If the writing style of the posts at ArcticStartup.com would be processed and analyzed by an AI algorithm, what would be the outcome? Read on and you will find out the answer and get an update about interesting Swedish startups that are using AI techniques to improve the automated understanding of the ever-growing web content out there. This is the future so be sure to get a grasp of the basics right now. Continue reading »
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23 Video Disrupting The Online Video Business
I was recently given a demo of 23 Video, a Danish online service offering a plug and play web-tv platform to set up ones own web-tv channel.
The first thought that crossed my mind during the demo was the feeling of sligth anxiety that occurs when checking out the roaming costs on the phone bill. If not chockingly high, they’re usually more than expected. Even though you had checked out the costs in beforehand and were being sensible using your phone abroad.
How come? Because it’s the exact same feeling of uncertainty and confusion one often faces when dealing with streaming costs. It already starts with the business offer letter, usually three pages long with no mention of the actual final cost. And that after a meeting with a sales person who’s supposed to know your needs and demands by then. Need a video player, too? Call some more people.
23 Video is determined to kill that mumbo jumbo and all talk about difficulties surrounding online streaming and setting up ones own web-tv channel.
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.
Neo Technology Secures Seed Funding To Lead NoSQL Movement
I probably shouldn’t be this ecxited, but I am. Swedish Neo Technology, developer of Neo4j, an open source graph database, has secured $2.5 million in seed funding to boost Neo4j’s presence in the emerging NonSQL movement market space.
I just received a happy call from Emil Eifrem, CEO Neo Technology, at the moment in US to talk about semantic web, NonSQL movement and the next step in Neo Technology’s life.
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Bambuser Picks New CEO From MySpace Nordic
Things are cooking in the Bambuser kitchen. The Swedish live video streaming service has pointed out Hans Eriksson, CEO MySpace Nordic, to take over CEO tourch from Jonas Vig, co-founder and now previous CEO Bambuser.
As I met Måns Adler, founder of Bambuser, this weekend, he was very glad and excited about having Hans onboard, as well as where Bambuser is heading right now. Startups go through different stages and the time has now come to Bambuser to move on to acceleration stage where adding experience to team is a quite natural.
Filehill, New Marketplace For Digital Content – We Have Gift Cards!
Filehill is a new Swedish startup I ran into when first pitching their idea at TechCrunch Talk Nordic earlier this year. Filehill offers a platform especially designed to trade digital content such as reports, playlists and manuals. Besides from the music, of course. They’ve just released into open beta after a year and a half of development, and I was naturally curious to see what the new marketplace looks like.
Load Impact – On Demand Web-based Load Testing
Those of you who have been working on building dynamic request intensive web services, know the importance of load testing and the challenges that come with it. You also know that somehow the test environment hardly ever is ”really” an exact mirrowed version of the live environment. That said, load testing of ones services can be a tricky one. There’s also so many variables that can make the service to jam up. One can test successfully almost every function separately but when having all working together things start to happen. Those knots are usually not as easy to spot.
So, when I first run into Load Impact, a Swedish startup running its easy online load testing service for six months now, I must admit I was a bit sceptical at first.
EmotiCards – Your Best Pictures As Postcards Via Facebook
Swedish startup EmotiCards is one of the many projects that saw its daylight during the 24 Hour Business Camp earlier this year. Today, six months later, Emoticards have seven employees and have just launched in beta on the Swedish market. The Company is a self-funded joint venture project between Spontu, Pixell Productions and KST Info Services. The idea of offering to send real, printed postcards using ones own pictures isn’t a unique one, but EmotiCards are trying to differenciate their service.
Environmental Approach With Premium And Free Cards
Apart from the obvious efforts to try to keep the interface very simple with few steps and easy payment, EmotiCards are printed on FSC-certified paper. Printing itself is as far as possible done locally close to the recipients thanks to the Xerox Premier Partner Network, shrinking delivery times and the need for air mail.
Videofy.me Monetizing Online Video Content
Videofy.me is a Swedish startup enabling online video content publishers to monetize their content. The company was founded in August 2008 by Robert Mellberg and Oskar Glauser, both having their background in Internet communications and advertising. Neither one of them is a huge video blogger but as working in advertising they kept witnessing the fastly growing gap between the online video content on blogsphere and the lack of ad solutions available for the long tail content publishers. Since the release of the first beta for four months ago they’ve been gaining traction among content publishers.
I stopped by Robert Mellberg, CEO Videofy.me, at their office in central Stockholm to hear how the user-generated online video market is doing and what’s on the drawing board.
Auktionsfynda – Find Your Last Minute Online Auction Bargains
Auktionsfynda, Swedish online auction search engine service launched today. It’s focusing on listing the auctions about to close, thus triggering the great feeling of satisfaction when finding the best bargain. The service initially indexes five auction sites (Tradera, Auktionskompaniet, Brabud, Metropol, Lauritz) and is planning to add two more in the next coming weeks. For time being only Swedish auction sites are included.
