Sweden Keeps Innovating On Search: Blogipedia, Twingly Channels and Spezify
There's no "One way" to do search. Traditional search engines compete for space and co-exist with nisched, inspirational, visual, social and now with the latest trending topic, real-time search. As the blogosphere with user generated content keeps growing, the search space keeps expanding with it. Our personal online presence increases through social networking etc. which means we need to keep track of our own digital footsteps, preferably real-time.
Regardless of the lack of an existing business model, search remains a very attractive space, and within past three months, three Swedish players have been added to the fields of nisched, visual and real-time search.
Witsbits - Cloud Computing Sold In A Box
Whether you're running a business or organizing a tech conference today, it's all about the cloud. I talk to startups talking to venture capitalists, and there's no way of pitching without having ones solution running in the cloud. As hard it's been to agree on a proper definition for cloud computing, it's been the thing for both service providers and businesses to move on to. Even the telecom companies are now getting into the game of cloud computing.
Not surprisingly cloud computing was also one of the buzz words at the recently held Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg, where Witsbits caught my attention when pitching their new business model.
Witsbits, a Swedish startup company, is the first and so far only actor in the Nordic and Scandinavian region providing cloud computing services. They started already in 2004, in the era when cloud computing still was called utility computing. The journey into cloud computing began in 2003 when running Render Planet, an automated render farm service offering free, remote, distributed rendering over the Internet. Rendering 3D images required a lot of hardware resources, which resulted in developing their own utility management software. The first cloud computing service saw its daylight, and Witsbits today is a profitable business with number of customers in their storage cloud. Now with cloud computing booming the company feels it's time to refocus on their core competence, the software development.
Booli's Mission - To Change The Swedish Real Estate Market
Booli is a real estate search engine service in Sweden where the market demand for Internet search is reaching new heights. According to a recent study (in Swedish) done by Skandiamäklarna, 84% of the buyers find their new home today via Internet, showing a 25% growth just from last year.
The service doesn't require registering and is free for both users and the over 600 real estate agencies in Sweden. By registering to the service one can for example save a search profile to receive notifications for matching objects. The real estate agencies are offered to add and update information on the objects they have for sale. Booli indexes and updates all available objects once a day, always linking back to the origin of the object descriptions.
The company is privately owned by its 10 employees together with private investors and the Firm Factory Network. The business model is based on advertising focused on the services close to housing, such as insurance, electricity suppliers, banking and broadband.
I sat down with Anders Kyhlstedt, VP Marketing, to talk about what's been going on since Booli left beta in the beginning of this year and how they are copying with the current economic state affecting the real estate business.
50 Beta Invites To JayCut's New Online Video Editor
JayCut, the Swedish startup offering online video editing technology, can add another achievement on it's list. They were recently selected as one of this years Red Herring 100 Europe winners. Congrats!
Since we last talked to JayCut, they have been busy developing a new editor. Last weekend I attended a blogger and tech geek event in Sweden's first nuclear reactor R1, and got a demo by Jonas Hombert, the CEO of JayCut.
Startup Sweden Gothenburg coming up 17-19th October 2008
Startup Sweden Göteborg (Gothenburg) will be organized 17-19th of October 2008. During the weekend event, four startups are to be kickstarted in 48 hours from idea into a business. The 32 participants with different backgrounds will be divided into four teams, all getting help from senior coaches. Startup Sweden is an initiative to get more firms to Sweden, bringing people with different backgrounds and skills wanting to start a business together. The aim is to have the startups also continue working after the weekend's event.
Anybody interested to take part can enroll at www.startupsweden.se. The organizers will pick participants based on complementing each other into the four project teams. The best startup team gets the opportunity to present at "Entrepreneur days" 2008.
Martin Frönmark, the initiator of Startup Sweden, comments: "Startup Sweden gives the first spark to start a business. It's an excellent experience and can give a good kickstart as the winners will get an opportunity to present their idea to entrepreneurs, financiers, and politicians during the Entrepreneur days."
The first Startup Sweden event in the Kalmar city in the spring resulted in creating a webservice Stuffly, an online marketplace for renting equipment. [After a quick lookup it seems this idea hasn't evolved into any tangible business, though.]
Press release (in Swedish).
