Did Supercell Just Receive Funding?
Back in February we covered a new Finnish gaming startup called Supercell. It was founded by Mikko Kodisoja, one of the gaming gurus in the Finnish gaming industry. Supercell also received a significant amount of funding from London Venture Partners' Phil Harrison (ex-Sony global studio director), David Gardner, (ex-EA COO, one of the early investors into Playfish), David Lau-Kee, Paul Heydon, Initial Capital LP (fund founded by serial entrepreneurs) as well as Jari Ovaskainen (ex-Iobox CEO). However, Petteri Koponen, one of the founders and early stage investors in Lifeline Ventures tweeted something interesting before and during the weekend.
Looking Past "Finland Post Welfare"
Students in Finland have come a long way in a few years. Last night, Finland saw one of its most impressive events in support of growth entrepreneurship - all organised by a small group of passionate students. What makes this all the better, is that the event was covered by numerous national media and the panelists at the actual event included the hotshots of Finnish business environment; a mix of very influential business people and a group of startup entrepreneurs. The event was called "Finland Post Welfare", questioning the things Finland should work on to sustain its welfare status. It was put together by Aalto Entrepreneurship Society.
We live blogged the event last night in English as the event itself was held in Finnish. As it's not the best use of anyone's time to suggest that you go through the logs - we'll do our best to summarise the event in this post.
Männistö And Tikka Spark Conversation On Finnish Startup Ecosystem
Lasse Männistö and Taneli Tikka came out yesterday with a three point suggestion to renew the governmental work regarding startups and growth companies. The timing is intentional and perfect, later tonight Aalto Entrepreneurship Society will host a panel discussion with some of the most renown business men and women Finland has. Taneli Tikka is one of the more acknowledged Finnish serial entrepreneurs and Lasse Männistö, a member of the Helsinki City Council, is a candidate running for Finnish Parliament.
The recommendations can be read on Lasse Männistö's website, for example, but we'll summarise the points and other discussion it has sparked. Like we've written before, Finland will see its parliamentary elections in April and many startup entrepreneurs would like to see the topic included among the other important discussion items. Many, rightly so, believe focus on startups is one of the key ways to improve the economy in the long term.
Making Growth Entrepreneurship Political
Finland will be having its parliamentary this April. Naturally, entrepreneurship and welfare are on the agenda, but one aspect of entrepreneurship that has been missing is the lobbying of growth entrepreneurship. On 21st of March, Aalto ES will be putting together an event together with a whole bunch of organisations to promote growth entrepreneurship for the candidates running for parliament. The event is controversially called Finland Post Welfare.
SeriesSeed.fi Brings Standardized Legal Documents For Startups
SeriesSeed.fi is perhaps one of the greatest startup related initiatives Finland has seen in a while. The site, put together by passionate individuals, gives away free of charge basic, standardized legal documents for startups. The documents cover the share holders agreement, term sheet and an investment agreement. Finland is a pioneer on this front as similar documents have been made available for the public only in a few startup hubs, such as Y-Combinator and TechStars. One of the key influencers of the SeriesSeed.fi documents are the SeriesSeed.com documents from the US.
Seedcamp Launches Seedsummit, A Service To Find Active Early Stage Investors
Seedcamp has just announced earlier today about their launch of a new service, seedsummit, which is aimed to help startups find investors more easily. It's in short, the AngelList for the rest of us. Seedsummit has no specific geographic focus and it has angels listed from Africa, Asia, Europe, Nordics and Baltics to name a few. While there are only a few names listed, I'm sure it will supply a need in demand.
Thinglink Raises 1M USD From Inventure And Lifeline Ventures
Thinglink, a Finnish product tagging startup based in Helsinki/Palo Alto (see our previous coverage), has just announced it has raised USD 1 million in funding from Nordic Inventure and Lifeline Ventures. The funding will be used to develop in-image product advertising network for brands, retailers and other product advertisers. The firm's reference customers include the Scandinavian media house Aller, the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE (Wenzel’s Antique Road Show), and interior design brand Artek.