Auktionsfynda is a service with a simple search and clean GUI, the main page displaying random selection of items that have 10, 30 or 60 min. left to bid. The search results include a short description of an item, time left to bid and link directly to the respective auction. No transactions, nor bidwatching is handled by the service, at least not yet. I think on demand notifications on auctions closing shortly would add value, since many of the bidwatching applications and services on the market are made service specific, especially for eBay.
Listen To Blogs – Blogs Turned Into Podcasts With Real Voices
Listen To Blogs is one of the online services created during the 24 Hours Business Camp held in January this year. The service was literally developed within 24 hours with no sleep by Henrik Berggren, David Kjelkerud and Eric Wahlforss. Listen To Blogs is today run by Henrik and David, Eric having the role of an advisor.
Both Eric and Henrik are part of the Soundcloud team, and so is ListenTo Blogs built on the SoundCloud API, using Google AppEngine and Twingly.
Listen To Blogs is exactly what its name suggests – a way for you to listen to your favourite blogs, as podcasts. You don’t even have to have your own blog, you can just pick any of your favourite blogs and turn it into podcast using your own voice.
This is where Listen To Blogs differs from other similar services, it uses real voices, is crowdsourced and free. There are quite a few number of services offering conversion from text to speech, TTS, but so far I’ve only come across ones using variety of digital voices. PimpMyNews with a paid iPhone app is one of the popular ones, but to quote Mark Hopkins from Mashable, they’re “fun for 10 minutes”.
New Startup Faces At TechCrunch Talk Nordic
TechCrunchTalk Nordic was held yesterday in Stockholm. The event was sold out and gathered many familiar faces from the startup and VC communities for panel discussions, presentations and pitches followed by drinks and networking.
The panels and presentations had a good mix of representatives from the entire region and discussed topics covering the Nordic and Baltic startup and VC culture. In my opinion the most memorable message sent was by Pär-Jörgen Pärsson from the VC firm Northzone Ventures. He presented some hard figures and facts just to state how the Nordics is the best exit market in the world with 36% exit rate, Skype excluded. So – the startups in the Nordics rock!
BootstrapLabs To Take Prezi To The Promised Land
“Prezi is one of the most exciting companies I have worked with during my 13 years as a serial Entrepreneur, and I see great opportunities for Prezi in the US and Silicon Valley, and I think that Microsoft and Google should watch Prezi closely, because Prezi is disrupting the way we present information.”
- Nicolai Wadstrom, CEO and founder of BootstrapLabs (The complete press release here).
Prezi, the recently launched online zooming presentation tool, has entered into an agreement with BootsrapLabs to help them establish a US presence. Nicolai Wadstrom could hardly hide his excitement when I met with him last week. I couldn’t agree with him more, as I’ve written about Prezi earlier.
What is BootstrapLabs?
BootstrapLabs, as the name states, is a company to bootstrap and serve as an out-post for non-us companies wanting to establish in the US and Silicon Valley, i.e. your company’s home away from home, including offices and expertise.
Prezi Zooms Right In To Public
When was the last time a presentation tool gave you a must-have feeling?
Prezi does that to you. Prezi is an online, nonlinear presentation tool from Zui Labs based in Budapest, Hungary. It makes the user think differently about the presentation by using zooming as a central part of the storytelling. The user can zoom in and out on pictures, videos, notes and PDF’s, thus making the presentation more alive and flexible. You work with your presentation online, after which you can dowload it on your computer. The best way to get an idea what Prezi is about is to take a tour in their tutorials and try out for yourself.
Prezi, one ot the 19 Rising Sun Startup Rally finalists on The Next Web Conference, went public yesterday after being in closed beta for almost a year. Along with the launch they released Prezi Desktop for offline work, updated editor, and most of all, a freemium model with three different types of licenses. The core difference between the three is that the free one only supports public presentations, you can’t make them private.
One of the people behind Prezi is Swedish Peter Arvai, the CEO of the company. Peter, previously Mobispine, has a wide experience on launching startups on an international scale. He can also be found on this years list of The Entreprenour of The Year, presented by Internetworld. (In Swedish)
My first Prezi experience
My tip, don’t start with your first Prezi on the night before your presentation. It takes a while to get into the mindset of how it’s supposed to work, but as soon as you get it, and trust me you will, it’s a nice ride. There was no hazzle in downloading the presentation afterwards and it ran as smoothly online as offline. Regarding the editor I’d like to have the Undo function closer to the actual editing, and I found the Clear Path function dangerously close to the Path function.
Plugg Startup Rally 2009 Deadline Closing
Plugg, the one day conference organised in Brussels, will be closing its Startup Rally 2009 submissions on February 4th. Plugg is taking place on the 13th of March and this year will showcase an interesting line-up of speakers from around the globe, including the former CEO and current chairman of the board of Dopplr Lisa Sounio.
Plugg is organised by Robin Wauters, a Techcrunch writer, who has this to say about the startup competition, “we want to give those European startups with the most potential a chance to raise their profile in front of the world, which in our case means hundreds of professional web practicioners, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and trade press / bloggers.” 20 most prominent startups from Europe will have a chance to give a 2-minute pitch to the audience at the conference. Registering is free and all you have to do is fit the criteria provided. Read more about registering on this minisite.
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