Posts tagged:

taneli tikka

Sponsor: Few Steps and Tools for Monetizing Web Services

by Sponsor, December 17, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Soprano Brain Alliance is a fast growing Finnish software developing company, which is particularly specialized in open source web technologies such as PHP, Drupal and Zend Framework. Our clients include large Finnish media corporations, public sector organizations and a handful of start up companies. Company’s founder Jukka Hassinen has build the 35 person employing company in six years. Other key people are Taneli Tikka (Board member), Mikko Hämäläinen (COO), Eetu Hyppönen (Serial Creative Director) and Santeri Lindgren (CTO). Brain Alliance is a part of the NASDAQ OMX listed company Soprano Plc.

Over the years our company has worked with over 60 clients and over 100 projects. Even though we work mainly with medium and big companies, we also like to take part in fresh start-up projects. In fact our key people work with at least one. To mention few: IRC-Galleria, Muxlim, Dopplr, RunToShop, ENCA, Mauton, E8 Personal CRM.
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Taneli Tikka Leaves Muxlim Board, Steps Down as RunToShop CEO

by Miikka Kukkosuo, March 20, 2009 — 1 Comment

Taneli TikkaTaneli Tikka, Finnish serial web entrepreneur, has told in his personal blog that he will leave the online Muslim community Muxlim’s Board of Directors, and hand over his seat to a “senior International figure in the online media world”. The purpose of the new board member is to “help Muxlim become a world class online media” in order to attract advertisers according to Taneli.

Taneli also notes that he will end his CEO assignment at RunToShop 1st of April, as the company reaches the milestone of getting ready to launch their product for webstores that adds “social layer” of recommendations, reviews, and opinions. But Taneli is not done with RunToShop, instead he will join the company’s Board, and continue putting in part-time effort guiding the firm. Taneli sounds confident RunToShop will have a successful 2009, assisted by the recently finished a new funding round in December.

Taneli states he is now looking for new challenges, either starting a new project or joining something existing, and invites all suggestions.

Asmo Halinen Officially Announcing The Move To One Did It

by Ville Vesterinen, February 5, 2009 — 1 Comment

one did itAsmo Halinen, one of the original three Apaja founders, officially announced that he’s taking the over the CEO role at One Did It. One Did It is a Finnish startup specialized in eco-social networking.

Halinen has been busy after his announcement to leave Apaja. I still can’t make out what One Did Its business model is (previous blog post here), but there probably is one based on the rather long line of investors they have, which include a digital marketing agency Nitro FX, a govenment investment vehicle Veraventure, Kari Rannila, Vesa Puttonen and Esko Reininpoika Alanko.

In addition to acting as a CEO of One Did It, Halinen has also joined to Board of Direcotors or as an Advisory Board member (he does not specify which) to Grey Area Labs and Eat.fi. Both of these startups, Great Area Labs and Eat.fi, are good choices for Halinen. The guys at Grey Area Labs just quit their jobs at Ericsson and decided to start working on their passion, alternative reality games with a serious twist. Similarly, Eat.fi is only getting better. Just recently the leading Finnish restaurant site added an option to filter for vegetarian and children friendly restaurants in Helsinki. Eat.fi is a prime example of a web service done right and for example Dopplr should put in on their site as the first thing you see when you add a trip to Helsinki.

If this would not be enough, Halinen has also joined the Board of Directors at BrainAlliance, A Finnish PHP software house, along with Taneli Tikka, who is also very active on the Board level in Finnish startups.

ArcticEvening In Tallinn – A Success

by Ville Vesterinen, January 29, 2009 — 2 Comments

arcticevening in tallinnLast night we held ArcticEvening in Tallinn, Estonia in co-operation with Connect Estonia,  so we could bring part of the Finnish startup scene to meet the Tallinn scene. This is a great way to get people from different scenes to meet and find new opportunities to work together beyond national borders. The night was a success. We had a four startups presenting, Scred, Edicy, Snoobi and Nutiteq. The audience put the startups to test during the Q&A, but for the most part the startups surviced well.