The Next 100 Million Euro Business Might Come From Bootcamp
Aalto Venture Garage is putting together a busy two week program they call Bootcamp. Bootcamp is to be held four times a year and it's an intensive program aimed at speeding up already existing early stage ventures. The first Bootcamp is to be run between September 17th and 30th. They are now accepting applications, but be quick - the deadline is September 8th. A mentoring program wouldn't be anything without high profile mentors and well enough, Aalto Venture Garage has managed to secure a good lineup of Finnish startup professionals. Mind you, the program isn't only aimed at Finnish startups - it's open for everyone around the Baltic rim.
Mikael Jungner Joins Sofanatics Board
The former Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (YLE) CEO Mikael Jungner has joined the social television startup, Sofanatics' board. Sofanatics is a social television startup where in the first versions users can watch television with others via a web service and share the passion. At the moment Sofanatics is focused around sports. Mikael Jungner, has left YLE as of this month and is now looking forwards to a political career along with some private sector agreements, such as the Sofanatics board seat.
Petteri Koponen Of Lifeline Ventures Talks About Emotions. Yeah, You Heard Right...
I'm happy to see another acquisition coming from Sweden. So happy I was about to write how PlusFourSix is strengthening its offering within digital entertainment through the acquisition of Global Media Bank. Then decided not to. There's something more interesting that I wanted to share.
Petteri Koponen, Jaiku co-founder and now partner at Lifeline Ventures, shared many interesting tidbits about his career as an entrepreneur at Aalto Entrepreneur Society Bootcamp event, but the best part was him telling about the emotional roller coaster that an entrepreneur is bound to go through (jump into 23.02 on the video, if you want to go straight to the 'emotional part'). Just as Koponen says, it's exhausting and the lows are really low and highs are really high, but once you get the taste, it's very hard or even impossible to go back to working for the man.
Calling All Nordic And Baltic Angel Investors
There's been a lot of talk lately about angel investing or the lack of thereof, and I think the time is finally ripe for it to raise its head here in the Nordics and Baltics.
I just recently talked to Petteri Koponen of Lifeline Ventures, who came back from the first SeedSummit that took place in London and was put together by the good people at Seedcamp. It's a new initiative that twice a year brings together a critical mass of Europe’s most active seed investors to try and establish a stronger, more cohesive network to support entrepreneurs across the continent.
We welcome the initiative. If its needed generally in Europe, the Nordics and Baltics are literally screaming for such an initiative.
The other angel investor coming from our neck of the woods who was present was who else than the other Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engeström. Other angels present included Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein and Sherry Coutu. A hefty list.
More Tickets Available For Tomorrow's ArcticEvening Tallinn!
ArcticEvening Tallinn sold out yesterday, but we decided to add another 50 tickets to the event. The evening will be a very interesting one with 3 entrepreneurs in different stages of their company explaining about the importance of marketing and how it is made successful for the company. You can read more about the event in our previous blog post, but just to sum it up we'll have Martin Koppel from Fortumo, Petteri Koponen (former Jaiku Co-Founder) from Lifeline Ventures and Kai Lemmetty from Floobs.
ArcticEvening Going Tallinn 3rd December, Registration Open Now!
Early next month we will go to Tallinn, Estonia to hold our end-of-the-year ArcticEvening in co-operation with OpenCoffee Club Tallinn and Connect Estonia. The event will take place on 3. December and focus on startup marketing. We will hold a panel under the 'What is marketing for startups and how to do it effectively'
Yet again, we have a solid lineup coming: An experienced serial entrepreneur that have a several exits under his belt and two young guns who are on their way to their fist big hits. See our list of panelist below and figure out who's who.
The ticket sales are open and the price is the only right one, the tickets are free. Go get yours while they last! We will announce the venue in due course once we get them confirmed.
If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, we suggest you take a look at videos from previous events.
Two Years Is Up, Jaiku Founders Leave Google
We just heard yesterday that Jyri Engeström, Jaiku co-founder, is leaving his Product Manager job at Google after his two year earn out is up. Today Petteri Koponen, the other Jaiku co-founder announced that he is leaving Google and joining Lifeline Ventures, a Finnish startup accelerator that's part of the Vigo program (See our previous stories on Lifeline Venture here and here).
