We all know the Swedish startup Videoplaza has been on a roll lately with their ad serving technology for managing and monetising online video. Venture capitalist are not disagreeing: Today Videoplaza announced the completion of its €3.5 million (US$5 million) round of investment led by Creandum and Northzone.
Not surprisingly, the capital was raised to support a further commercial development and a roll-out across Europe. More specifically, the funding will enable Videoplaza to accelerate the deployment of its Monetizer ad server platform technology for managing, displaying and tracking advertising in and around publishers’ online video content into more European territories, including Germany, Spain and Italy.
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TechCrunch ran a story on Spotify a couple of days ago, where Daniel Ek had commented on some very interesting issues. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke at SXSW and told in his keynote that, Spotify as a service consumes more bandwidth than the whole of Sweden (on certain days that is). Those wondering why Spotify is built in a P2P manner now fully understand the need for such a solution. Ek also commented that it’s a million dollar question why Apple remains to deliver all its digital downloads from a “single source” generating huge amounts of traffic that also need to be paid for.
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I ask myself pretty often why there is so much great web innovation coming from Sweden. Really awesome ideas and startups are much less common in my home country Germany, despite a population almost ten times as large as Sweden’s.
This time, it’s a new service called MyClubCards that caught my attention. MyClubCards offers a mobile application (currently iPhone only) which people who are members of one or more loyalty programs can use to collect points when paying in a store. So imagine you have club cards from three different loyalty programs that you carry in your wallet. Instead of that, you can add those cards to your MyClubCards collection by simply entering the program name and your personal customer number. MyClubCards generates a barcode for each of those cards, which you can show to the cashier next time you want to use your card at a point of sale. Instead of scanning the physical card, the cashier scans the barcode on your phone.
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We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.
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Are Nordic countries particularly entrepreneurial? How do our societies perceive entrepreneurship as a career choice?
The perception already exists that the Nordic countries are among the most innovative in the world. The two most recent and comprehensive rankings supporting this belief came from the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Boston Consulting Group, both published in April 2009. The first of these studies ranked Japan as the most innovative country in the world, while in the second Singapore was at the top of the list. Nevertheless, Finland and Sweden ranked in the top ten for both reports, while Denmark and Norway also ranked impressively.
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The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.
The two online legs of an old media company are typically classifieds and editorially driven news sites. Alma’s classifieds segment, which includes such assets as the housing site Etuovi.com and jobs site Monster.fi, posted a loss of €0.7m with an €27m revenue. Sanoma doesn’t give out any information on its online classifieds.
On the online news side, Alma publishes Iltalehti.fi, the biggest website in Finland by unique visitors. Although the full year figures for the asset were not disclosed today, the Q1/09 report from April states a revenue of €1.2m, so the annual income is likely to be around the €5m mark. Given that Iltalehti.fi relies mainly on journalistic content, the site is – after full allocation of editorial costs – most likely loss-making or, if they’re lucky, posting a very small profit.
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Swedish university students are to begin using a near field communication payments system (NFC) developed by payments processor Payex and secure mobile solutions specialist Accumulate.
For this, PayEx along with existing investors have invested US$2m of venture capital in Accumulate. The money will be used to further develop Accumulate’s mobile payments and mobile security business.
20,000 students are expected to be enrolled on the system by the end of this year, with a total of 100,000 students at a number of universities going live over the next six months, beginning with Uppsala University and Linköping University.
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As Swedish private equity company Scope has invested a whopping €7m in a Finnish company Footbalance System Ltd.
The investment will enable the company to further accelerate the growth and sales of its custom insole concept (see videos below). The solution is sold through Road Runner Sports in the US and Intersport International Corporation in Europe. Here’s a more in-depth take on the investment from Technopolis.
Footbalance’s solution is a 100% customized insole, which it creates through its computer-aided foot analysis and in-store production units. Footbalance’s concept is also a means for sports stores to increase their service level by helping the estimated 75% of all consumers who suffer from incorrect foot positions, such as overpronation and supination. Footbalance insoles support ideal foot and ankle alignment while preventing and correcting malpositions.