The panel was equally good. Sten Tamkivi, Allan Martinson and Taneli Tikka gave the audience what they came for – a very interesting and thought provokin take on the current economy, the startup ecosystem, most interesting companies and events of 2008 and what they predict will the ones to follow in 2009.

What stuck with me was Allan’s remark that you should look beyonnd just the Internet for new business ideas. The focus has been so squarely on the Internet for the past few years that the biggest opportunities might now be on the edges of the Internet where the Internet meets the real world, or in totally different areas, like for example the food industry that’s trying to cope with the EU legislation. Similarly, after I grilled Taneli for a while to reveal the areas he is looking most closely at, he mentioned the fast improvements in the genetics industry and the possibilities to link the social web to the improvements in that area. Similarly, Sten made us think beyond the ‘Skype as phone’ concept talking about mobility and how Skype is looking at possibilities of introducing an Open API.

A great evening, that we want to build on also in the future. Look out for more ArcticEvenings around the Baltic and Nordic countries.

photo by seikatsu (CC:)

RunToShop Closes Financing Round

by Antti Vilpponen, December 18, 2008 — 1 Comment

Taneli Tikka, the CEO of RunToShop, has just announced on his blog that they have closed a financing round with RunToShop. The investment round was lead by VeraVenture, the Finnish gov’t investment fund. Taneli writes that this is their largest round yet and together with VeraVenture, there were 8 business angels additionally in the investment round.

There is no disclosure on the sum invested, but since RunToShop is able to go through all of next year easily and be backed for the internationalisation of the company – it can be can be considered to be a relatively high one. Together with the announcement, Taneli tells that RunToShop is now hiring concept designers and developers to help them take the idea further.

Despite the economic downturn, this is a very welcome investment round to spark up the entrepreneurial scene here in the Nordics. Perfect proof of the fact that, just as Joi and Saul told earlier, even in difficult times venture capitalists and investors do business.

Fruugo’s Presentation From SIME

by Miikka Kukkosuo, November 20, 2008 — 1 Comment

Taneli Tikka posted a video of Fruugo “launch” last week in SIME (there wasn’t any product launch as such, most things mentioned where the same as we reported before the event).

The video shows Fruugo’s VP marketing Janne Waltonen giving a presentation and then answering a few interview questions.

Fruugo talk in SIME by Taneli for http://tane.li from Taneli Tikka on Vimeo.

Fruugo will be present today at digital marketing seminar DiVia in Helsinki, and might tell a bit more, although they’ll still not show their actual product.

The Finnish business newspaper Kauppalehti released an article last Friday, stating that Fruugo has “forgotten” (as commented by Fruugo) to leave their financial statement to Trade Register at the end of August as required, but has just posted them a statement of losing the company’s share capital. That doesn’t necessarily mean the company wouldn’t have cash or other liquid assets to run their operations, though, but looks like they’re most likely looking for more money. Also, the previous CEO Reijo Syrjäläinen has left and Fruugo is now run by the company’s operational director Juha Usva.

Is Blyk Done Being A Startup?

by Ville Vesterinen, November 20, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Just as Blyk, an ad-funded, youth-oriented mobile virtual network operator, announced their partnership with Aito, they come and announce that they have closed a significant funding round of 40 million euros ($50.4 million) from their existing investors, which include Goldman Sachs, IFIC and Sofinnova Partners. Considerign the current economic climate this achievement is that much more significant.

But by following the news one can’t but wonder whether Blyk is a startup anymore at all. MocoNews.net, a news site covering the business of mobile content, reports that just as Blyk took in the investment it also announced lay offs.