This not such a big jump as Petteri worked at Google in a wide variety of roles that gave him an ideal view into what was happening in the market. First Petteri worked at the Android product team and subsequently on Google's New Business team, which continuously searches for and works with startups that partner with Google. It's exciting to follow how the Vigo program evolves. At least Lifeline Ventures seem to be already hard at work. Petteri told me that they have already done some investments even though the whole program is just coming together.
Jaiku Co-founder Joins Aito Board - A Win For The Ecosystem
Petteri Koponen (see video below), co-founder of Jaiku and First Hop, joins Aito Technologies board. Koponen, who currently works at Google after Jaiku's acquisition by Google in October 2007 has a long experience from media and telecom from his years. Aito Technologies is a Finnish Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution provider for mobile operators and digital service providers.
Along with Koponen's nomination Aito Technologies announced also the nomination of Antti Viitanen to its board of directors.
Jaiku Picks Up. Android Integration Soon In The Plans?
We recently wrote about Jaiku losing users and subsequently got strong response from the Jaiku community telling us differently. Partly the reason why some users (link in Finnish) have moved to Twitter was Jaiku's feature pack was seriously couching: feeds not coming through and SMS messages were disabled.
Soon after Jaiku community stood up for their service the Jaiku team also woke up and already the next day feeds were back up, even if still a bit slow, and today SMS was also reactivated. The community effectively made itself heard and it worked at least to some extent.
There's also new feature's coming for example regarding the API that supports OAuth, but the gravest of the concerns' has yet to be answered by the Jaiku team, namely when are we going to see these changes happen and especially where is the service going.
Jyri Engeström commented in Jaikido blog way back in August when Jaiku was being ported to Google App Engine, "We appreciate your patience and can’t wait to open up Jaiku to everyone", but is Google's corporate wheel too slow to turn and is Google's silence policy regarding it's products development slowly pushing the Jaiku community's patience one step too far?
The same Jaikido blog entry talks about how 3rd party developers will have greater control over the system and can write applications that provide richer features to their users. This clearly shows that there are plans for the future. One could even speculate that Google has all along had a clear plan on what they are going to do with Jaiku. As Antti Akonniemi speculates, " Jaiku’s location based and phone profile features pre-installed on Google phones could change everything."
Now, if one wants to see this happening one easily could: Petteri Koponen has been working especifically on Android in Google's London office, while Jyri Engeström is in Mountainview working on Google's strategy for the social web. Has Google just waited until Android is ready to ramp up Jaiku development? Then again, last April Teemu Kurppa told (In Finnish) the Finnish crowd that Jaiku was being developed on the Google's infamous "20% time". Google would hardly make developers develop the corner stone of it's mobile strategy on their 'extra 20%'. Or would it? Jyri's silence despite the lively conversation and many requests regarding an update on what's happening could indicate that something's up.
This is not a new idea, but could the time start to be ripe for the launch as Jaiku's porting to Google App Engine is nearly finished which allows a rapid uptake of new users, and as Android is fully functioning and just starting to go after market share?
Edit 17.12.2008 at 3.36pm: Jyri Engeström posted today a new blog post in his blog where he carefully tells us about the future of Jaiku. Among other updates he says that "I regard the Jaiku community as friends, and your concern about the future of the service is legitimate. It warrants a response."
To indicate what is to come, he goes on by saying that they "[...]plan to open up its development to the user community more in the future." and that "People should be able to post and follow status updates across servers just like they send email. No single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform."
The best indication on what's to come is at the end of the blog post. I quote: "In spite of the decision to not throw resources at building Jaiku into an independent Web brand, recall that the acquisition announcement stated that 'Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users.' Of course this statement still holds true, and you can bet your Android that there are completely new Wow!'s in store."
At ArcticStartup we believe that we will soon see something that involves Jaiku's microblogging model, Android and the Open Stack nicely mixed into a working solution for those handset manufacturers that decide to take upon Google's open offer.
Finnish Jaiku Community Fights Back. Hard!
I recently wrote about the Finnish Jaiku community moving to Twitter en mass. This got the community on barricades ready to defend their service teeth and nail against my claim. What is interesting here is the intensity with which the community defended its service against my argument and choice of words. They even came after me on ArcticStartup's journalistic standards. I got the same treatment as TheNextWeb contributing editor Zee M Kane, even if for different reasons. After the points have been made it is up to each and every individual to make their own judgement regarding the issue. The comment tread is here and a Jaiku thread here (In Finnish).
