Finland’s biggest directory service Fonecta has made an undisclosed “strategic” investment into social yellow pages service Tupalo.com, run by an Austrian startup. Finland marks the beginning of the service’s Scandinavian expansion. For Fonecta, this is a step into getting involved with social media technologies for directory services. Tupalo’s service has now also been launched in Finnish.
social media
Fonecta Gets Into Social Media By Investing Into Tupalo.com
Silverbakk Monitors Your Social Media Activity
Sweden has got its own social media monitoring tool, Silverbakk Briefing Room (we recently wrote about Icelandic Clara). Silverbakk measures influence, visibility and engagement in social media, probably the hottest topic at the moment besides real-time search and augmented reality. The company launched its product only three weeks ago promising an easy to use tool to start monitoring ones company, brand, event or competitors in just 60 seconds.
Sponsored: Zokem – Your Life. Share it. Automatically.
Sponsor: Zokem – Your Life. Share it. Automatically.
http://zokem.com/
Zokem is a mobile communications and lifecasting startup that enables users to automatically share their daily activities to their friends’ mobile phones, to the Internet and to social networking services, such as Facebook and MySpace.
Zokem takes people’s activity information from mobiles to the Internet, not the other way around as most of the existing services do. Zokem offers its users a completely new way to communicate and keep in touch with friends and family by automating many of the normally manual messages between people, where the content is created by people simply living their lives.
Zokem aims to provide its service to all users no matter what device or service they are using. Therefore, Zokem has built a native mobile application to all major platforms (Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android, iPhone and Java), and it is integrated with all major social networking services to enable its users to share their lives automatically through one single channel. Users may also define what information they want to share with different services and friend groups, as in real life.
Zokem is one of over 200 startups from Finland participating in BizSpark program. All startups, building their own software application, earning less than $1M/year of revenue, and that are privately-owned, can participate to BizSpark program.
“BizSpark has been an uncomplicated and easy partnership with nothing but pleasant surprises. It has helped us with tools that start-ups usually lack, and for young companies, like Zokem, there is only an upside in the business. BizSpark is also a good launching pad for being noticed globally.” Zokem CEO Ludovic Gaudé comments.
Startups get a MSDN premium subscription for three years, for each of their developers. Each subscription includes all of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Expressions Studio developer tools, and all the platform software (Windows, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, etc) that they need to build and test the application. The majority of startups are also building web-based applications, which they’ll host themselves or though a hosting service provider like Nebula Oy in Finland, so BizSpark also provides free server licenses to put those applications into production. The production license allows unlimited use of Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, SharePoint Server and Systems Center during the three-year membership.
Startups can enroll on http://microsoft.com/BizSpark. There they’ll see a list of organizations (BizSpark Network Partners) any of whom can enroll them in their own country, or they can contact Microsoft directly.
Note: this is our periodical blog sponsor message.
Zokem is a mobile communications and lifecasting startup that enables users to automatically share their daily activities to their friends’ mobile phones, to the Internet and to social networking services, such as Facebook and MySpace.
Social Music Marketplace gogoyoko Launches in Scandinavia
Icelandic social music marketplace” gogoyoko has expanded their open Beta to cover the whole of Scandinavia. The service now works in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Faroe Islands and Greenland. gogoyoko’s tagline is bringing “Fair Play” back into the music business – through the service music fans can purchase music directly from the artists and labels. gogoyoko’s service consists of a music store, a social network, and free streaming music player.
http://go.gogoyoko.com/?p=767
For artists and other music right holders gogoyoko offers a platform for creating their online destination and managing the sale, promotion, and distribution of their music. Through the service music fans can interact directly with the artists and purchase music from gogoyoko’s music store without middlemen. Artists have full control over the pricing of their music, and get 100% of the profits. Users can access their music collection online or download it to any portable device – there is no DRM used.
gogoyoko also features a free streaming functionality, supported by advertising. Artists get a share of the advertisement revenues based on the streaming of their music. It is possible to use the streaming player also on other web sites.
The social networking features are aimed to encourage the interaction of artists, record labels, music professionals and music fans. All basic SNS features are supported from profiles and status updates to follow functionality. gogoyoko also plans to introduce more features later this year, like interactive music magazine and a worldwide music map providing concert listings and easy access to music and profiles.