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Already last year there was a lot of talk in Finnish media circles about how Schibsted, who own, for example, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet, is coming and taking a big share of Finnish media’s most profitable products: classifieds and market places. Now the land grab has started and its called Tori.
Tori has set up the shop quickly and started strong. It’s modeled on the Swedish service Blocket. Monthly uniques for the month of January broke 300,000. That is an impressive number given the service had zero publicity and was only gearing up for the launch. The team, headed by the CEO Jussi Lystimäki, drove traffic to the site using Adwords and smart guerilla advertising tactics.
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The company behind Second Life, Linden Lab, has just announced it has bought Avatars United, a Stockholm Sweden online community for avatars (see our previous story here and here).
Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon tells that when they talk to the users who sign up but then decide not to stay, they say they left, in part, because they had a hard time finding people to hang out with. Either their friends weren’t there, or they have a hard time meeting new ones inworld, or sometimes both. Now Avatars United should fix this. I haven’t looked at Second Life in a while, but if its anything like it has been before, I think Linden Lab needs much more than just Avatars United to make it work.
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During the second half of 2009 Sweden held the EU Presidency, and the cleantech businesses of the country asked themselves: “How can we increase Swedish exports of Green Business?” Their solution was to collect companies in one building in downtown Stockholm, close to government offices and city hall, to allow Ministers, MPs, businesses and other interested people to have a look at what Sweden has to offer in cleantech.
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One can’t have missed the buzz (to the extent its ridiculous) of Apple’s rumored tablet that is rumored to be unveiled in San Francisco on Tuesday, January 26.
In addition to the Jesus tablet (yes, that’s what some people call it) there are rumors about a similar-ish device from Microsoft, a color tablet device called Courier and of course HTC is cooking one with Google, maybe. At least that’s the word on the street.
What do you do with the too big iPhone? Just as the vision of the infamous CrunchPad, it would be a great device to browse the web laying on the couch. After all taking a MacBook Pro to bed or browsing it while laying on the couch is not only clunky and difficult, it is also likely to burn you. But there is only so much Internet you can browse while laying on your back or when curled up on a couch. So what would be even better usage for a browser that does not fit in your pocket?
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Guest post by Andy Cars, CEO of Seedcap. Andy evaluates hundreds of business ideas each year giving him an in-depth understanding of what it takes to succeed in a global market.
Seedcap AB help entrepreneurs and start-ups to raise capital. Here’s Andy’s 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital.
1. Trying to raise money too late
Raising money is time consuming. Count with an absolute minimum of 3 months, with a more likely scenario being 5 – 7 months.
2. Trying to raise money too early
There should be a logical relationship between the perceived value of the company in need of cash and the amount of cash to be raised. Trying to raise significant sums simply based on an idea usually fails, which leads us to point 3 below:
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The Malmö, Sweden based company who’s facial recognition powered visual search technology is very well regarded, announced on their blog this afternoon that they’ve appointed Carl Silbersky as their new CEO. In a move that seems strangely similar to Spotify’s announcement earlier, the new focus will be on developing Polar Rose’s mobile service. The fact that Former CEO Nikolaj Nyholm will remain on the board of directors gives us a good clue about what this new direction really means for Polar Rose, the respected but ultimately profitless company whose A-round was way back in 2006. Continue reading »
I talked to Videoplaza founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli just last week and Sorosh told me that videoplaza is very bullish on online video monetization. They see that throughout the industry the number of started video streams are up and the number of ads per video are up, on average moving from three to seven. Overall in the video advertising market demand is growing faster than supple and big media companies are waking up to online video.
During our call Tavakoli went on to tell me that Videoplaza could be cashflow positive if they wanted, but they are focusing on growth.
Today Videoplaza walked the talked and put out a blog post where they are looking for no less than 10(!) new employees to recruit before the end of Q1 2010. This is no small announcement in the current economy. The company is clearly scaling up for the storm ahead in 2010.
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