Regardless whether the wording was misleading or not, and I'm ready to pull my weight and stand behind the argument I made, what is true is that even if users are leaving Jaiku the service is not dead by no means given the resistance and passion ArcticStartup just witnessed. The users send a loud and clear message that, the ones that are staying with the service are really sticking up for their tight-knit community despite Twitter's or anyone else's international dominance.
This makes me very proud to be a fellow Finn as it probably does make the Jaiku founders Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen. They have all the reason to be proud with a community like this. I have never witnessed the power of online community this close, even though some examples across the Atlantic like Facebook Beacon come to mind. Now we only have to make Sergei Brin and Larry Page to understand what kind of dynamic community they are letting to fade. The only wish that the Jaiku community has is to know what is about to happen to their service. @jyri, do you hear us?
Image by Tambako the Jaguar (CC: by-nd)
Finland Finally Moving To Twitter
There has been a dynamic and active Jaiku community in Finland even after the service got acquired by Google in October 2007. Google acquisition has many times meant a kiss of death to many startups. The Jaiku community strongly believed Jaiku would be an exception. At least until now it did.
Among the Finnish Jaiku community there was talk about migrating to Twitter, a US based micro-blogging site, already a while back when Jaiku was down but yesterday (Link in Finnish) I saw people abandoning the ship in bigger numbers than ever before.
Why I believe this might really be the kiss of death to the Finnish born Jaiku is because I just recently shifted my own usage to become Twitter heavy without knowing about the mass exodus here in Helsinki. This is not due to one service being superior to the other, but due to something as simple as the network effect I got to witness at LeWeb in Paris. So many of my friends outside of Finland are having conversations that are relevant to me in Twitter that I can not afford to not be there.
Before I was adamant that Jaiku is a better service, but now I have come to believe that it's just different. Where as in Jaiku the users can have long discussions threads (think Gmail), which makes the short postings just starting points of the long winding conversations, in Twitter you can't but Tweet 140 characters at a time, making the latter service truly more limited. But the beaty of Twitter, I believe, is exactly the limitation and the fact that since it's limited it scales as a consumable vast stream of information, which you can mold according to your own preferences. In this I mean you can build your own personal filter for the vast amount of information that is generated daily in the web, thus effectively eliminating the spam and following not just what people are explicitly saying but also feeds from news services, blogs, so on and so forth. Leo Laporte just recently touched on the same topic in This Week in Tech. Laporte was also one of the first Silicon Valley luminaries who declared Jaiku as a better service than Twitter.
The mass exodus in Finland has been mainly attributed to the downsides and difficulties that Jaiku is currently having, for example feeds not coming through and a disabled SMS service, but I believe that the bigger reason why Jaiku would eventually lose the race even here in Finland is the potential upside in communicating with the whole world instead of just with other Finns and the odd faithfull foreigner still using the service. That said, Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen built an amazing service and I still hope I see a mass exodus from Twitter back to Jaiku even though I don't believe that happens.
How To Break From The Arctic Region
I've lately had many discussion on how the break from the Nordics & Baltics and make one's service or product really global. Just recently I had this discussion here at Nordkapp where I work, so it does not only concern software products but equally all the service provides with international ambitions.
For a technology startup this question focuses many times on the issue of whether they should pack their bags and move to the Silicon Valley or whether they should build a strong user base first at home. Another viable option might be to reach out to London, but then again, many think that will only slows you down in your quest to global market share and you should head straight to the eye of the storm where the battle for the critical masses are fought.
This is more of a ongoing conversation than something that can be answered with a clear Yes or No, but here are some thoughts to start with:
- If you know which market you want to get to think about getting a board member, an advisory board member or an investor from the market. Instead of trying to bombard firms operating in the given market with a requests for shallow partnerships or just opening an office there, by aligning someone's interest with yours ie. giving them a stake in your success you can instantly tab into their network of contacts. These people already know who are the people you don't want to work with, because even though someone might have a nice resume they also might have a bad reputation among the local players, which would make your market entry a disaster. And vice versa: They know exactly who are the perfect partners for you and you don't end up taking the one you happen to know from a Trade Show two years ago. To get these people on board you need to focus, do your research on who is the right fit with you, work hard, dedicate time to it and make the offer really worth their time.
