Stardoll Reaches 150 Million Users
Stardoll, the Swedish paper doll site has reached 150 million registered users. The news was disclosed by Mattias Miksche, the CEO of the company in his twitter stream. We also caught the news in the official Stardoll news stream in the morning, but it has since disappeared. The site has definitely hit a nice growth trajectory. Back in March last year we reported the company counting down to 100 million users.
Interview with Ben Holmes of Index Ventures
Ben Holmes has been a partner at Index Ventures since 2002, and has been heavily involved with Index's investments in Europe. In the Nordic region he currently sits on the boards of Gray Area Labs, Just-Eat, Rebtel, and Stardoll, as well as Mind Candy, Netlog, Notonthehighstreet, Shapeways in the UK.
He spoke with us to promote their newly announced €500 million growth fund, which will invest in emerging leaders with international ambitions. Below are the notes from the interview:
Is Stardoll Finally Making The Big Move To Mobile?
Last night Mattias Miksche tweeted that Stardoll is looking for iOS and Android developers in Stockholm. Miksche is the CEO of Stardoll. This could signal a change of things to come for Stardoll. The mobile platform, especially the likes of Android and iOS, is something that is becoming more available to even the teenagers and thus it makes sense for Stardoll to try and tap onto this market. Stardoll has a simple styling game on iOS called Stadoll Fashion Spin, but it's only available for the iOS.
Stardoll 5 Years Old And 100 Million Strong
We had mentioned Stardoll a couple of weeks ago regarding them counting days till they hit the 100 million member milestone. Another milestone that they hit over time was their 5th birthday. Yesterday Stardoll announced that they had been operational 5 years. It is worth noting that in 5 years, they have reached a 100 million members, something not many others are able to do.
Stardoll Begins Countdown To 100M Members
Stardoll states itself as the largest online community for girls who love fashion. Indeed, it's getting very big. Last night we caught a retweet by Henrik Torstensson, a former SVP of strategy at Stardoll, stating that Stardoll is getting close to acquiring its 100 millionth member. We got in touch with Stardoll and they stated that they're not there yet, but getting close.
Stardolls To Launch A Clothing Line
Stardoll, a virtual environment for teenage girls, has recently announced a partnership deal with JCPenney, one of America's leading retailers, to launch a new line of Stardoll-branded clothing and accessories. The line is to be launched during this year's back-to-school season and it will be available in 300 JCPenney department stores across US as well as on their webstore jcp.com. The partnership is a major deal for Stardoll and a logical extension of their services. Millions of teenage girls have been using the website to create and fashion virtual dolls - bringing a similar experience into the real world can prove to be very lucrative. On top of that, TechCrunch has reported that Stardoll is about to enter a licensing deal with a toy-manufacturer Mattel to produce branded toys from the game. Stardoll is clearly onto something here.
Saul Klein On What Companies In The Nordics Make More Than $10 Million Annually
Quora has become a great source of information for entrepreneurs, and pretty much anyone interested in a specific topic. In short, Quora is a well executed question and answer service that is currently in beta. WIth this, they've been able to choose who they want to let in while this in turn has helped them keep the quality of the answers very high. Another interesting aspect of the service that startups should take notice of, is the people they've managed to get on board. You can find lots of famous startup CEOs there answering questions and helping people understand more about their companies. Enough about Quora though. There was an interesting question in Quora regarding which Nordic companies make more than $10 million annually and Saul Klein had answered it. He answered a similar question about companies based in London that interested a lot of people, so it's definitely interesting to look into this as well.
Emotionr Sold To Zallas Technologies
Little known Finnish beta service called Emotionr has been sold to Zallas Technologies in the US. The price was not disclosed, but my guess is that we're not talking about astronomical figures here based on the complexity of the free service. Furthermore, the service does not show significant amounts of traffic data in Compete.com statistics so the price for it might be a symbolic one.
Entrepreneurship Forum Panel On Monetizing Digital Content
ArcticStartup with its passion for entrepreneurship is media partnering with the Entrepreneurship Forum in Stockholm, Sweden. The Entrepreneurship Forum initiative, co-founded by Daniel Blomquist at Creandum, aims to promote entrepreneurship and create a meeting place for everyone (students, entrepreneurs, investors) interested in entrepreneurship.
The topic at this second annual event is How to Monetize Digital Content and they've got a really interesting set up for panel including absolute top players pushing the new Internet economy forward.
Henrik Torstensson (SVP Stardoll and General Manager Piczo), Sorosh Tavakoli (CEO Videoplaza) and Ted Valentin (annonskartan, sushikartan etc.).