I like the look and feel of the service a lot. The attitude is there as well – one cannot help smiling when receiving the account registration email greeting you “Welcome to gogoyoko, Your account creation was a huge success.” The site functions pretty well (there are some quite minor layout issues to polish here and there), and streaming seems fast and smooth. For purchasing songs you first need to buy “store credits” between 2 and 100 euros with a credit card (for keeping the transaction costs in control, I presume).
It is of course impossible to avoid comparison with Spotify. However, the big difference is that gogoyoko is targeted as more a grass-roots platform and medium for connecting directly artists and fans. Its focus is in supporting artist self publishing in good and bad – it might become a very good channel outside the record label driven model, though it also forces artists to be responsible for self marketing their music.
Despite the steaming functionality, gogoyoko offers the pay-per-download model for taking the music with you on a portable device. It is interesting to see what happens to that model going forward. Spotify’s offline streaming functionality is a big benefit and allows you to enjoy a whole bigger range of music on the go. On the other hand, the pay-per-download model does also provide good way of directly supporting artists you like.
However, I still believe there should be a feature like Richard Stallman’s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
old idea (in one of his essays) of a easily available “donate” button, which would allow you to send amount of your choice to the artist whose work you are listening. More and more now as digital content can be easily copied with practically no distribution cost, why depend on the old pay-for-download model when it is very much one-off transaction that is also limited to a nominal fixed fee. As a fan, why not send the artist some love each time when you are on a great mood and enjoy a particular song? That would provide artists also much better recurring return on their creativity over time.
Icelandic social music marketplace gogoyoko has expanded their open Beta to cover the whole of Scandinavia. The service now works in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Faroe Islands and Greenland. gogoyoko’s tagline is bringing “Fair Play” back into the music business – through the service music fans can purchase music directly from the artists and labels. gogoyoko’s service consists of a music store, a social network, and free streaming music player.
Twingly Channels, Social Filtering On Real-Time Web, Launches Private Beta
Twingly Channels is launching into private beta today, opening up to the wide public later this year. At the moment one has to apply for an invite by suggesting a channel topic.
Swedish Twingly have been building up the hype since early June when they first announced Project Shinobi, the working name for Twingly Channels we then got a sneak preview of for a month ago at the Sweden Social Web Camp. And they certainly are reaching for the stars, or as Martin Källström, CEO Twingly, puts it:
”Twingly Channels lets people cut out the noise of online search and the real-time web — to instantly see what news and content to spend time on. By following topics rather than bloggers or outlets, Twingly simplifies the challenge of RSS, social search, and the real-time web.“
Aspiring Global Mentorship Community Mentory.com
Mentory is a new global mentorship community from Denmark, targeted for match-making between mentors and protégés. In addition to matching people for the traditional one-on-one mentoring relationships, the web service allows for open “mass-mentoring” among the whole network. The key target users are businesspeople and entrepreneurs.
Social Music Marketplace gogoyoko Raises ISK 100 Million
Despite of the downturn and bad overall economical situation in Iceland, the new social music service gogoyoko (see our previous intro) has secured 100 million Iceland Kronur (slightly more modest in euros: EUR 0,69M; USD 0,89M) in funding from Icelandic The New Venture Business Fund (90 %) and private investor Vilhjalmur Thorsteinsson (10 %).
The purpose of the funding was not disclosed, but in the company’s newsletter it is stated that the firm has been growing steadily and just moved to a bigger office. gogoyoko is still looking for more people and prepares for increasing international marketing activities this year. gogoyoko has gotten advice and steering for the fundraising and product development process from Norwegian “New Media Innovation House” Ignitas that also has taken an equity stake in gogoyoko. Ignitas has been previously involved in selling Norway’s #2 social network Biip.no to media enterprise Egmont/Nettavisen.
gogoyoko provides artists and other music right holders a social marketplace allowing them to sell music directly to consumers worldwide without middlemen. The service is currently running in closed beta, planned to be publicly opened in April. gogoyoko’s service is promised to include interesting features like a custom music player embedable to any site through which the users can stream (ad-funded) tracks and albums for free. The player is also supposed to include a music store interface. On gogoyoko’s portal, artists can create their personal sites, write news, blog entries, upload discography, pictures, videos, and enter gig information to gogoyoko’s global map.