Here’s a quote from Pekka Ala-Pietilä, Blyk CEO, on MocoNews.net:

[...]we are experiencing tougher times and unpredictable times ahead of us, and we like everyone else are feeling the impact, so we have to be well prepared and to do things differently internally. We are working more smartly, and we have to cut the number of people. But I can’t disclose that number.

So on one hand you have the 40 million euro that just came in and on the other you have a group of people whose services are not needed anymore at Blyk.

As said times are tough for those who try to raise financing. VC funds don’t just give out money, but the firms need to work hard to get it in and commit to certain conditions. Add to that the fact that one of the investors that is part of the 40m euro round is the infamous Goldman Sachs who is known to be cut throat in everything they do, and you start to see why Blyk partly adjusted their strategy (new partnerships with operators), and especially why the people who were there for the  startup stage need to go. The firm is not a startup anymore, but a full blown company that needs professional management, not some quirky founder DNA. At least this is how the investors see it and after all they are calling the shots when one decides to take that route.

We all grow up, even startups. Regardless, ArticStartup congratulates Blyk by pulling this off when most companies are busy telling each other how they should stop thinking about growing and start thinking about surviving.

Here’s what a Finnish serial entrepreneur and dealmake Taneli Tikka makes of the news.

Rumors Circling Around Fruugo

by Miikka Kukkosuo, November 5, 2008 — 8 Comments

There’s a number of gossips around the big stealth mode Finnish startup Fruugo currently. The rumor has it they are firing a lot of their employees, their product is late from launch and it hasn’t been that well received by potential customers. Fruugo commented earlier they are aiming to become the “trusted 3rd party of e-commerce”, set out to solve the problems in the internet ecommerce supply chain making online shopping safer, and “more fun”, for both consumers and etailers.

Fruugo is assumed to have tens of millions in funding, and they state having 150 employees. Taneli Tikka also addressed the rumors in his recent blog post, mentioning Fruugo may have been still hiring last month. Fruugo is burning through the cash quite fast with that amount of employees. However, even if the company would be spending around 1M 11M euros [typo corrected] per year, the assumed funding of tens of millions should be enough to carry on operations for quite some time still. If the funding is not as generous, though, Fruugo might be having tough time in the current economic situation.

Fruugo’s CEO Reijo Syrjäläinen mentioned in our interview in the summer that the service would be available in closed Beta in a few months. We should see that coming up very soon if the rumors are not true. Taneli has also heard Fruugo would be going for bigger PR at SIME Stockholm.

Building a service sized what Fruugo’s comments so far hint of, is likely to be a huge and difficult a task. Thus it may not be any surprise if the old “Pi rule” of startups might have gotten Fruugo as well (take your original plan and multiply the time-to-market by Pi, and divide the expected revenue by Pi).

Serial Entrepreneur Taneli Tikka Shares His Insights

by Ville Vesterinen, October 6, 2008 — 3 Comments

taneli tikkaTaneli Tikka, a Finnish serial entrepreneur and currently the CEO of RunToShop, COO of Dopplr and a former CEO of IRC Gallery among other things, has started blogging (here) about entrepreneurship, startups and everything that comes with it.

Taneli promises to openly blog about many of his past endeavors, which is something not very often seen from people with an experience comparable to Taneli’s. Not only is this fantastic news for Nordic and especially for Finnish entrepreneurship, but it also sets a great example for all the C-level executives to share their knowledge and insights with the less experienced. To quote Taneli:

I plan to follow the kind of guideline I have often followed: speak my mind on a wide range of issues and topics, as opinionated as it may occasionally be. Sounds like a quick way to get into trouble, doesn’t it?

The blog has only a few posts as yet, but there already is valuable advice for all entrepreneurs. Even though this is certainly not the first time someone has published such information it makes all the difference to the entrepreneurs closer to home who don’t necessarily don’t know where or what to look for from all the blogs published globally.

ArcticStartup applauds the courage for openness and will be sure to follow the blog closely.

