Soprano Brain Alliance is a fast growing Finnish software developing company, which is particularly specialized in open source web technologies such as PHP, Drupal and Zend Framework. Our clients include large Finnish media corporations, public sector organizations and a handful of start up companies. Company’s founder Jukka Hassinen has build the 35 person employing company in six years. Other key people are Taneli Tikka (Board member), Mikko Hämäläinen (COO), Eetu Hyppönen (Serial Creative Director) and Santeri Lindgren (CTO). Brain Alliance is a part of the NASDAQ OMX listed company Soprano Plc.
Over the years our company has worked with over 60 clients and over 100 projects. Even though we work mainly with medium and big companies, we also like to take part in fresh start-up projects. In fact our key people work with at least one. To mention few: IRC-Galleria, Muxlim, Dopplr, RunToShop, ENCA, Mauton, E8 Personal CRM. Continue reading »
Taneli Tikka, Finnish serial web entrepreneur, has told in his personal blog that he will leave the online Muslim community Muxlim’s Board of Directors, and hand over his seat to a “senior International figure in the online media world”. The purpose of the new board member is to “help Muxlim become a world class online media” in order to attract advertisers according to Taneli.
Taneli also notes that he will end his CEO assignment at RunToShop 1st of April, as the company reaches the milestone of getting ready to launch their product for webstores that adds “social layer” of recommendations, reviews, and opinions. But Taneli is not done with RunToShop, instead he will join the company’s Board, and continue putting in part-time effort guiding the firm. Taneli sounds confident RunToShop will have a successful 2009, assisted by the recently finished a new funding round in December.
Taneli states he is now looking for new challenges, either starting a new project or joining something existing, and invites all suggestions.
Taneli Tikka, the CEO of RunToShop, has just announced on his blog that they have closed a financing round with RunToShop. The investment round was lead by VeraVenture, the Finnish gov’t investment fund. Taneli writes that this is their largest round yet and together with VeraVenture, there were 8 business angels additionally in the investment round.
There is no disclosure on the sum invested, but since RunToShop is able to go through all of next year easily and be backed for the internationalisation of the company – it can be can be considered to be a relatively high one. Together with the announcement, Taneli tells that RunToShop is now hiring concept designers and developers to help them take the idea further.
Despite the economic downturn, this is a very welcome investment round to spark up the entrepreneurial scene here in the Nordics. Perfect proof of the fact that, just as Joi and Saul told earlier, even in difficult times venture capitalists and investors do business.
The week’s been way too busy and apologies for the lack of writing from me. However, I’ve been following the scene and been meeting people over lunch from the startup scene. I’ve heard a few interesting facts this week that I’d like to share with the readers here.
NewsToScreen has been growing fast despite my earlier bashing. NewsToScreen is an aggregator of different feeds and activities that can be used to transmit information to large crowds. They now have 80 000 members and transmit 5-10% of Finnish online video and approximately 66% of Finnish commercial video. I also talked to their founder and CEO Marko Parkkinen about the usage of the product and he confirmed that they have slightly shifted the focus and are taking different approaches in capitalising it.
RunToShop, the social shopping recommendation service, now has over 400 partners. We previously wrote about 150 partners in their network so the growth has been nice. Despite still having a long way to go to successfully integrate the service with these partners I’m glad to see companies also focusing on the commercialisation of their innovation.
The Deloitte Fast 50/500 Finland list for 2008 is out. A familiar company is topping the list with a growth percentage of close to 3000% – Futurice. Futurice is a web and mobile production powerhouse located in Helsinki, Finland. Second on the list is OpenBit, a mobile payment provider we have covered previously as well.
I’ll do some more digging into the Deloitte’s list as there are a lot of interesting companies that need to be uncovered in terms of interviews.
Taneli Tikka, a Finnish serial entrepreneur and currently the CEO of RunToShop, COO of Dopplr and a former CEO of IRC Gallery among other things, has started blogging (here) about entrepreneurship, startups and everything that comes with it.
Taneli promises to openly blog about many of his past endeavors, which is something not very often seen from people with an experience comparable to Taneli’s. Not only is this fantastic news for Nordic and especially for Finnish entrepreneurship, but it also sets a great example for all the C-level executives to share their knowledge and insights with the less experienced. To quote Taneli:
I plan to follow the kind of guideline I have often followed: speak my mind on a wide range of issues and topics, as opinionated as it may occasionally be. Sounds like a quick way to get into trouble, doesn’t it?
The blog has only a few posts as yet, but there already is valuable advice for all entrepreneurs. Even though this is certainly not the first time someone has published such information it makes all the difference to the entrepreneurs closer to home who don’t necessarily don’t know where or what to look for from all the blogs published globally.
ArcticStartup applauds the courage for openness and will be sure to follow the blog closely.
There will be eight finalist in total in the pitch competition and each startup will have 6 minute pitch to present to the high profile jury. Read more about the Startup Launchpad here.
Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!
The free bus ride for startups to the MindTrek and back from Helsinki on 8.-9.10.2008 will depart 8.10. Wednesday morning at 7.15am in fron of Kiasma (the bus has MindTrek sign on it).
The bus will head back to Helsinki on 9.10. Thursday at 4pm departing in front of Hotel Rosendahlin at Tampere. If you want to come along contact Hanne Lehtola at hanne.lehtola [at] culminatum.fi
Antti Akonniemi from Kisko Labs is also running an Ignite while we are driving up there. Antti wrote a short intro on what’s on offer for the ride up:
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? And what if your stage was an actual bus full of startup entrepreneurs? Fun of karaoke and excitement of Powerpoint combined. Sounds too much like the movie Speed? Introducing Ignite:Mobile. Join ArcticStartup’s bus trip to MindTrek and experience the first ever Ignite:Mobile.
