App Developers Innovate With Norway's Public Data
Apps4Norge was a competition organised jointly by IKT Norge (ICT Norway) and Difi, the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment. Prizes worth NOK 150,000 (€20,000) were on offer for apps and ideas utilising public data to benefit society.
The government did its bit by opening up a raft of new datasets. Location and weather data were the most utilised in the 50 ideas and 38 prototype apps submitted to the jury. The most interesting ideas combined multiple datasets, such as a map application for sailors combining location and weather data.
Investment Negotiation Secrets Revealed In Term Sheet Battle’s Nordic Tour
When we talk about funding rounds, the money seems to be the only thing that matters. But more important than that is what the money is actually buying. With so many fun clauses like liquidity preferences and clawback provisions potentially littering the term sheet put in front of you, it's best to know what you're getting into before you find yourself in a VC's office.
The best way to learn is by watching, so here's an event we're super excited about supporting. Term Sheet Battles are coming to Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm in the last week of this month to show 200 attendees in each city what happens during a negotiation.
Oslo's Swipe Launches With World Record Attempt
The digital eyes of Europe are on Amsterdam today as The Next Web's sold out European Conference gets underway. Leading the Norwegian contingent is Swipe, one of 20 finalists in the eagerly awaited Microsoft BizSpark Startup Rally.
Co-founders Horia Cernusca and Håkon Eide have been hard at work perfecting their presentation software since winning Oslo's last Startup Weekend. Today they unveil their product, billed as "a new way to deliver and watch presentations - from any device to any number of devices, in real-time".
Keep Your Eye On Norway - A Startup Scene Is MESHing Together
This past week we had the opportunity to participate in MESH's 1 year anniversary, and finally check out co-working space that's bringing together the community necessary for an entrepreneurial ecosystem and making some noise about it.
A startup ecosystem is sorely needed in Norway. There are some cool startups popping up there, but despite having the same population as Helsinki and a major tech companies like Opera located in Oslo, you really don't hear of many startups outside the oil and gas industry.
But MESH is making a movement happen by being a grassroots space 'by and for' entrepreneurs. Their 2500 m2 building located right in Oslo's city center offers around 50 desks and 9 offices. On top of that they have an entrepreneur-geared cafe, a new bar (which divides into three meeting spaces during the day), and a nightclub with a retractable roof, which doubles as an event space for 400 people. It's... a nice place.
And the space is growing in cool areas. On top of constructing a bigger community space, they're adding a sound studio for artists that need equipment, and right now they're putting together a Maker Space with 3D printers and hardware tools for hackers and artists to come up with new inventions.
WiMP DIY Allows Unsigned Artists To Monetize Streaming
Norway-based WiMP is bringing some innovation to their music streaming platform through the launch of WiMP DIY, allowing unsigned artists to upload their music, and take in 70% of the income. WiMP offers a more editorially focused take on a music streaming service, and with it, these unsigned artists have the possiblitly to be featured in WiMP's NewSound campaign, which highlights new, local music, or to be put in playlists next to international acts.
"We launch this offer to cover a market demand. WIMP DIY is not intended as an alternative to a conventional record deal, but as a push in that direction. WiMP wants to invite artists who do not yet have a record label supporting them, but who have got ambitions of reaching out with their music," says Sveinung Rindal, Head of Editorial at WiMP.
Opera Moves To WebKit
Well, we can follow one Opera story after another. Opera has announced 300 million active users, but the big news is that they're moving from Presto, their own rendering engine, to WebKit. With Safari, Chrome, and now Opera now using the engine, well over 40% of the internet will be displayed through Webkit. The main motivation for this move is likely cost - contributing to another engine is cheaper than maintaining and building your own.
"The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need," says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie.
MESH Weaves Together The Norwegian Startup Scene
Oslo is struggling to make a name for itself for its startup scene, but a new co-working space opened its doors in April that aims to become the nexus of the startup community. Located in downtown Oslo, MESH is a huge co-working and event space that has already started providing the networks, orgnaization, and services needed for the startup community to prosper.