IRC-Galleria’s Price To Sulake – 12,5 Million Euro

by Antti Vilpponen, October 1, 2008 — 4 Comments

IRC-galleriaKauppalehti reports that according financial data published into the government files, the price Sulake paid for the acquisition of IRC-Galleria a while back is 12,5 million euros. The company behind IRC-Galleria is Dynamoid, where the Finnish serial entrepreneur Taneli Tikka has also gathered some experience.

The price was 6,6 times their annual revenue which at that time was 1,89 million euros and 25 times their earnings of 500 000 euros.

ENCA: An Acid Test For A Platform To Take Over Niche Markets

by Ville Vesterinen, September 12, 2008 — 5 Comments

ENCA is a Finnish social network that helps people to collect and swap euro coins and other euro numismatics.

ENCA aims to be the ultimate language agnostic Social Network for coin collectors. It lets its users to swap euro coins in their own language. Say you’re a Parisian coin collector who does not speak (or does not want to speak) any other language. In the future ENCA aims to translate your postings into all the 23 European languages currently spoken in the EU. Out of those 23 languages, currently the service can do only Finnish, French and English and the team is working on German and Spanish. All together ENCA has information on over 1200 coins in it’s database at the moment.

One could argue that ENCA is a combination of Wikipedia, Ebay and Facobook in the world of coin collecting. It achieves to be informative in nature when acting as a Ebay like broker, but at the same time bringing in a Social Network like dimension.

ENCA is coded in PHP on symfony-framework and for database it uses MySQL.

The project was started in late 2006 by an enthusiastic Finnish coin collector, who got the idea when the euro was introduced as a common currency across the chosen EU countries. He played with the idea for years before settling for a social network around coin collecting. Once started he got quickly a strong group of business savvy people involved, namely Jarno Anttalainen (CEO at Syväjohtaminen / DeepLead Ltd.), Taneli Tikka (CEO at RunToShop, COO at Dopplr to name a few) and Ville Karkkolainen (CEO at Triventum). See more on the team here.

ENCA’s business model is three fold:

  1. Premium services for users
  2. A percentage cut from the coins sold via ENCA (yet to set up).
  3. Targeted marketing

The market size for coin collecting is significant. There are about 2 million active euro coin collectors world wide and the value of euro-numismatic market is annually around 2 billion euro. Ebay already by itself has over one million euro items on sale each year with an estimated average price of 20 euro a piece.

Coin collecting market is promising, but the real upside is in multiplying the ENCA model and platform to another niche markets, say stamp collecting, books, wines etc. The same platform will bend easily into a any such Social Network platform by just changing the look to go with the respective niche.

ENCA’s foundation is unusual and different from the way Finnish companies are normally born. As ENCA’s founder did not have much money or assets to back up a major loan, nor did he want to resort to institutions such as Tekes with its high bureacratic hurdles, he needed to figure another way to raise the money. ENCA has altogether 34 investing partners and all of them fall in either Friends, Fools or Family category. One investment might not be more than one or two thousand euro, but all together they add up.

This is a financing model that’s much used for example in Sweden and US and one would hope we’d see more of that in the Nordics and Baltics as well. This model enables one to do a proto of the service or product one wishes to bring to market. The proto makes the idea much more concrete and thus gives the service a lot bigger chance of getting the Business Angels or VC funds interested to further develop the product with the team.

ENCA is just out of Beta and one still needs to have an invitation from a member to join the social network. Regardless, the guys at ENCA were nice enough to give all our readers a possibility to sign up here. Happy coin collecting.

RunToShop beta is live

by Ville Vesterinen, September 8, 2008 — 3 Comments

RunToShop beta is live for public (Only in Finnish at this stage). Earlier on the site opened briefly for a group of about 200 alpha users that were able to play with the functionality, give feedback and help the team find bugs in the service. Now the public test beta is open to everybody. Below Taneli Tikka, RunToShop CEO, gives me a run down on the idea and their strategy on fast growth:

As you see in this video taken just before I wrote my previous post on the start-up, Taneli actually explaines that the site was only an early demo at the time and NOT an actual beta yet, which I failed to acknowle in my blog post. I hope to do more justice to the service and the guys working hard on it in the future. Moreover, we want to give big credit for everybody at RunToShop for taking the bold move of testing things out very publicly very early in the game.

