Hoa's Grand Battle Looks At The Psychology Of The Dance Floor
The saying goes, "If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." They only sell one hammer in Hoa's Tool Shop, but luckily a psychological hammer is a pretty cool tool to wield.
The Stockholm-based startup has been doing a few things we've found worth writing about lately. Their creativity newsletter gets me thinking about fostering my entrepreneurial creativity every morning. Their main product, Viary, has been shown to dramatically cut down on face-to-face time needed with psychologists. And now, with the help of some people from Hyper Island, they've taken a look at the dance floor through a side-project app of theirs.
Game Fundings And Acquisitions $1.89B In 2010
Venturebeat has a story out on 2010 and how game fundings and acquisitions developed compared to 2009. Growth was spectacular and in terms of percentages, the size of the fundings and acquisitions rose by 130% compared to 2009. Thus in 2009 the overall size of the market in these terms was $819 million. The data is provided by IHS and is said to cover international markets. According to IHS, the numbers cover funding and acquisitions activity in all areas of gaming except mobile gaming.
Finnish Ministry Finally Understands Importance Of Growth Companies
Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy yesterday announced their first study (better late than never) into the growth company ecosystem in Finland. Like said, it is first of its kind, but this will become an annual look into the effect these companies play for the Finnish society. The study is downloadable online (in Finnish) for free, but we'll go through the main points here and what this might potentially mean in the political sense. The focus of the study is on employment and how many people these so called growth companies can employ. It turns out that during 2006 and 2009, 691 companies created around 50 000 jobs. 50 000 jobs in Finnish terms in just three years is huge, but 691 growth companies by any standards isn't a lot.
Futureful - A Predictive Discovery Engine
Futureful is a Finnish, research based startup that is developing a predictive discovery engine. In essence, they want to help you discover more interesting content on the internet, based on your behaviour and liking. The company was founded by Marko Anderson and Jarno Koponen and they pitch themselves as "imagine if Hunch and Flipboard bootstrapped a lovechild."
QAim's Study Shows Android Usage Surges In The Nordics As Well
QAim, a Finnish mobile analytics and Customer Experience Management (CEM) startup, has released a new study (announcement available in Finnish) on the share of different mobile operating systems (OS) among users of mobile services in the Nordic countries. QAim's study shows strong increase in Android's popularity among the active mobile services users, and the firm estimates that Android will become the most widely used mobile operating system among the Nordic mobile service users in the summer of 2011.
Why Being Sold To The US Is A Big Deal
Nexit Ventures is one of the most prominent mobile and wireless investors around. They naturally do a lot of research to analyse their business and opportunities. We've managed to get our hands on some of their research material and we want to share it with you. One of the key issues in venture businesses is how you build your business towards an exit (and how you prepare for it). For entrepreneurs looking at the US market, this post is good news.Being A VC In The Nordics
Daniel Blomquist of Creandum, a Swedish early stage venture capital company, has posted an excellent post to their blog analysing the differences between the Nordic countries to other countries as well as analysing the differences within themselves. In essence, Daniel goes on to confirm what Will Cardwell said some time ago.
Creandum has gathered a lot of knowledge about the Nordic venture capital market over the last two years to understand the ecosystem better and thus be able to work in it better. They now share some of this knowledge with us. Their main findings from the report were:
Growth Companies Largest Employers In The Finnish Economy
Kauppalehti reports on some fascinating results from research conducted by Balance Consulting on the effects of growth companies in the Finnish economy. While I realise this data is very Finland centric and might not be of that much interest to others - I am sure these results will resonate in similar manner in other countries. We wrote about this in 2008 as well and it seems that the data, some one and a half years later is still very valid. The study was conducted by looking at companies whose revenue is above 1,7 million euros annually and belong to the Balance Consulting corporate databse. While the database is very thorough, it does leave a lot of the younger startups out.