The two founders of MESH, Audun Ueland and Anders Mjåset have an entrepreneurial background themselves. About five years ago the two started up a recruiting company focused on engineering students which they sold to their competitors. After that they started another company that didn't take off, but then met up with someone who was looking to patent a solution to protect strollers and other items on planes. After expanding across Northern Europe they sold Pram Pack to Stokke, and used those funds to start MESH.
Stay.com Goes Social And Offline With Its Travel Guides
Stay.com, the Norway based travel startup has come out with a new version of its travel app. Last October we had a detailed write up of the company and how it became to be. For this summer, the company has made its city guides social and user friendly with making them work offline. The applications work on Android and the iOS platforms.
The app features some 116 cities which users are able to download to their phones with a simple tap. Each city guide has numerous sites to visit, restaurants to eat at and places to go. Also, not to mention an offline map that works with the iPhone's positioning system showing how lost you might be. Going offline with the city guides helps with the horrendous data roaming costs one can churn overseas.
Norwegian bMobilized Raises €1.15 Million Series A
bMobilized, the Norwegian-originated creator of a mobile website conversion solution for small and medium sized businesses, has raised $1.5 million (€1.15 million) in series A financing. The round was financed by two European early-stage investors, Alliance Ventures and Investinor. After being founded in 2005 bMobilized moved operations from Oslo to New York City in 2010, where it now has 14 employees.
The company's technology automatically reproduces a website's look and feel on a mobile device, while also claiming to add more functionality than what other mobile conversion tool can offer. The conversion into HTML5 is customizable, and can translate the mobile website into any of seven language. Mobile features like a contact bar, maps, social sharing buttons, product promo window on home page, and other features can also be easily added in.
betaFACTORY: New Incubator Out Of Norway, Application Deadline Soon
New out of Norway is betaFACTORY, an incubator with the goal of mentoring and funding 50 companies over the next 3 years. The incubator will be located in downtown Oslo and was put together using the same fundamentals as Y Combinator, TechStars, and other intensive incubators that provide a strong focus on customer development and give a small amount of seed funding. I got the chance to talk with Brian Weisberg, the founder of betaFACTORY about who they are and what they're looking for. The deadline for the application is January 8th.
Bypass Apple App Store With Majoobi
Oslo based startup Majoobi has published their application which helps anyone create an iPhone, iPad or an Android app - online. Majoobi makes use of HTML5 and users are essentially creating websites that are optimized for the iOS and Android operating platforms. The service is extremely simple to use and will have you up and running in minutes. It took me about a minute to understand it and create a simple site for ArcticStartup as a demo.
Expono Improves On Flickr
Expono is a Norwegian company, working in the field of photo sharing. This is an industry that hasn't had too many newcomers since Flickr has gained ground among the early adopters. Expono, however, has some very neat features compared to Flickr as well as some short comings too. Nevertheless, it is a service worth giving a try. The service is being built by a small five team combo in Oslo, Norway. The company was founded already back in 2007.
TravellersPoint - Norway's Pride In Travel
Travellerspoint is a Norwegian community based travel website that both combines wiki-style guides and a personal plaform for content sharing. Travellerspoint offers a relatively good source of information on numerous cities as well as a place to host your travel photos as well as blog about your travels. The site is by all means popular - their tour states they have over 178 000 travellers registered as members.
Despite the success with the site (it gathers about 50-60k uniques a month), they have not managed to integrate the different parts of the site very well. I guess this is something that still lacks in many ways across the industry. I have to say that TripSay is perhaps a step closer to this (then again - they do lack the large community TravellersPoint has). By integrating the services I mean the issue of combining them closer instead of having each service in its own "silo" and not cross-linking for example. I'm sure there is a ton of interesting data to be found from the travel stories of people in the blogs - but the link between these and the wiki-style guides is still missing.
TravellersPoint's business model at the moment is advertising and commissions from hotel and hostel bookings, as one might guess. The interesting question to ask is will these sites gain more traffic as people search deeper online for that best deal on hotels in a certain city or will they suffer from the downturn in the same way as the travel industry in general?
