It’s great time to take the first step with your New Year’s resolution to exercise more, before you give up and forget it like you did last year. At least I did. Moozement, a Finnish startup offering a simplified training log for sharing your activities with friends, has rebranded itself and become HeiaHeia (see my previous interview with one of the founders here). “Heia! Heia!”, pronounced similarly to “Hey ya, Hey ya”, is a Norwegian sports chant.
The company states that the key driver for the development of the service has been to create a sports service which anybody could use with her or his friends – not just the devotees of a particular sport or the users of certain technical gear or the fans of a given brand.
The founders, Ivan Kuznetsov and Olli Oksanen, are both ex-Nokiates who took the infamous ‘package’ when Nokia started offering it to its employees to slim down the organization. HeiaHeia is one of the first startups that emerge from stealth mode, which has its roots in the Nokia package. I know there’s other startups coming with a similar origin. I have even heard some people say that with the package, Nokia has done more to the Finnish startup scene than Tekes. I’m not sure about that, but it has certainly given a possibility for many people with long careers in Nokia of a runway of a year to year and a half to play around with their ideas before the reality hits and they need to start thinking about salary.
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Yesterday we reported that a big name team has come out with a new startup called Sofanatics. The team consists of Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman, a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
We have gathered some further information and believe Sofanatics is a service focusing on sociel viewing. Wikipedia describes a social viewing service as a practice revolving around the ability for multiple users to aggregate from multiple sources and view online videos together in a synchronized viewing experience. Typically the experience also involves some form of instant messaging or communication to facilitate discussion pertaining to the common viewing experience. This would fit our earlier prediction of ’something with video, football and doing all this is a social manner.’
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To “minimize the hassle in input & maximize the social benefits”. That’s how Moozement descriped their goal with their service. Moozement is a Finnish startup offering a simplified training log for sharing your activities with friends. I have been a user now for a while and unlike many other services I have tried out, I come back to Moozement week after week. This is clearly much more than I can say about most services I try.
There are still some user experience bumps in the service and the dashboard is way too busy, but overall it’s a good start. Before I had tried the service I thought they are going head-on against Nokia Sports Tracker, but little did I know and was told what the service is really about when I had a chat with one of the founders, Ivan Kuznetsov (video below).
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