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, 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, 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

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!