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?