More reading on Stardoll, Videoplaza and Ted Valentin here at ArcticStartup.
Ville is coming over to moderate the panel so get ready for some good time and great insights!
See you there!
Stardoll Acquires Piczo - For Once The Right Way Round
Stardoll, the Swedish based paper doll community, has announced that it has acquired Piczo, a social networking site aimed at teenagers in a cash and shares takeover. Details of the merger are very limited, but according to a Times Online article Stardoll will become profitable with the takeover.
Stardoll currently has around 20 million unique visitors a month visiting the site and an annual turnover of above 10 million euros. The idea behind the merger, according to Times Online, is to bring more value for the advertisers - both sites share similar demographics and many users on Stardoll link to Piczo. A good position to start off with. An educated guess, looking at various sources online, would be that Stardoll has about three times the registered members of Piczo - 30 million and 10 million respectively.
From this point of view, it makes complete sense for Stardoll to acquire Piczo and grow its properties online. With the acquisition, Stardoll will become the single most largest network online to target teenager girls (about 75% of Piczo's users are teenage girls). What Stardoll is able to do with its network is tailor it further to the needs of the advertisers than other broader social network services like Facebook, for example, can. The reason is simple, the passion and niche goes a lot deeper in services such as Stardoll than it will in Facebook. With deeper integration into the service, Stardoll is able to charge higher premiums from the advertisers.
It's hard to say if the downturn in the economy had something to do with this merger, but my bet is that it happened exactly because of that. In general, it is said that valuations go down when the economy plummets. My guess is that Piczo has become an attractive opportunity for that reason. Stardoll has been very successful and has also been growing organically very strongly - thus showing fewer effects of the slowing economy.
Furthermore it is great to see a Nordic company takeover its competitor from the Valley - there haven't been too many of those around. However, it is hard to say how this merger will show to the users - if it will in any way other than similar kind of advertisement solutions. One thing is sure though, these sort of activities will create more interest towards entrepreneurship in general - exactly what we need more of here in the Nordics.
Rohea Acquires Mikseri.net and Kuvake.net
Rohea Oy, company run by Eero Holmila, Tomi Saarinen and Tero Heikkinen, has acquired two famous Finnish entertainment sites Mikseri.net and Kuvake.net. Mikseri.net is the most famous Finnish music site for unlabelled artists and some popular musicians have sprung up from the service to top the radio charts. Mikseri.net has more than 100 000 songs in its database. Kuvake.net has around 150 000 registered users and is a social network for young adults revolving around photos and personal communication.
Rohea acquired the sites in a 51% buyout of Reflekto Oy's shares. Reflekto Oy was founded by Arto Aaltonen who has also put his touch on other successful web properties such as the now Swedish owned and run Stardoll. Aaltonen will continue to be a share holder in Reflekto Oy and a member of its board.
Rohea has definitely taken massive leaps in becoming an interesting player in the Finnish web property market. In the past, Finnish media companies have bought out popular web destinations such as Telkku.com, an online Finnish television guide, and Blogilista.fi, a local blog directory for Finnish citizen journalists. It will be interesting to follow what the ambitions for Rohea are in developing the sites, be it a long term roadmap for development or an interesting target for a larger acquisition.
Library House Lists 100 Hottest Mediatech Companies
Library House, a research house on startups and other fast growing ventures, has listed 100 of the hottest mediatech companies in Europe. The 100 companies were selected by analysing companies using Library House proprietary data and an expert advisory panel. Library House also states that these 100 companies are the ones that will most likely change the mediatech world (mediatech meaning media and technology).
To our joy, we can find 3 Nordic companies in the top 10 list; Blyk (Finland), Sulake (Finland) and Stardoll (Sweden). Other companies in the top 10 were Flirtomatic (UK), MOO (UK), Where Are You Now? (UK), Dailymotion (France), King.com (UK), Playfish (UK) and Plastic Logic (UK). It's interesting to see that there is a healthy spread of gaming and entertainment companies in the top 10 as well as to note the absence of any media companies per se.
Other Nordic companies in the list were CCP (Iceland), Spotify (Sweden, Luxembourg), Betware (Iceland) and Xtract (Finland). The fact that most of the companies are from the UK or Central European countries pretty much states the overlooking of the Baltic market in total (I believe they are part of Europe, at least the last time I looked). Then again, this is exactly one of the reasons why I set about with ArcticStartup a little over a year ago - to give more insight to the Baltic and Nordic startup industries. Seems like we still have plenty of work to do.