There should still be plenty of room in the bus, so drop Hanne a mail and come along.
RunToShop beta is live for public (Only in Finnish at this stage). Earlier on the site opened briefly for a group of about 200 alpha users that were able to play with the functionality, give feedback and help the team find bugs in the service. Now the public test beta is open to everybody. Below Taneli Tikka, RunToShop CEO, gives me a run down on the idea and their strategy on fast growth:
As you see in this video taken just before I wrote my previous post on the start-up, Taneli actually explaines that the site was only an early demo at the time and NOT an actual beta yet, which I failed to acknowle in my blog post. I hope to do more justice to the service and the guys working hard on it in the future. Moreover, we want to give big credit for everybody at RunToShop for taking the bold move of testing things out very publicly very early in the game.
I attended RunToShop party last week at Shaker, Helsinki along with a lot of Finnish entrepreneurs and it was a blast. It was an opening day of the RunToShop.fi service, which was to act as the first step towards opening the service internationally at RunToShop.com
RunToShop is a social recommendation service for stores that rewards its users for recommendations as well as for the actual purchases. Whether it works or not is anybody’s guess at this point when the full fledged service is not rolled out yet.
The service at .fi address came and went. I did create a profile and browsed around the service to familiarize with it and decided to came back later on. Yet, today I found that the guys had but the site back behind a login and a password, probably to fix some buggy code. I didn’t get a proper look with still so few stores and service providers on the site at the time and am eager to take a another look as it goes live again. Hopefully there will be a lot more to browse through.
What is notable in RunToShop however is the way it was build: The guys behind the concept started building the start-up only in April 2008 and according to RunToShop CEO, Taneli Tikka, the service has already over 150 partners: Mostly in Finland and in the UK.
What is also unusual is the very strong advisory board the start-up has gathered which includes close to 30 experienced entrepreneurs and key figures in the industry. Similarly Taneli Tikka who is driving the start-up as its CEO has a long list of start-ups behind him, including Dopplr and IRC-Gallery to name only a few.
I did a video interview with Taneli, but since I only had my iphone with me Kai from Floobs borrowed me his Nokia N95 to record the interview. Unluckily I didn’t have a chance to pick the video clip from Kai last week, and when I gave Kai a call yesterday I got an SMS back saying he was hiking somewhere in the Norwegian Lapland, so it’ll have to wait a little. We’ll post the interview on the blog as soon as I get my hands on it.
The mystery Espoo based startup RunToShop that we’ve covered a fewtimes before has set for launch in September. The core of the company is also coming out in their newly designed website – social shopping through personal recommendations and reviews. RunToShop states themselves as the place to find stuff people really love.
They are also actively looking for partners, shops, that want to increase their sales through social shopping. Apparently there will be no shopping mechanisms on the site as they are recommending partners to add a piece of javascript to their website to keep calculation of sales. RunToShop, or Run as they call it themselves, gets money from sales commissions. However, partners will have an option to add their products into the company database, probably for recommendations and reviews.
These are of course guessese, but I have heard from a trusted source that RunToShop is not launching in Finland in September. One easy giveaway is the language – it’s all in English and they speak English in …? You guessed it.
I attended the Parteco picnic today, organised by Katri Lietsala and Esa Sirkkunen, who ran the Participatory Economy and Beyond -research project. It was a good event with old media companies slowly turning to social media (which I have to say shouldn’t be done only for social media’s sake).
I also heard some good rumours regarding the Finnish startup scene. First of all, regarding Dopplr – Marko Ahtisaari, Lisa Sounio and Taneli Tikka have left, or are leaving the company to continue to new challenges. Taneli Tikka is currently very active with his new startup RunToShop, which is creating some buzz among Finnish startups. The moves at the moment are not official, but there is a lot of buzz around that.
Juha Huttunen of Tripsay was also nodding towards August with regards to their official launch. Therefore we’ll have to wait a few more months before we will be able to see the service they are coming out with. I understand they are currently making final moves towards the launch.
Last, but not least – rumour or not – the Iron Sky movie, followup to the largest Finnish movie ever distributed – StarWreck, will be launched in 2010. Currently the script is being finetuned for the “investment round” that will be a few million euros and that will begin during the end of this year.
However, there was a lot of positive talk among the startups there regarding various issues and I also received a lot of great ideas regarding our next event.
Taneli Tikka, the Finnish serial entrepreneur extraordinaire, has joined RunToShop as their CEO. Extraordinaire? In the last 12 months he has joined 4 companies as an executive member (and he’s still active in all of them).
RunToShop is a mystery company that was founded in 2007 and they seem to be organising somesort of a revolution in social shopping. There’s not a lot of info on RunToShop even on Google (50 pages at the time of writing this post).
Soprano Brain Alliance is a fast growing Finnish software developing company, which is particularly specialized in open source web technologies such as PHP, Drupal and Zend Framework. Our clients include large Finnish media corporations, public sector organizations and a handful of start up companies. Company’s founder Jukka Hassinen has build the 35 person employing company in six years. Other key people are Taneli Tikka (Board member), Mikko Hämäläinen (COO), Eetu Hyppönen (Serial Creative Director) and Santeri Lindgren (CTO). Brain Alliance is a part of the NASDAQ OMX listed company Soprano Plc.
Taneli Tikka
The week’s been way too busy and apologies for the lack of writing from me. However, I’ve been following the scene and been meeting people over lunch from the startup scene. I’ve heard a few interesting facts this week that I’d like to share with the readers here.
The mystery Espoo based startup 
I attended the Parteco picnic today, organised by Katri Lietsala and Esa Sirkkunen, who ran the Participatory Economy and Beyond -research project. It was a good event with old media companies slowly turning to social media (which I have to say shouldn’t be done only for social media’s sake).
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
