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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First Screenshot Of Planeto – Stealth Mode Online Quiz Game
“Planeto takes quiz gaming to new heights. Now you can experience unprecedented quiz fun together with millions of players around the globe.”
Swedish startup Planeto is going after the wealth waiting in virtual goods and social gaming, besides from the modest goal of world domination in gaming. Planeto Quiz claims to be the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online Quiz (MMOQ). The game is first to combine elements of online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online with the accessibility and instant thrill of traditional quiz games.
Planeto’s been all hush hush from the beginning, even the names of the private investors of the company are still to be kept secret. But, as of today, we’ve got a little preview of what’s in the making!
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.
Continue reading »
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.
JayCut Takes Online Video Editor Mobile With Moblin
“Creativity just went mobile”, Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut
JayCut, the Swedish online video editor startup will as of today be available on Moblin-based ultra-portable devices like netbooks and mobile internet devices (MIDs). Moblin is an open source Linux operating system which is optimized for Intel® Atom™ processor based devices. JayCut’s been working closely with Intel on the new Moblin v2 that offers advanced Internet, media and social networking experiences. The mobile editor is primarly launched within their white label product, but hang in there, a public version is on its way, too. Jonas Hombert, CEO JayCut, is excited about moving on to the mobile space with MIDs, thus changing the way content producers and publishers will work in the future. Having the publishing system in ones pocket gets publishers whole new opportunities to interact with its audience closer to real-time.
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.
Twingly Announces Project Shinobi
Twingly, the Swedish blog search engine, announced earlier this afternoon that as of October 1st they will be shifting into the next gear by launching “what will become the next great platform for social media“.
Obviously they’ve not just been adding new flags to their partner list, but also busy cooking new stuff in the Twingly kitchen, or as to put it in their own words (The Announcement):
“With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use.”
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”.
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