Tuxera is a Finnish software startup specialized in file system interoperability software. The firm has developed Windows-interoperable file system drivers for NTFS and exFAT, allowing device manufacturers who use Linux or other non-Windows platforms to still provide plug and play access to the files from Windows or Mac computers. It claims to be the only company currently providing such system drivers to device manufacturers who use Linux or other non-Windows platform.
open source
Tuxera Shows Example In Finding Your Niche
Global Call Stirs Up The Market In Iceland
During my visit to Iceland earlier this week I met with a local VoIP company called Global Call. While there are many VoIP companies around, Global Call had managed to arouse some serious interest and hate towards them. First of all, many of their clients like them for their low rates where as the other telcos seriously hate them for competing with them. I talked to Benedikt Bjarnason and Höskuldur Darri Ellertsson about their business and how they’re doing.
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MySQL Founders Invest In Cross-Platform Tech Provider Mobile Sorcery
A Swedish mobile technology startup Mobile Sorcery has gotten a Series A investment of undisclosed sum a second round seed investment of 1.5 million Swedish Kronor (around 145.000 EUR or 206.000 USD)(Correction: the actual investment was a lot bigger, “a proper A round”, yet the exact sum is undisclosed) from MySQL founders David Axmark and Michael Widenius, and STING (Stockholm Innovation and Growth) Capital private equity fund. Majority of this round’s investment came Axmark and Widenius, while for STING this was the second investment in Mobile Sorcery.
Flowplayer – The Next Open Source Success?
I first heard from Flowplayer from the guys at Floobs. Kaitsu, their CEO, said that I might want to check out these guys. The line was something in the lines of ‘…yeah, He’s really good. He worked for us before but wanted to go and develop his own open source project. It’s all cool’. This healthy attitude is something that other industries should copy. Very rarely you hear such a supportive attitude toward someone who takes off to develop his own project.
Flowplayer is a flash video player, just like YouTube player. Except that the founders claim it’s a dramatically better alternative and they have the number to back up the statement. They are currently receiving 14 000 visitors visiting their site a day and the player is downloaded 1 000 times a day. The founders aim is to make Flowplayer the #1 Flash video player in the world.
Why its better than the alternatives out there
- Customization – Every single aspect of Flowplayer can be tweaked to meet your needs. This includes both the behaviour and the appearance.
- Scripting – Flowplayer API is object-oriented and not just a flat list of functions. The event model is taken to the next level, allowing you to link custom functionality to every player event.
- Plugins – Flowplayer can be extended with plugins. Some already-existing plugins allow you to, for example, place HTML content over the video when the playback ends, or implement custom playlists using only basic HTML skills.
- Streaming servers – Flowplayer offers specialized streaming plugins for several different types of stream source. You can also build your own.
- Multiple players on a page – You can have many player instances on a page without compromising the page’s load speed or usability. A splash image loads in place of the video players before they are clicked to begin playback – but you can still supply a full configuration to each player in advance of it actually being loaded.
You can see more of the above here.
The story
Flowplayer’s story is a story that I have heard many times over, but before it has so often taken place in Silicon Valley. This time it takes place in our backyard, which is something I expect to see happen a lot more often. Good stuff!
The story of Flowplayer began in 2005 when there wasn’t good video players around. There was no YouTube and the Internet seemed to lack the kind of video player that works on all major browsers. Flash technology came to rescue and Anssi placed a small open source project called “Flowplayer” to SourceForge. The first version was quite limited but enough to attract a few downloads per day. These download numbers were enough for Anssi to get excited and he started improving the player. Soon it became so popular that he decided to ask if Tero would be interested to join the project.
Tero joined the team at the beginning of 2008 and started working on the website. Soon after that we realized that we want to make a player that is something different – something better…
Business model
Licensing is Flowplayer’s number one business model and a single commercial license costs 95 USD. Other commercial licensing types are north of that sum and go up to 1495 USD for a bundled license.