- For any consumer technology startup, don't just visit US and get a sales guy in there. Move there permanently for a few years if that's the market you aim for. And if you're building the next consumer web service, that is most likely the market you should aim for to get the traction over competitors. That said, you should still cultivate your network back at home so you can also benefit from that and link other firms from back home to your new contacts. This goes for the time of high growth when you're just building your product, but especially for the time after you have made your millions. You can have a huge advantage by having a network in both ends whether you start another startup or decide turn into an investor.
- When choosing an investor, you want to be careful for not choosing some small local fund, because they might actually limit your company to reach its full potential since they'll hold you back in fearing that they might get squeezed out in the later investing rounds. Also, since cycle times for an exit are growing (what was an exit in 5 years, looks more like an exit in 8 years now) you need a big enough fund that can follow up without running out of money.
- Same goes for advisory board members: Some people active in the Finnish startup scene have voiced their concern about the quality of people present in many of the more informal investor get-togethers. You don't want some former technology company middle manager from the early 90's influencing your vision, because they advice you to take the path they are familiar with which more often than not is something different from going global from day one.
- Even though Silicon Valley is the epicenter of much of the activity in the consumer technology startup world don't only look at the US. Do see how fertile ground India, China or Asia might be for your product. When they all start to look good, remember to choose your battles. As a startup you have very limited resources and if you'd like to push through you need to focus your efforts.
What else should a startup consider when trying to go international?
Here's Jaiku founders' advice on how to choose between London and the Silicon Valley when building a successful startup (original post here)
Photo by oskay (CC:BY).
Is Nokia Buying Zipiko?
I received several phone calls yesterday where I was asked about what is happening at Nokia and whether they are buying the Finnish SMS based social intention broadcasting application Zipiko.
The whole thing started when the Zipiko gang shared a taxi from the Nokia House located in Espoo, Finland with Prashant Agarwal, The director of Product Strategy at Fjord. Prashant Jaikued about it where it was picked up by the Jaiku co-founder Petteri Koponen who proposed that Nokia is about to acquire the small company.
This was enough to start a chain reaction in the Finnish social media and got it really boiling which 
eventually reached US and at that point it had already crossed over from Jaiku to Twitter. Co-incidentally the Zipiko servers where down just at the time that US was waking up and checking their Twitter feeds for the morning. All this would imply that Zipiko.com had received enough traffic, ignited by the news from the taxi ride, that their servers couldn't handle it anymore .
Just a week earlier I had been watching Zipiko lead developer's presentation on Google App Engine that they are using. Knowing that they use the App Engine lets me figure out exactly the amount of traffic that the service received to go down. Google App Engine manages up to 5 million views per month before letting the service go down. Now, that would be a rather remarkable amount of traffic ignited globally by just Jaiku and Twitter messages.
This makes would make a very interesting story if the protagonist herself, the Zipipop* CEO Helene Auramo, wouldn't have admitted to me that the juicy rumor was just that, a rumor. Also their service was down from some unrelated reason. So it seems that Nokia is not yet going after this Finnish startup.
But the question remains: What did Zipiko do in the Nokia house in the first place?
*Zipiko is an app made by Zipipop and has part of the company working exclusively on it.
A Chat With The Jaiku Founders At Seedcamp
I met the Jaiku founders (now at Google), Petteri Koponen and Jyri Engeström, yesterday at the Seedcamp evening party and asked them how they see the startup scene in Europe versus US and of course what they are up to nowadays.
What's happening to Jaiku today?
Something's definitely happening in the UK and Mountain View today - according to Petteri's Jaiku post. Petteri is the co-founder of Jaiku working in the UK, while Jyri Engestrom is working in Mountain view with his wife and son.
Yesterday we got our 20 invites and Petteri even replied to his Jaiku announcing those invites as "OK, sounds good. Expect some news shortly :)" - we're on the lookout!
