Sellfy Offers A Painless Way To Sell Your Digital Product
Artists, designers, developers and other creative individuals who are looking to sell their digital product online often lack the time and resources to set up an online store. Latvian startup Sellfy plans to make the selling process as painless as possible with its streamlined “drop & sell” application.
Importance Of Foreigners In An Entrepreneurship Ecosystem
This post belongs to a series of posts, supported by the Finnish Software Entrepreneurs.
Very few people on a macro economical scale realise the importance of entrepreneurship to a nation's economic welfare. However, even fewer realise the importance of foreign talent to the success of a nation's entrepreneurship ecosystem and hence the success of a nation's welfare. While there have been studies to support this, it hasn't reached the level of acknowledgement it deserves in the Nordics and Baltics yet.
Flattr Takes A Step Towards PayPal With A Twist
We covered Flattr in our review last May. In short, the service is way for content producers to get paid through micro-donations by individuals like you and me. Or more accurately, it was that service since last Sunday. Yesterday, Flattr began making some important changes to its service that will put it on a different path of development.
PayPal Opens Micropayment Solution To Public
Last week PayPal announced that it has opened its micropayments solution to the public globally. In essence, it's a better way for developers, content creators and publishers to charge for small amounts of content quickly. PayPal has designed this new service to be more useful for small, quick payments instead of the traditional way of purchasing and paying for services with PayPal where you have to leave the original website you were on.
Scred Comes Out With A New Focus
Scred, a house hold Finnish startup who we have used to seeing tracking debts and shared expenses is now shifting their focus towards more comprehensively managing money.
They start with managing money for different groups such as bands, indie film crews, event organisers and associations. The point is to offer a solution for communities which often don't have good online financial applications and don't know about accounting.
Along with the new focus the guy have also redesigned the site. Kudos to the team for learning the design tools as they went along. As Kristoffer from Scred told me "We ended up learning how to do design ourselves as we couldn't find anyone sufficiently skilled and available to work with our bootstrapped approach". Whether that was a good choice, I left to the user to decide herself.
mobileAxept Enabling Mobile Payments
mobileAxept is a Norwegian startup providing a mobile phone payment system, which directly charges an existing credit card or a bank account.
mobileAxept's solution is based on a patented gateway for securing transactions between the customer, merchant, and credit card companies or banks. The merchants can offer customers a way to pay with their mobile phone, either by calling or sending a SMS to specified numer. However, the payment will be processed on the customer's credit or debit card rather than added to phone bill. This way the phone can be used for quick impulse purchases or micropayments without big overhead costs typically associated with mobile payments.
Set Up A Business With Zero Cost: Scred Introduces MiniCorps
Scred, a Finnish company building tools and services to help friends, groups and communities manage their money, has released a new version of their service. Before Scred enabled me to track debts and share expenses in multiple currencies. I found the basic Scred service already useful in sharing expenses with my flat mates. Now Scred has come out with a new version of their service, which has a set of new features that take the service to a whole new level.
Scred explores new business models
Scred, a Finnish community-oriented cost balancing tool, which initially focused on balancing debts and shared expenses among a group of friends announced that they are looking into new possibilities to leverage their back-end infrastructure.
Scred has partnered with Alternative Party which will be held in Helsinki in the coming October. Scred built an inexpensive bespoke ticketing service for the party with which you can reserve, buy and print the tickets straight from the web. Tickets are also machine verifiable which is more than many other service providers offer.
Kristoffer Lawson from Scred told us that the new service is currently not available for 3rd parties, but that they they will see how the first deployment will go and add some features before deciding whether it's the right path to take. According to Kristoffer tickets can be currently bought via PayPal and 'couple of banking services', but the credit card option is on its way.
The party in itself is the second largest 'demoscene-party' in Finland after Assembly. Alternative Party aims to mix demos, music and art. Unlike Assembly, Alternative Party's focus is more on artistic shows and activities and there is practically no gaming.
There is starting to be a lot of activity in the e-commerce infrastructure space coming from Finland. Scred seems to be gradually heading that direction and Fruugo is looking into becoming the “trusted 3rd party of ecommerce". Based on Fruugo's still mysterious website we will find out what they will actually offer in more detail later in 2008 when they're planning to launch. This is something that might also be of interest to Scred since after knowing what Fruugo is aiming for Scred can better adjust their product offering to the market.