RunToShop.fi went live and back

by Ville Vesterinen, August 28, 2008 — 3 Comments

I attended RunToShop party last week at Shaker, Helsinki along with a lot of Finnish entrepreneurs and it was a blast. It was an opening day of the RunToShop.fi service, which was to act as the first step towards opening the service internationally at RunToShop.com

RunToShop is a social recommendation service for stores that rewards its users for recommendations as well as for the actual purchases. Whether it works or not is anybody’s guess at this point when the full fledged service is not rolled out yet.

The service at .fi address came and went. I did create a profile and browsed around the service to familiarize with it and decided to came back later on. Yet, today I found that the guys had but the site back behind a login and a password, probably to fix some buggy code. I didn’t get a proper look with still so few stores and service providers on the site at the time and am eager to take a another look as it goes live again. Hopefully there will be a lot more to browse through.

What is notable in RunToShop however is the way it was build: The guys behind the concept started building the start-up only in April 2008 and according to RunToShop CEO, Taneli Tikka, the service has already over 150 partners: Mostly in Finland and in the UK.

What is also unusual is the very strong advisory board the start-up has gathered which includes close to 30 experienced entrepreneurs and key figures in the industry. Similarly Taneli Tikka who is driving the start-up as its CEO has a long list of start-ups behind him, including Dopplr and IRC-Gallery to name only a few.


I did a video interview with Taneli, but since I only had my iphone with me Kai from Floobs borrowed me his Nokia N95 to record the interview. Unluckily I didn’t have a chance to pick the video clip from Kai last week, and when I gave Kai a call yesterday I got an SMS back saying he was hiking somewhere in the Norwegian Lapland, so it’ll have to wait a little. We’ll post the interview on the blog as soon as I get my hands on it.


Few rumours from Parteco picnic

by Antti Vilpponen, June 11, 2008 — 1 Comment

I attended the Parteco picnic today, organised by Katri Lietsala and Esa Sirkkunen, who ran the Participatory Economy and Beyond -research project. It was a good event with old media companies slowly turning to social media (which I have to say shouldn’t be done only for social media’s sake).

I also heard some good rumours regarding the Finnish startup scene. First of all, regarding Dopplr – Marko Ahtisaari, Lisa Sounio and Taneli Tikka have left, or are leaving the company to continue to new challenges. Taneli Tikka is currently very active with his new startup RunToShop, which is creating some buzz among Finnish startups. The moves at the moment are not official, but there is a lot of buzz around that.

Juha Huttunen of Tripsay was also nodding towards August with regards to their official launch. Therefore we’ll have to wait a few more months before we will be able to see the service they are coming out with. I understand they are currently making final moves towards the launch.

Last, but not least – rumour or not – the Iron Sky movie, followup to the largest Finnish movie ever distributed – StarWreck, will be launched in 2010. Currently the script is being finetuned for the “investment round” that will be a few million euros and that will begin during the end of this year.

However, there was a lot of positive talk among the startups there regarding various issues and I also received a lot of great ideas regarding our next event.

Taneli Tikka joins as CEO of RunToShop

by Antti Vilpponen, April 17, 2008 — Leave a Comment

RunToShopTaneli Tikka, the Finnish serial entrepreneur extraordinaire, has joined RunToShop as their CEO. Extraordinaire? In the last 12 months he has joined 4 companies as an executive member (and he’s still active in all of them).

RunToShop is a mystery company that was founded in 2007 and they seem to be organising somesort of a revolution in social shopping. There’s not a lot of info on RunToShop even on Google (50 pages at the time of writing this post).