The firm’s updated intro video:
Gogoyoko from Gogoyoko on Vimeo.
BarCamp Baltics 2009 Gathering in Latvia in February
BarCamp Baltics 2009 will be held in Riga, Latvia, between 6th and 8th of February, 2009. That’s the place to be if you’re interested in Baltic and Russian ideas, views, and cooperation around mobile and web projects.
BarCamp is an international network of conferences organized around different themes, based on the idea that participants will generate the presentations and discussions for and in the events themselves. BarCamp Baltics brings together social networking and new media specialists, bloggers, podcasters, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and mobile Internet professionals and enthusiasts.
The event will feature 5 to 6 simultaneous sessions, including presentations, workshops, messages and discussions, 30 minutes long each. Between 75 to 95 presentations in total will be held during a day. Participants can choose any sessions to attend and also the topics they want to present, and there will be presentations both in English and in Russian. Around 500 to 600 participants from the Baltic States and CIS, Central and Western Europe, and Americas are expected to be present.
BarCamp Baltics aims to to stimulate the development of new IT and media projects in Baltic states and CIS, and enhance networking and provide connections for international commercial and non-commercial joint projects. BarCamp Baltics 2008 gathered together more than 500 people from 23 countries, and was supported by the biggest media in Latvia.
BarCamp’s been arranged also in Helsinki, and there are a few other ones coming up: Odense in January and Århus in March, in Denmark, and in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May.
Tori Innovations Comes Out Of Stealth
Tori Innovations has come out of stealth mode and announced they have developed an internet-based social media service aimed to enhance firms’ innovation processes. Tori Innovations aims to lower the costs of their customers by allowing the firms to enhance their internal communications and bring the end users’ and stakeholders’ opinions faster and more efficiently into the R&D processes.
With Tori Innovation’s product it’s possible to collect feedback and ideas from widely dispersed communities of users, stakeholders, and employees, information the collection of which is something not previously possible on a large scale. This is achieved by placing widgets on the sites to allow people to create ideas and post them to the firm. The ideas coming outside the firm can then be collected on the company’s site, and then refined, reorganized, and processed for decision making.
Tori Innovation’s technology is based on spinoff from research of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Tori Innovations has a pilot project in the works with a high profile Finnish customer, which will be announced shortly. Then we hopefully get more details and can review the actual product as well.
Interview with Valentin Ivanov, Founder of Bizi
Note: This is a guest blog post by Märt Ridala from Estonia.
I interviewed Valentin Ivanov, the founder of Bizi, which is a new startup launched in Estonia last week. The service Bizi offers could be called “Estonian Twitter” with some minor modifications – possibility to add video and pictures. Valentin is an Estonian entrepreneur with international experience, having spent the last decade working in IT developing online applications for the mobile, gambling and entertainment industries in positions ranging from developer, technical manager to Chief Executive Officer. Valentin is also Founder and CEO at Yaika.com, which enables anyone to start their own live TV or radio channel for free. Let’s hear it from Valentin.
1. What is BIZI in a nutshell?
BIZI is a life-moments exchange network. Through BIZI, we aim to unite family members, friends and just other people together via letting them share their short news, feelings and emotions as short messages, small photos or 15 seconds long video records. All this can be done very easily over web, mobile and (very soon) over SMS as well! All this can be done free of charge and will stay free.
There are lots of ideas how to use BIZI for both personal and organizational purposes; either commercially, or non-commercially. Those, who will keep an eye on our press, blogs and other forums will find a lot about it very soon.
2. Why should a person use BIZI instead of Twitter?
The most important reason to use BIZI instead of any other foreign service is the opportunity to speak in your own language to others, who want to do exactly the same.
BIZI offers a bit more than just a Short Text Messages Exchange service – our features are a bit different and definitely more innovative than Twitter, Facebook.com or Orkut.com have. Thus, providing a list of features for real micro-blogging, BIZI lets users to enhance their text posts with 15 seconds long video-audio or just a voice record right from their webcam and microphone. Or, users can add a photo or any other illustration instead!
