Pipedrive Hits 1000th Customer, Shares Factors Of Success
We've covered Pipedrive a few times in the past, and even pay for our own license for sales use in the office. Overall it's a nice sales CRM service that helps users keep all their leads and sales ideas in place by giving a good overview of the big picture. At the core of the product is their sales pipeline that offers different steps where deals can reside as you move them forward towards closing. Over this past weekend Pipedrive has announced they hit their 1000th paying customer.
Jussi Laakkonen On Applifier: Over 150M users on Facebook, 10 Million on Mobile
Last year I remember reading news of Applifier's fast growth and funding round, and I remember thinking Applifier would be the new hot Finnish company we'd hear a lot of news from. But what has happened since then? I suppose I can partly blame myself for taking a job here and then leaving everyone in the cold, but to make up for it I caught up with CEO Jussi Laakkonen about what's new at Applifier.
The company is seeing "well north" of 150 million monthly users on Facebook, making it likely the largest cross-promotion network on the site. So far the company has swollen to 22 people offices in Finland and California. Like most regional companies, in California they manage publisher relations, business development, and sales, while the engineering is handled in Finland.
Statistics On Scandinavian Music Streamers
A market survey conducted by Norstat for the WiMP music streaming service shows that roughly 3 out of 10 Norwegians and Swedes have listened to music by streaming in the week before the questioning took place. The survey was collected in January of 2012. In Norway, this proportion increased 20 to 29 percent from June of the past year, while Sweden saw a jump of 27 to 29 percent, showing the early saturation of the market. Danish users are behind the times, with a jump from 14 to a current 20%. This low penetration can likely be explained by Spotify only launching in Denmark in October.
Windows Phone 7 Marketplaces Surpasses 50.000 Apps
All About Windows Phone is reporting that the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace recently reached 50 000 apps and seems to have hit some sort of critical mass. It took over a year to get to 40 000 apps, but just 40 days to get to the next 10 000-- a sign of good exponential growth on the platform.
MySites Gathers Interest While IRC-Gallery Shows Lower Usage
Ramine Darabiha, the founder and CEO, of MySites blogged about their service growth statistics. He's finally managed to get the growth curve to remind the commonly used hockey stick figure. In August 2009 they reached just a little under 2,5 million hits to their services and this has nicely grown through Q4 of 2009 to about over 6 million hits in December 2009. In January 2010, while the month is not over, they have managed to receive over 25 million hits to their services.
ArcticStartup Visitor Traffic Statistics
Many people come to asking about our readership, where our readers come from and how fast we're growing as a blog. These conversation have many times spurred very interesting conversations and made me analyze the value we provide much more closely as I would've otherwise done. I'm always thankful for all the comments and questions, since they make us think about how to build the blog into a more valuable destionation to our readers to visit and what they are most interested in reading.
The other days when I was reading a blog post by an American VC, Fred Wilson, who has probably the most read VC blog in the world, I realized that I have never told you directly those figures, even though the very conversations spurred by the numbers have been so valuable to us. So here goes.
We get little over 10 000 unique visitors a month and about 30 000 page views (and we very rarely cut the blog post so that you need to click to 'Read more' to see the rest of the story as for example TechCrunch does, since this effectively double's the page views as the site loads again. A nice trick to fool the advertisers) . RSS subscribers we have about 600. All of this traffic is originating from no less than 130 countries. Yes, the growth has been very rapid as we are just little over one year old. But where it gets interesting is when we go beyond the pure readership.
Amazingly, we get a lot of the traffic from Facebook. I have pulled a feed from the blog to my Twitter account, which I have in turn plugged-in my Facebook status update, effectively cross- posting ArcticStartup blog updates to the services I use the most and where most of my social graph resides. Before I had my personal Twitter feed pulled to Facebook and all the @messages made little sense to my Facebook friends, I just recently decided to pull the ArcticStartup blog specific Twitter feed there, but for some reason it's not working very well. Antti, Miikka and Karri all seem to import AS blog posts in different way to Facebook. I believe Miikka imports the blog post as notes, whereas Antti and Karri occasionally post them manually. I might be wrong here though.
Equally interesting is the traffic coming from Twitter. This traffic has and is growing fast as the Nordic and Baltic countries are familiarising themselves with the new micromessaging communication tool. I'm quite certain we're about the see a similar boom in Twitter adoptation as we saw with Facebook which didn't leave anyone cold. That said, It might take longer than it took for Facebook to swipe across the Nordic and Baltic countires. This is because it is not as easy to see the value in Twitter as it is in Facebook. Facebook most people got almost instantly and started visiting the site franticly already after the first week. With Twitter it takes much longer time which can mean from several weeks to months depending on how many people you start following. I also believe it's not only in how many people you follow, it just takes time to build the habit of going back to the page (or client) and see the value in jumping on and off the funny stream of links and info bits. And some people might not ever get there. Still, I think it's going to grow fast and we're about the feel that also here in the arctics. It's going to be the most talked about the service of 2009 and it's going to be felt in every company and school.
Even more interesting the the traffic sources are the list of countries where the traffic is coming from. I find it nothing short of amazing that we receive traffic on average from 130 countries. Needless to say our readership is truly global. The top 10 consists of the usuals suspects of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, The United States and UK, but what more interesting ones are India and The Netherlands. This is a clear measure of the activity around the technology startups in those countries.
photo by "abnelphoto.com"
Eat.fi Shows Strong Traction in Visitors
Eat.fi, the Helsinki based restaurant review site, has shown strong traction in the last months, according to their blog. Although the figures aren't that high compared to international web services, 10k uniques a week is relatively good - especialy if you look at the growth rate, they have doubled the uniques in a matter of 2 months.
Oindex.fi statistics for Eat.fi
The uniques have been increasing fairly steadily after they redesigned their site and made the service a lot more usable with new features. The biggest obstacles to overcome in my opinion is for them to create a truly scalable service that does not require them to manually insert all restaurants in each city. The service itself has also a lot of potential to grow in other terms for example, adding menus on to the site and enabling users to specifically rate individual foods - something not many restaurant review sites do.
Eat.fi has also attracted other kind of traction. Tina Aspiala, the founder of the company has taken Asmo Halinen of Apaja fame on board as an advisor. Asmo has also joined the ranks of Grey Area as an advisor.
