new Finland based company which lets its users manage and put all their online content in a single place. They will launch in the very near future, but they wanted to give us a sneak peak behind the curtain next Thursday.
Here's the event in more detail:
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Dubrovnik Lounge & Lobby
Address: Eerikinkatu 11 (downstairs), Helsinki
The event goes more or less as follows:
-Doors open at 6pm
-The presentations will start at 6.30pm
-Each company will talk about 10-15 minute
-And for the next hour and a half we can chat over a cup of coffee or a pint, meet new people and connect
If you want, you can join in on the event in Facebook. See you next thursday!