The Free version of Flowplayer is licensed under the GPL license and it includes a copyright notice together with Flowplayer’s logo. According to the GPL this information must be displayed even if you modify the source code of the player. Flowplayer’s commercial versions are free from this rule and you can brand your player the way you like it. Their number one competitor i is JW FLV Player.
Flowplayer is also experimenting with advertising as a business model. This could yield potentially lot bigger revenues than the simple commercial licensing, but is only in its infancy across the industry. Flowplayer is now partnered with LiveRail, but others have also contacted the company and are working on Flowplayer integration, including EyeWonder, MediaMelon and DoubleClick. Flowplayers’s goal is to have many advertising partners and customers can choose from a list of options, including pure Open Source alternatives that one can host on her own without any ad-networks taking a cut from her revenue. The advertising solution is showing promise already as the company receives 10 queries a week asking about the advertising option. We believe that this space is going to get very interesting before the year is out and we are surely not alone with our prediction.
Google Ceases Development of Jaiku, Open Sources Platform
Google announced that they’re closing or ceasing development of variety of services, including Jaiku.
As mentioned eariler, Jaiku has been in process of porting to Google App Engine and there have been some rumours of opening the Jaiku platform. Official release now states that Jaiku Engine will be open sourced under the Apache Licence, and supported by volunteer team of Googlers.
This probably means that Google will not have any plans of integrating or bringing Jaiku to other platforms like Android. Jaiku will transform into a general microblogging platform and the open source efforts will help keeping Jaiku.com development alive. Other than that, this is a huge hit on the Jaiku.com community, brand and service. There are benefits of building platforms, but usually a more intense community is not one of them.
Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku and now a Googler, stated in recent Jaiku discussion (1, 2) that current schedule for release is during this spring.
It will be also intresting to see what kind of changes App Engine will need to run the full feature set of Jaiku.
Star Wreck Studios gathering attention abroad
Star Wreck Studios, an open source movie making platform or rather a community of passionate movie loving individuals that produced the Star Wreck, a movie with eight million downloads from all around the world, has been featured in the VentureBeat.
The article is quite thorough in explaining what Star Wreck Studios is doing and it sounds very promising indeed, even though already the first comment to the actual article questioned the long term prospects of the open source movie making model. I am sure all open source models have their own problems and hurdles to over come but just like with the software business I believe the model can be made to work better than most of the industry heavy weights can predict. After all, it is hard to argue with eight million downloads achieved with a mere $20,000.
Regardless of the Star Wreck Studios’ operating model’s credentials it is absolutely fantastic to see another Finnish startup featured in a media such as the VentureBeat. Now, I suspect that Star Wreck Studios’ board member and a personal friend of mine Peter Vesterbacka had something to do with the fact that VentureBeat’s reporter Tanja Aitamurto took note and eventually wrote the piece. I’d hope more people that have similar connections to the Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley or even to the Silicon Roundabout in London would recognize the opportunities and contact the promising Nordic start-ups and start evangelize them on their trips over seas or over the canal. If such a culture would born it would benefit everybody, not least the evangelists themselves.
Going back to the article, here’s a few tidbits that I found particularly interesting:
Star Wreck Studios isn’t just about collaborative movie making, it’s also about collaborative movie viewing. [...] For example, if you’re watching a horror flick, as a part of the plot, your phone rings, and when you answer, the person on the other end of the line is the main character of the movie.
[...]
[Peter Vesterbacka] says that the goal for the project is to wreck the Hollywood model of film making.
[...]
“StarWreck easily generated more than 10 times return. The numbers are small, but the cost, $20,000, was minimal as well”, Vesterbacka says. “And when your movie costs only 20K to make, you don’t need to have an audience of millions or tens of millions to reach your goals. But if you spent a hundred million on the production, the expectations for the size of the audience grows, too.”
[...]
Star Wreck Studios is bootstrapped so far, and the company is hoping to get a first round of funding in a year and some angel led funding in the next few months.
We here at ArcticStartup are fans already and looking forward to Star Wreck Studios’ future productions. Let us know if you know any other promising open source projects going on in the Nordics. We’d love to hear what else is cooking on the open source front.
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