While developing, we were trying to cover all the needs and requests of our friends, colleagues and also those people, who live in our country and use Twitter, Friendsfeed.com and other similar services over the Internet. BIZI has been made in Estonia and for Estonia.
3. Is BIZI meant for Estonian market? Do you have plans regarding other markets?
As for now, BIZI has been made for Estonian market only. Regarding extending BIZI to other markets, may be one day…
4. What is your general opinion about making local copies of global social-networking services? Is it reasonable to make them? Why people prefer the local copies?
To be very honest, creating BIZI is quite an old idea, which was growing inside me for quite a few years. But as I expect nobody will believe me, I will try to answer your question as-is: my general opinion of bringing something extremely good to local countries in local language and tuned up to be mentally local as well is definitely excellent. How much reasonable is to create such projects is normally a business question to the one trying to that. My reason is a longing for something exciting, something that I can use personally in a home way, and the opportunity to share it with my friends and relatives – people I love and people I want to be part of my life. With all our projects – both BIZI, Yaika.com and the others we are heavily working on – we want to bring a grain of positive emotion to people, to make them happier, more friendly and open.
Now, answering why people prefer local copies, I would first like to ask you back – why do we always prefer everything to be “in my language”: a recipe in the medicine shop to be easily understandable, a movie to be either fully adopted or enhanced with subtitles? Why do we normally prefer everything to be “in my way”? Just because we always prefer to feel ourselves much more secure and comfortable, when we are fully after the situation.
5. How does BIZI plan to make money?
We expect BIZI to get profit form selling advertizing and receiving
sponsorships. Once in the future.
OtaSizzle – Ubiquitous Social Media Research Environment
OtaSizzle is a new mobile social media test environment project founded in Otaniemi, Espoo (home of Helsinki University of Technology TKK). OtaSizzle will include an open experimentation environment for testing mobile social media services. The purpose is to create prototype mobile social media service platforms and study them with extensive field tests, coupled with quantitative measurements and qualitative analysis.
The aim is to build a living lab environment of thousands of users in Otaniemi, with extensions in greater Helsinki. The users will be able to try out and develop own new social media services. The Otasizzle environment is also open to different research institutes and firms that want to develop and test their services. The OtaSizzle consortium is coordinated by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. One target is also to create a “packaged” experimentation environment, “SizzleLab” concept, which can also be extended elsewhere.
The first service created is called Ossi, which is targeted to students of TKK. The students will get free mobile broadband service to connect and contact each other. The purpose is to study what kind of ways of keeping in contact the students will favor. (See also video (in Finnish) describing the new service.)
The OtaSizzle project is part of TKK’s MIDE (Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy) program, which purpose is bringing together the expertise of various fields of engineering to generate new thinking in all fields of technology. Apparently different corporations and associations fund MIDE with over 20M euros.
The reasoning behind the new initiative is that social media services on mobile phones have the potential to become as popular as text messages if designed and implemented correctly. Thus prolonged empirical tests with large user bases are necessary according to the researchers.
I certainly agree research’s needed in the area, and it all sounds quite good (not least for the participating students who get the free mobile broadband). But I wonder if there’s really a need for a new separate test environment? There are already quite a big bunch of real mobile social networks (e.g. mig33, Zyb and countless others), which could be researched as well. You may be able to get more quantitative data from the test environment easier, but how real will that be? Will users use the service actively so that you can draw generalizations out of it? Considering at least the first users will be entirely students of technology, I’d expect the results to be “slightly skewed” compared to the population as a whole. Also I’d imagine the students would rather like to use a service which their outside friends can log into as well (then again the joke goes the technology students aren’t really in contact with the outside world…).
If the service platform enables the normal users do quick mockups and mashups using some simple tools, then there might be some really good value in there. I’d love to get some additional insight on this.
RunToShop set for launch in September
The mystery Espoo based startup RunToShop that we’ve covered a few times 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.
WebAnalytics Wednesday Helsinki – Measuring Social Media
The next WebAnalytics Wednesday in Finland will take place in Helsinki 27th of February. The place is Sanoma House and the topic of the evening Measuring Social Media. Steve Jackson from Satama will speak about Measuring success of social media. Whitevector’s Tommi Lehtonen will continue on Measuring influential opinions on brands. See the invitation for details.
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